Three years ago today we tied the knot. Looking at the pictures makes me incredibly happy. Because we looked so happy. And we are still happy. And I'm so thankful for that.
Our story: For Posterity and because I have never written down how it all went.
I met Ski for the first time in 2001, in a smoky bar, in the Highland Park area of St. Paul. The creep I was dating at the time, The Drummer, and I hesitate to even call it dating but lack another term for the destructiveness that was the relationship, introduced us and I can vividly remember chatting casually about what a waste of time working was. We had both recently entered the working world from college, where you have lofty expectations for establishing a career and becoming a grown-up, and we both understood what the roll of the eyes meant when we talked about what a waste of time it was to work in corporate America, where working for a Big Five was a lot more like the equivalent of pushing paper and filling an empty seat in a conference room than it was about trotting the globe in business suits building complex computer programs. I can distinctly remember the laughter flowing steadily and leaving the conversation thinking "The new bass player is hilarious."
I had been dating The Drummer in the band he joined for a while and had frequented that bar on many a night, drinking way too much Leinie's Original out of the keg, swaying in time to the music. I would love nothing more than to say that my world changed that day and we lived happily ever after because it would have saved me all of the pain and heartache that happened later. But it didn't change. Me and the new bass player became casual friends, chatting between sets, hanging out together with big groups of people when the band was finished playing or on off-nights. I continued my destructive relationship with The Drummer and the bass player found himself and dated Britney Spears. No, not the REAL Britney Spears but this anorexic chick named Britney that had close to as much emotional baggage as the real deal. She never liked me and I never understood why.
My perpetual roommate at the time and I drove to southern Minnesota one night to watch the band play. The Drummer spent the evening flirting with the cocktail waitress at the rundown bar right in front of me, while his best friend tried to grope me on the dance floor. Needless to say, I was angry. While the drama unfolded and my sister's boyfriend at the time, who is now her husband, told The Drummer's dirtball friend to leave me the hell alone, I noticed my roommate in a booth with Ski and I remember wondering what they were talking about. I stormed over and told her we were leaving and that was the beginning of the end of my band groupie days. The Drummer and I patched things up after that but he eventually ended up cheating on me again and after a year or so of being treated like some sort of second class citizen, I finally cut off the relationship and quit going to shows.
It was months later, after the anger towards The Drummer had worn off, that he and I and Ski started meeting occasionally for lunch in downtown Minneapolis. I had, in the meantime, had a couple of just as destructive and equally heartbreaking relationships, and was getting pretty jaded on the ways of love. It was my birthday in January 2002 and we got together a big group of people to celebrate. I was late getting to the meeting place and I was bummed out when I realized that Ski had left. Apparently he had come to my birthday party alone and when no one showed up, he went home. I called him and he came back out, in the middle of a snowstorm, to celebrate and delivered me my only birthday card of the night. It was hand-made, with a picture of him playing guitar with a stern look on his face and it said, "What Badass wants, Badass gets...and Badass wants you to have a Happy Birthday, fruitcake!" His stage name at the time was Badass (pronounced Ba-doss and not Bad-ass) because he's a smart ass and it gave them something to joke about on stage. I would overhear women in the bathroom at shows talking about how hot Badass was, totally oblivious that wasn't his real name. I still have the card. Why I kept it, I'm not sure, but I kept it nonetheless.
Fast forward a few months, post break-up with my last pre-Ski boyfriend, to the time when Ski and The Drummer bought a house only a mile or so from where I was living with two of my girlfriends. I had recently instituted a No Men Rule and had promised myself to spend some time alone, figuring out who I was. A few days after they moved in Ski and I got together to hang out and I made him watch The Princess Bride for the first time. Not long after that I drove him home after hanging out doing nothing one night and he kissed me completely out of the blue. I was shocked. I still had my No Men Rule in tact and he was one of my few very trusted friends, I surely didn't want to risk such a good relationship by ruining it with dating. Did I? I remember being so confused and not knowing what to do. We didn't talk for a few days and when he called I think he said something along the lines of, "When can I see you?" I was totally overwhelmed and down on the whole idea of dating and I don't remember how long it went, a week or maybe more, before we ended up getting together. I asked him what had happened and said that I felt weird about it and I can still remember his exact words. He said, "I've wanted this for a long time but have been waiting for the timing to be right. I've looked at it from every angle and you and I WORK. We just do." It's hard to argue with someone that is clearly so sure of himself and a day later when talking to my roommate about what had happened, she said, "He told me that he liked you that night in Mankato and to tell you that The Drummer was bad news." She never told me, and truth be old, I probably wouldn't have listened, but I realized that he HAD thought about this for a long time and he WAS sure about it.
Things moved fast from there and we moved in together just a little over a year later. Living in that apartment with him was one of the happiest times of my life. We stayed in on the weekends and learned to cook and not just to cook burgers and fries but to cook things like filet mignon and sesame crusted tuna. We started experimenting with wines. We built the foundations of what our marriage is today. We didn't need anyone else. We had eachother and we were happy.
A few months after moving in together, I got offered a job in Duluth. It had been my dream for a long time to move to a smaller town and Duluth had always been number one on the list because of its culture and how beautiful it is. I didn't want to raise my kids in the city. He didn't hesitate. He quit his job and we found an apartment up north to call our own. To this day I believe God Himself was smiling on us during that time as less than a week before we were supposed to move (on one salary), he got a call back on a resume he had sent and he got offered a job too. Two computer programmers finding work in such a small town was a borderline miracle.
I remember pulling out of the parking lot, following a U-Haul full of all of my possessions and the man that I was madly in love with. My phone rang. I answered it.
He said, "Are you ready for this adventure?"
I smiled and said, "Of course. I can't wait."
In my heart, I married him that day. Because it felt a bit like jumping in to the deep end with my best friend. And the best part about it was that I wasn't even the least bit scared to do it. And neither was he. Nothing, not even that first apartment being so run-down that it couldn't run water and lights at the same time, bothered us. We were too young and too naive to let things like that cause stress.
We bought our house in March of 2003 and finally officially tied the knot three years ago today. A year and a half after getting married, we got our first positive pregnancy test in the bathroom of that house. We were both thrilled to death. Watching his little girl's face light up when I tell her that Daddy is home melts my heart every single day. Because I am lucky that he is her Daddy and I'm lucky that in a few short months we'll welcome our second child. And I am so incredibly lucky that he is my partner on this journey. There are bumps and trials and situations where we don't necessarily agree but there is no greater feeling in the world than knowing it doesn't matter what life throws at you, your relationship can and will handle it.
Happy Anniversary, honey.
