Julia
poetrysansonions.blogspot.com

I think these days we think that stories like this are too sentimental for general consumptions. You might find this in a Chicken Soup book, or a romance novel, but not in a magazine. I think that is too bad, there are still a lot of stories like this happening in the world today. I certainly didn’t think of myself as “sappy” enough to write a story like this, but life has a way of upending our expectations.

My husband and I have been married for fifteen months. I had been married before, but Scott not only hadn’t been married, he had never seriously dated before. He thought he was quite clever to never be “burdened with a wife or children, and would joke that if you stayed drunk all the time it didn’t matter who you took home when the bars closed, as long as they were gone by the time his shower was done.

His parents marriage was not happy, and he was pretty badly beaten as a child. When he started going to school and a teacher noticed the bruises, he thought it might end. Instead they were just always under his clothing. It finally ended when he was big enough to hit back.

His parents were miserable married to each other, and after their divorce his mother made the kids’ lives miserable to match herself. All of his family on both sides were alcoholics, and most of them used other drugs as well. The babies were given whiskey to help them go to sleep and the kids were encouraged to start having beer in second grade. My husband was an alcoholic before he graduated from high school, and he kept on drinking heavily for the next 19 years.

I honestly am not sure why he decided he was going to change. He says that he just was tired of being drunk all the time. When I was looking for a hiking partner for the weekends my kids were with their dad, my husband answered a craigslist ad.

He considered me the perfect hiking partner. I had kids, was only looking to date men who were serious, and I understood that he was not that kind of man. I wasn’t looking for a relationship, so someone that was a good hiking companion and who was obviously an avid hiker, and not someone just looking for a date. We both had hiking and backpacking gear, although we didn’t do any overnight hikes, and we liked to see who could remember more about the trails we were hiking. (Yes the tree that hangs out over the river before or after the small waterfall to the left, etc.)

My parents are also avid backpackers, and several times we all went out together to check out a new trail, or make sure new gear was really adjusted correctly. About two months into hiking, my husband called me up one night and asked me if I wanted to go hiking that weekend. I reminded him that I had the kids that weekend (something that had always been a non-starter) and he said he could put up with them this one time. It had been a hard week and going hiking by himself just wasn’t as fun as it used to be.

Five miles and ten or fifteen rest breaks later, the twins were teaching him how to braid hair, and my son was convincing him to help out with a scout activity later that month. As I watched him allow himself to become entwined in their elaborate plans, I couldn’t help but chuckle inside. I had learned enough of his history by then to understand why he never wanted to get married or have kids, and I could see that he had completely forgotten that as one twin or the other would grab his hand to hurry him along to see the next waterfall. (It was obvious that he was having lots of fun because instead of playing our game, who can remember what is ahead before the other one, he was acting like he had never been on the trail so that the kids could tell him what was next.)

It wasn’t long before my son had talked him into helping plan his birthday party, and the twins had him signed up to sponsor them for the jog-a-thon. He had never been interested in doing anything on weekdays, which had worked well with my schedule, but suddenly his weekday evenings weren’t quite so busy. It wasn’t until I was teasing him about freeing up his time for the kids and not for me that he sheepishly admitted that while he liked the kids, going a whole week without seeing me or talking to me was making him lonely, and he used the kids as an excuse to change his “rule.”

It took me a while to notice that he wasn’t even having a beer when we had dinner at his house. I knew he had smoked previously, but until my kids asked him about it, I hadn’t realized he had quit cold turkey about six months before we met. When my son asked him if it had been hard, he said that one day he just decided he wasn’t going to smoke anymore, and when he had a cigarette a few weeks later when he was really stressed out that the taste was so terrible that he couldn’t stand it. Over and over I saw proof that despite a lot of really terrible things that had happened in his life, when he decided he was going to do something, he did it 100%.

He asked my kids for permission to ask me to marry him, and had them help him pick out the ring. We married with ten people, plus the bishop and his wife, in a simple ceremony at the home in the mountains that we had chosen together. I am still sometimes amazed at how quickly our courtship went, and how many life altering changes my husband made in a year. The cap off of those changes was when he was baptised three months after we got married.

A month before our anniversary, we were talking in the dark, and he asked me if I thought this was a dream and he was going to wake up sometimes and find himself covered in vomit, drunk out of his mind. I laughed about it until I realized that he wasn’t making a joke. He was asking a serious question. I asked him why he thought that our life together was a dream.

At that point he explained his experiences as a child in much more detail, and then told me that he had never known someone who was happily married, and who still loved their spouses a year after they were married. I thought he must be exaggerating the point, but after hearing about his aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, I realized he was deadly serious. He really had never seen happily married people. In his world, people had money, and they had houses and boats and other adult toys, and they had kids and spouses, but they were not happy.

We snuggled closer together and I told him that it wasn’t a dream, that I love him very much, and that I loved him more everyday. At that point he said, “I thought this kind of love only happened in romance novels.”

Our lives have NOT been easy since we married. I would in no way consider our lives or relationship to be the kind someone would write up in a novel of any kind, but I did agree with him that we were pretty lucky to have found each other, even if it was a little later in life than we would have liked. We are happier than we would have been if we had found each other fifteen years ago because we have experienced the other side; a bad marriage and terrible custody battle for me, an endless string of one night stands that blurred in an alcoholic fog for him.

Every time I think that life is too hard and I don’t know if I can keep going, I remind myself that we are living in our own romance novel, and I could not ask for a sweeter man to have as my partner. If you were to run into him at church or when he is working, you would see a confident guy who gets things done. He spent decades trying to drink away any chance of feeling love as he tried to drown his pain.

No matter how tough and stern he is with his Boy Scouts, and no matter how professional he is while he is working, inside there is a man who is secretly grinning, because his life turned out to be a romance novel.