Our Story: 12 Years and Counting

I love hearing the stories of how other couples met. Actually, I just love stories. So, if you have an hour or two to read...in honor of Eli and my 9th wedding anniversary, here is our story.

I was working in a call center for a telemarketing company (I know, I know, I've heard it all before). In the six years I worked for that company, we had three different managers, and then a period with remote management before the center's eventual demise. The call center's current manager was taking a new position with a different company, and he was thrown a going away party at a local bar, Josies. It was March 20, 2003. I had just turned 21 twenty days earlier. I was not a bar person; I actually felt very uncomfortable in them. However, my friend and coworker (who I'll refer to here as "D") planned on going to the party, and asked if I'd go with her. I agreed, after much hesitation.

"D" and me at work

Since we worked 2nd shift, we didn't get off work until late, and we arrived at the bar just as the last of the going away party left. We decided to sit down and have a drink anyway. There was a bald guy sitting around the corner of the bar from us. "D" whispered to me that he was the brother of one of the girls we worked with. That's nice, I thought, They really don't look like they're related. Within minutes the guy came over and introduced himself as Eli, and said to "D", "Are you going to introduce me to your friend?" After the "Hi, nice to meet you's", I tuned him out. I figured he and "D" would visit since they knew each other and I definitely was not in the market for a man. I had a long-distance boyfriend at the time, and although we were having consistent misunderstandings, I was trying to find a way to mend it. Eli must have known I was ignoring him because he made the comment, "You don't say much, do you". Feeling guilty, I made small talk and realized I lived in an apartment just down the alley from him.

You know how you never see that certain kind of vehicle around until you buy one, and suddenly they're all over the place? Well, it kinda happened that way with Eli. We started running into each other everywhere. Living an alley apart didn't help matters, but I have a sneaking suspicion Eli was making himself available. He'd show up at work to "visit his sister" and would have lunch for me. I almost hit him with my car as he walked across the alley coming home late at night. And as I started hanging out more with "D" encounters increased since their circles overlapped. His friends became my friends.

By April my relationship with my boyfriend had deteriorated to the point that we broke up. Much of it was my fault; I was living for me and was tired of trying to make everyone else happy. I regret the way everything played out, but it became glaringly obvious that we had rarely been on the same page with the most important things a couple should be, and it was time to move on.

Walking by his apartment door one day in May, "D" offered the fun fact that Eli never locked his apartment door. It was fuel for my devious nature. After a quick check in the alley to make sure his car was gone, we sneaked up to his apartment and trashed it. Yes, trashed it. Well, whatever there was to trash...it was pretty minimalistic. I took the labels off of all his canned food...all two cans. And one was tuna. I threw every magazine I found in the bathtub, along with towels, and flipped his mattress up on one wall. We rearranged his furniture, which was a chair and a TV on an old microwave stand. I can recall to this day the smell of the apartment...stale, like dirty footprints, and Joop cologne. He wasn't actually in the apartment very often. Later that day he showed up at my door frantic, begging me to say I had something to do with his tossed place. He thought he had been robbed...of what, to this day I still don't know. After that he started stopping by regularly to watch movies at my place or ask if I needed anything.

Eli and me, first photo taken together at his parents' house ~ May 2003

Eli was a "Weekend Warrior", enlisted with the Army National Guard. On May 12 he was sent to Fort Carson, Colorado on active duty for training to be deployed on a regular peace keeping mission to Egypt. Timing, huh?

Even though we talked for hours on the phone at night and sent letters and emails, I really really missed him. I drove out to visit him with a coworker (his Mom made me promise not to go unless someone went with me, and Sandra was the only one free) Memorial Day weekend at the end of May. We stayed at his family's house while out there, and to this day they tease me about the "strange friend" I brought out with me. Most the weekend she spent sitting in the basement with a blanket over her head...she had no money, so I paid for everything for her. Despite this Eli and I were able to go out and do some sight seeing and spent a lot of time with his cousins. It was so hard to leave. We ran into a major hail storm on the way back that threatened to tear apart my little Honda, but we made it.

Eli and me in Old Colorado City, Memorial Day weekend, 2003

June 20 I hitched a ride with Eli's Mom, Pam, and step-dad, Brad, across the state line for Eli's brother's wedding. I was Eli's "plus 1"; he was flying in from Colorado later that day for the rehearsal. I remember we stopped at a McDonald's for lunch during our trip and I ordered my usual one sandwich. Pam commented, "No wonder you stay so thin!" Oh how all that was to change.... I also remember the fish they served at the rehearsal dinner as the best I've ever eaten. It didn't even taste like fish. That weekend was very special for us. After the wedding and dance, complete with fireworks, Eli asked me if I'd "be his girl", and then we listened to Faithfully by Journey. He confided in me that he longed for a marriage like his Grandma and Grandpa had, that lasted a lifetime. I explained to him I didn't believe in divorce. Leaving that time was even harder than before, so Pam sent me with Eli's step-sister for part of the trip back....I realized later it was to keep my mind off things. She was great to talk to when I needed a distraction.

Eli and me at his brother's wedding, June 21, 2003

The Fourth of July weekend, "D" and I drove out to Colorado to visit Eli. Eli brought one of his Army buddies, and we stayed at family's house again. We found an underground bar called "Cheers" (which later flooded in 2013), watched hot air balloons, and chased an ice cream truck around the block just to get a picture. It was a great, relaxing weekend, and having "D" there to talk to on the trip back made it much easier.

In Cheers, Longmont, Colorado ~ July 2003

In July Eli was mentioning how much his back was hurting after shooting off mortar rounds. He went to the doctor, and they prescribed pain meds. Toward mid-July they figured he had problems with discs in his back, and was non-deployable. From there on out it was just a question of when he would come home. Around 3 am one night, shortly before he came home, we were talking on the phone for the millionth hour, and he said very casually, "Will you marry me some day?" I said, "Of course!" and kept talking, being sleep-deprived and thinking nothing of it. A little later Eli said, "Did we just do what I think we did?" I said, "Uh...what?" "Are we engaged?" "Um, I guess?" Eli promised he'd get me "a little something" for my finger when he got back, to prove he was serious, and I got off the phone to call a groggy "D" and tell her what had happened. So that's our desperately romantic proposal story.

Soon after Eli got back he went to the chiropractor and discovered herniated and bulging discs in his back and a piece of broken vertebrae floating around in spinal fluid. He was sent to see a specialist, and in October 2003 he had back surgery to fuse vertebrae and remove discs, at the age of 24.

Eli kept his word and bought me a diamond "promise ring" until he could afford a real engagement ring. We kept the unofficial "engagement" quiet because it all had happened very fast, and we knew family wouldn't approve. In August 2004 he bought the engagement ring, asked for my parents' blessing, and got down on one knee in their living room to officially ask me to marry him. Eli then started taking classes to become Catholic, as he was Lutheran, finally being conditionally baptized, confirmed, and receiving his First Holy Communion in early 2006.

Eli in black, right center in front of the Bishop 

We were then able to set the wedding date for July 15, 2006.

We made a lot of memories together those first two years...kayaking and camping trips with family, parties, and a lot of rendezvous at bars. Too many.

One in particular was six months before we were married. We were visiting a friend of ours who was bartending (who was also supposed to be a groomsman in our wedding). It was slow, and I got bored. Our friend was burning our drinks when I got into a conversation with a lady sitting next to me. She explained to me how she used to do this trick where she folded a dollar bill in half like a tent and placed it on the floor behind her bar stool. Then she would hold onto the bar with her feet as she leaned backwards and picked the dollar off the floor with her teeth. "I'm going to do it!" I declared. I strategically placed the dollar bill on the floor, climbed back on my stool, and wrapped my feet around the edge of the bar. I leaned backwards, and was only a few inches from the dollar when it happened. My feet slipped off the edge of the bar. I fell, backwards, upside down, and face first into the disgustingly filthy bar floor. I heard a crunch as I fell. I picked myself up, seeing stars, as people started circling around me. Something wasn't right. I grabbed the bridge of my nose, and it felt...bunchy? I pulled down, and it seemed to crack into place. There was blood everywhere. I had broken my nose. We scurried out of the bar to try to stop the bleeding. The following Monday I went to the doctor, and had x-rays taken. The actual nasal bone had broken right where it starts to jut out from the skull, not where it becomes cartilage, where most breaks happen. I was asked to repeat the story of what I did to the nurse, then to another nurse who happened to be walking by in the hall at the moment, then to the doctor, and then to the specialist they sent me to, all amid peals of laughter. It was great penance for my stupidity. The ENT specialist said I needed surgery to try and straighten my nose out. And instead of listing off states as I was drifting off into anesthetic sleep, what was I suppose to recount? Ah yes, the tale of my bar stool back-flip. My sweet mother was with me as I was waking up after surgery, and she said I kept talking about sailing away with the Captain. I don't remember this, but it's funny because he was the fellow who got me into that predicament in the first place. I had gotten my first, and to-date, only cast. Thankfully it healed, leaving only a small scar, and was still slightly crooked, by the time we were married.

Yes, I let people sign my cast.

My Mom laughing at me as I try to get the seal off my bottle of nasal spray. On my 24th birthday, February 28, 2006

Those two years were also very difficult for us, waiting and waiting for what seemed like a day that would never really happen. At times it appeared we'd never even make it. Through all the disagreements and even giving up on each other a time or two, we always found our way back together. We are each other's own wooden nickels.

In November 2004 Eli "bought me" an old farmhouse on 6 1/2 acres. I set to work making it a home for our future family. Things started going wrong immediately. One day I saw sparks flying from the electrical pole outside. I went out to find the box charred black. It turned out someone had buried what were supposed to be overhead wires. Then I came home one rainy day to find part of the ceiling had collapsed in the entryway and water dripping in. Another day, we came in after Mass to find the back room's powder room filled with 4 inches of water from a leak under the sink. Lacking the funds to fix it properly, we decided to have the lines capped, reducing the house to a one bath status. Then the septic backed up. Thankfully Eli knew a guy who could snake it for us. The hot water line to the bathtub froze every time it dipped below 10°. Getting a warm shower in the winter often included having to run my hair dryer over the pipes behind the kitchen wall for half an hour. The first storm the summer of 2005 that produced strong winds from the west, also produced streams of water pouring through the upstairs hallway window and the electrical outlet right below it. I again came home to find a collapsed ceiling, this time the suspended tile ceiling in the spare bedroom downstairs. Each forecasted storm after that had me running upstairs with buckets and towels, praying not to get electrocuted. The sump pump had to run constantly in the basement in the spring to keep it dry.

Our first house

Bats were also a constant nuisance. (My nemesis, my fear terror and revulsion of bats goes back to the time of my diagnosis of OCD, and in part stems from finding a bat curled up behind the insulating plastic around the old farmhouse I grew up in. I researched bats, and ended up reading obsessively about rabies, including old Victorian horror stories of men chaining themselves in the yard so they wouldn't bite anyone.) One bat in particular couldn't even fly, and was pulling itself across the floor with its wings. Shudder. A sign of rabies. Then there was the last bat. I was alone, it was night, and I was pregnant with our first son. I saw the familiar shadow flicker and flit across the wall, and terror shot through me. Not again! I prayed. I locked myself in the bathroom and called Eli at work, panicking. He tried reassuring me that it was nothing to be scared of, and offered to come home. I don't remember if he did or not...what I do remember is an adrenaline rush and an uncontrollable desire to protect our home and unborn baby. I crawled on my hands and knees out of the bathroom to get the steel handled broom, and crawled with it into the living room. I used to play softball, I thought. I can do this. I positioned myself against the wall, broom in "batting" position, waiting for the bat to make its loop through the living room. Details are foggy, and I have no sense of how long it took to actually hit the bat. But I did. And once I saw it laying there on the hardwood floor something inside me snapped. I kept beating the repulsive thing with the broom until it was a bloody broken mess and the broom was bent completely in half, no longer usable. Sporadically during the next few days I'd vigorously scrub the spot with disinfectant.

When I was forced to quit my job in late 2006 due to carpal tunnel issues, we finally said enough was enough and gave up on the place. We put our first home on the market in early 2007. Little did we know the old girl had one more trick up her sleeve. She refused to sell. The one offer we received we accepted. However, the buyer's financing fell through, and I saw a notice in the paper soon after that there was a warrant out for the lady's arrest, for 5th degree theft. The housing market crashed in 2007, and we were unable to keep up with mortgage payments on only Eli's earnings. The bank foreclosed on us and refused to mediate. They wouldn't allow us to refinance (we weren't eligible, they said) nor do a short sale, and they sent back the money we gave them because "it wasn't the full amount". The last month we were in the house I started catching glimpses of rats sneaking along the toe kicks in the kitchen at night. The opportunists must have sensed an impending retreat. I believe God was giving me reasons to feel ok about leaving. We moved in May 2008, and have been renting ever since--four different places, moving three times while I was pregnant--in the last 7 years. The first of which was a tiny one bedroom apartment. Another had electrical issues, and the lights would get brighter while the dryer or furnace ran. The exterior electrical box there caught fire as well. Another place saw a mass influx of mice (they actually chewed a 2 inch hole through the wall behind the washer) and we caught seven mice in traps in the span of one evening. When it wasn't mice it was earwigs. Those creepy crawlies were nocturnal and if you had the bad judgement to turn the lights on in the living room at night you would find a swarm of them migrating across the carpet. Oh the memories...I'm starting to itch.

Engagement photos

Getting back to the wedding.... We planned everything in about 4 months. The dresses were off the rack from David's Bridal. Thankfully they had the dress I had been gazing longingly at for the last year. I let my bridesmaids pick their own dresses. The guy's tuxes were rented. July 14, 2006, we traveled in caravan style with our wedding party out of state to the church our priests come from, St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary. We had rehearsal in the chapel there, then confessions, and then went back to the hotel for the rehearsal dinner.

Me and Eli at our rehearsal dinner. 

July 15 I woke early, and waited for my hair lady to come to my room to do my hair. To this day I wish I had chosen to have my hair done differently. It didn't look anything like I hoped it to, especially while the veil was on. My bridesmaids (my oldest friend, Eli's sister, and "D") took off to get their hair done at a local shop. I sat there waiting, alone...freaking out inside.

Keeping my sanity with coffee. Nothing has changed!

My brothers came to check on me before we left for the chapel. Not sure why everyone thought I was a flight risk....

We had to keep the wedding flowers in several rooms' tiny fridges the night before the wedding, and ended up freezing them. The roses darkened and wrinkled as they thawed, and the leaves took on a dark waxy look, making them look aged. I was told consolingly that many people pay a lot of money to have their flowers made to look that way. I still have not met these people.

The day turned out nice but meltingly hot, 95° in the shade. We ladies were late getting to the Seminary, so we weren't able to get many pictures taken before as planned. I heard later the guys were joking I was going to leave Eli standing at the altar. The wedding was at noon, with no AC in the chapel. Little Grandma was thankfully positioned in front of a fan. You could feel the sweat trickle down your back. We had a Traditional Latin Nuptial Mass, and were married by Fr. Robert MacPherson, his first marriage. One of the seminarians serving Mass was a Mr. Michael Goshie, who would eight years later baptize our fourth son as Fr. Goshie, My Dad walked me up the aisle to Pachelbel's Canon in D. Music played during the Offertory was Ave Maria (my favorite song of all time). During Communion Panis Angelicus was played. After our vows and Communion we moved to a side altar and consecrated ourselves to Our Blessed Mother. We processed out of the chapel to Handel's Hornpipe.

The now Fr. Michael Goshie, then a seminarian, on the left. This was the exchange of rings.

There were less than 40 people at the private ceremony, but over 300 at the reception.

Eli's step-sister giving me some air under all that hair.

My family

Eli's Family

After taking photos we road tripped back to our home state, hitting bars as we went. The reception started at 5 pm, dance at 8:30.

There was some confusion as to who was supposed to be where and when. Most of our bridal party had to be brought back from the bar down the street for the dance to start. Our photographer disappeared before our dance, so all we got were grainy, disposable camera shots of it. But sometimes those are the best.

Faithfully by Journey

We stuck it out to the end of the night with our guests.

We waited a couple weeks to take our honeymoon because it worked better that way for both our work schedules. We went back to Colorado for a week because we loved it there and had so many good memories from before. It really was a dream, looking back, we had no idea what was ahead of us. Ignorance is bliss. We went to Six Flags and had a caricature artist draw us. (It still hangs on our bedroom wall.) We stayed in fancy hotel rooms with down comforters and pillows and had Outback Steakhouse delivered. We ate piles and piles of Mexican food because, for some odd reason, I was craving the taste of cilantro. We visited Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Garden of the Gods, and attended the wedding of one of Eli's old classmates. The day we got back from our honeymoon I took a pregnancy test and found out we were going to be parents!

We welcomed a 9 pound baby boy into the world in April 2007 and named him Aidan James. It was a difficult birth and ended in an emergency c-section and a 10 day hospitalization. I developed a spinal headache from a botched epidural. 

Aidan

The next spring I discovered we were expecting again, and an excited Eli told everyone he ran into. Things did not go well, though, and I lost the baby. We were expecting again soon after, and Gavin Charles was born in January 2009 at a whopping 9 lbs. 4 oz. Because of this he was a scheduled c-section, as are the rest of our boys. Eli was laid off from his job of five years the day we came home from the hospital with Gavin. It was terrifying, but turned out to be one of the best things that happened to us. Having lost our house around the same time we lost the baby, we moved twice while I was pregnant with Gavin, in May 2008 and again in December 2008. We moved again when he was about 16 months old, in April 2010, to a house we hoped to rent-to-own in a town closer to where Eli started a new job. 

Gavin

The rent-to-own deal never happened....Eli switched jobs again, but farther away, and our rental agreement grew more strained. We were expecting baby boy #3 when we were asked to leave so the owner of the house could move back in, and we moved to our current house in April 2011. 7 lb. 11 oz. Liam Stephen was born in August 2011.

Liam

After losing another baby in April 2013, on my 32nd birthday in February 2014 we welcomed our 4th son into the world, Ian Joseph, at 9 lbs. 2 oz.

Ian

There are so many more stories I could add that make up our whole "story", but some stories are better left untold. I'll settle for this slightly "abbreviated" version. 12 years of making a relationship last, not always well, but always forward. I pray for the grace to make every moment to come better than the last for each other, and for generous doses of forgiveness. It may not have always been true, but we have become each other's best friend.

Our Love Has Been a Journey

I couldn't have known when we first met that everything in my life before then had been leading me to you...

But looking back, I realize that every decision led me to just the right turn, and that every road, taken or not, brought me one step closer to you and the love we share...

Today, I know for sure that when our paths came together and we found one another, it was really only the beginning of the most beautiful journey of all--

the journey of two hearts that beat as one.

I love you, Sly