Next month, Jason and I will have been engaged for a year... Something I waited two whole years for after meeting Jason, and my whole lifetime before that. I've gotten so caught up in planning the wedding, family drama, and the frustration of life as it happens that I've lost sight of the fact that I should be blissfully happy right now. I've waited for Jason and the moment he gives me the first kiss as my husband. I want to take a moment to stop everything and reflect on my life leading up to the (what should be) the happiest year I've experienced and the first year of the rest of my life.
I don't remember the moment I became acutely aware that somewhere, there was someone out there that God had created with me in mind. I think I first started thinking about it with the introduction of the writer Victoria Holt into my life. All of her books are about a protagonist in a 19th century setting who isn't neccessarily the most beautiful or popular girl in her town, but she is smart and clever, and I always likened myself to her characters. Her books generally started when the main character was a child, when the first action happened in order to begin a chain of events that lead the reader throughout the rest of the book. Almost always you saw her characters meet a man and get married. If it happened early in the book, the relationship was doomed. If it happened later on in the book, the protagonist had to go through a lot of pain and hardships to find the man she was meant for. I started reading these books when I was around 12 or 13, and I remember falling haplessly into the storylines, especially into the relationships between the protagonist and the usually antagonist-turned-love interest. I would finish the book in 2-3 days, and then I remember sitting in my room or outside on the porchswing placing myself into those storylines and that maybe one day the perfect man for me would appear in my life.
That was also around the time I began to develop into a woman, and my body and mind began to change and mature. At my church we did a whole weekend about purity and I went to several Christian camps where we talked about sex and abstaining. With the girls, the main thing that they talked to us about is having that knight in shining armor out there waiting for us, and our honor and innocence was the greatest gift we could give them. To all of the other girls (who were cynical and in public school), they scoffed at this and probably lost their virginity by age 16. But to me, this cemented into my mind an idea that there is someone out there very special, and I had a very strong feeling that they were thinking about me as well, even if they didn't know who I was. When I was 13, my youth pastor's wife encouraged us 7th grade girls to make a list of all of the things we desired in a husband. We were encouraged to write everything from the very serious like religious and denomination affiliations to the silly like what his shaving habits were. I did this, and prayed for that person on that peice of paper. My prayer was two-fold. One was that God would give me someone that fit all of those things on my peice of paper, and the other was that God would protect that person's heart and mind and give them comfort, because I didn't want them to be lonely for me like I was for them. I don't really remember what all was on that list, except that I found it when Jason and I first started dating and I wept openly because it fit him to a T. Nothing on that list was left out. But Jason doesn't come in til later.
As life moved on and people came in and out of my life, the boy factor eventually played into the picture. When I was about 14 or 15, I met Elizabeth. She was everything I was not. She was friends with all of the boys, she was popular with all of the girls. She wasn't neccesarily beautiful, actually she tended to be on the gross side, but everyone seemed to love her. She was the girl that was friends with all of my friends, and they all liked her better than me, so I spent my teenage years in their entirety having my friends choose someone over me, and pointedly kicking me out of their social circle because she told them to. The reason she is the first frienemy I had is this: I had no reason to call boys at 14. I didn't want to have a series of stupid high school relationships that would make me bitter and angry and in the back of my mind, I thought about the person I would be spending my life with one day, and I would be dissapointed if they had dated every girl he could. I could have had boyfriends, and lots of them. I didn't grow up in my town, so even to this day people regard me and my sister like we have this shroud of mystery around us. I just chose not to. Now I look back at the guys I could have dated then and laugh. They have all dated every girl in the town atleast once, they all have gained TONS of weight and have dead end jobs and a lot of them have been on and off of drugs (even though they were squeaky clean and innocent in middle/high school), and I would be embarrassed to say I shared my first kiss, first anything with them. When Elizabeth discovered I wasn't interested in joining the great boy race, she couldn't handle it. Did it mean the boys weren't good enough for me? That I was too good for them? What was wrong with me? It also seemed to put me on a different level of competition with her that has lasted up until today. How dare I suggest that I might be "too cool" for something she loved so desperately? In her mind, it was her responsibility to deem things "uncool"... And even until now, we've had a rocky back and forth relationship where we'll be friends for 5 minutes, long enough for her to attempt to make me feel beneath her and inadequate. I respond by getting up and leaving, no response, and it puts her in her place. She comes back around several months later like it never happened, and it begins again. Anyway, this isn't about Elizabeth. Moving on.
When I was a few months off of 16, I met my first high school boyfriend. His name was Austin. He was a few years older than me but in maturity a few years younger. He came from a family trying to make their way up the social ladder in the upper-middle crust of Birmingham. His family was(is) deeply religious, and I met him at a church function. To be completely honest, I was still hung up on the idea that somewhere my husband was waiting for me, and I wasn't interested in dating this big, bulky, awkward, red-headed, pimple-faced thing in a baseball cap that wanted to date. He was 2 years my senior at 17 and a year ahead of me in school. At the (constant) pushing of my mom, I gave him a chance. It was my first experience with a guy, and it wasn't easy. Our relationship went immediately from fun and frothy to heavy and hard to bear because he struggled with depression and had narcissistic tendencies. I spent 2 years pretty much crying and in pain the whole time because he would lash out at me because of his angst and anger towards his parents. I also lost about 20 lbs because I was so anxious I could barely ever keep anything down. I wasn't bulemic, I just literally couldn't swallow anything down when my nerves were so bad. Pair that with the fact that I had a borderline eating disorder (body dysmorphic disorder) thanks to him threatening our relationship if I ever gain weight, and to say I was miserable would be an understatement. Throughout our entire relationship I thought forward to my wedding and wondered if this is how I would spend the rest of my life. Naturally, since I was with him for so long and he was the first, I didn't know how bad I was being treated and had deluded myself into believing that I was happy. I always thought about my list I made, and while I had convinced myself that things like that were silly and childish, I always had a sense of unrest about being with Austin forever. Finally, I escaped from the relationship burned very badly with a lot of baggage right before I graduated high school. For the record, he has grown into a great person and I'm proud to say he was my first boyfriend. He protected my innocence and all I lost was a little time while I was with him.
The months that followed leaving Austin were hard. It was my last semester of high school and I wasn't sure who I was without Austin. I didn't mourn for our relationship at all.. 3 days, max. To be honest, my heart had checked out several months before everything else did. Even still, I had been the girlfriend of a football player and baseball player at a notable school in Birmingham for so long that I didn't know who I was when I wasn't decked out in their school colors or making care packages to send with him for away games. My mom got me into a psychology class at the local junior college to sop up some of my spare time, and I started meeting guys and making new friends. Unlike a lot of my contemporaries who were getting out of long term high school relationships, I didn't go crazy after we broke up from all of the newfound time, freedom, and attention. My thought process now was, "well, if it wasn't him... who is it?" I never felt like I would be a girl that would wait until my late 20's-early 30's to meet the person I'm meant for. I always thought I would be young, as did my mom. One major deal was that I chose to save myself for marriage, and how long can relationships really last with out sex? Either you get married or you break up. I knew that either I was going to be in a long string of not very serious relationships, or I would meet the man of my dreams soon and settle down quickly. My mom really did know it too. She sensed it coming when I didn't even have anyone in my life.
After a few not very serious relationships, I met Jason. Looking back, if you had told me in those early days that Jason, the young college boy with spikey hair, a rice rocket, and a bad attitude was going to be my husband one day I would have 1) laughed, and 2) run like you-know-what. He was the friend of one of the guys I dated post-Austin, and that guy had done me very dirty. We started out as friends because he befriended me during that time and it was entirely platonic because he had promised himself to another girl who wasn't allowed to date him because of his age. Sure, he had a bad attitude, hated school, and was immature and a little on the wild side. But he respected my innocence and found it attractive. Instead of considering my innocence attractive and wanting to take it away, he wanted to wrap it up and protect it from all of the evils in this world. He was protective, which was one of the many superlatives on that list and one of the first things I noticed about him. With Austin, he wasn't neccesarily as protective as he was controlling. His way of protecting me was limiting my experiences and keeping me on a shelf somewhere, only to be seen by him. Jason encouraged me to go out and experience, but with any issue or problem he was there waiting in the wings to support me. When we finally began dating, we knew immediately that we wanted to be together forever. Most of Jason's friends expected us to be married the following summer because we became serious immediately. Everyone else expected us to either get married really soon, or break up because of how fast things fell into place. But things just clicked with us. It just worked. I remember wishing I could look into the future and see us where we are today. I always wondered what my wedding dress would look like, what Jason would looking standing at the end of a church aisle in a tux, who my bridesmaids would be, everything. I longed for the future so much, but time flew so quickly that it would seem like I would blink, and another 6 months would pass. Because of Jason's sort-of-rebellious ways and bad attitude thanks to his friends early on, he would go between talking about our wedding to these periods of time where he refused to say I was even a possibility for marriage. I would always sneak to the Walmart on my side of town for fear of being caught by his friends and look at wedding magazines wistfully, thinking about the day that I could buy as many of them as I want. Years passed from that, and our relationship has had it's ups and downs, hills and valleys, but as we've gotten closer, the "if" we get married became a "when" we get married, and we began to plan a little here and a little there. We would plan for our future a little bit, then he would freak out and we couldn't talk about it for months. Then we would start talking about it again. Nothing I longed for more was to get engaged, and I would get so overwhelmed with sadness and jealousy when I found out that my friends were getting married. Now of course, looking back, I'm glad we waited until we did because the people I knew that were getting married then have either gotten divorced, are inundated with children, or live very strange lives where they go out and party like single people with no responsiblity, but they're married. When we moved home from JSU the semester after Jason moved there to be with me, that was the summer that everything really came together. We made it through a point where we almost didn't make it, and after that happened we just seemed to pull through with flying colors and ended up happier than ever. The most important thing was that Jason and I had grown up and said "goodbye" to some of our childish, college-kid ways and habits we had picked up from our friends, and that breaking point where we were either going to make it or we weren't happened when we became 2 real human beings with real needs that had to be addressed and we stopped trying to keep an image with the other person. The biggest change with this was Jason because he stopped trying to be Joe Cool, Mr. Hardbutt, Mr. Insensitive and began to actually bear his soul every now and then. Not very often, but better than never. The following autumn Jason decided it was time to move out, and that was the huge kicker. Living at home with his parents up until this point had kept Jason in college kid land, the land of no commitments and bad attitudes. His mom has a tendency of spoiling and cottling him relentlessly, so he remained in some sort of timewarp where he never took responsibility for himself and everything was done for him. When he moved out on his own and he was doing his own dishes, his own laundry, and his own cooking, something in him changed almost in a snap. He literally went to bed one night a boy, and woke up the next morning as a man. When this happened, it went from hem-hawwing and refusing to take responsibility for the continuation of our relationship to BAM! it's time to move things along and get married. We almost immediately began to look for engagement rings, and the following April we got engaged. during that whole time, I wanted a wedding magazine so bad Jason had to practically drag me away from the magazine aisle wherever we went. I will never forget the first time I bought a wedding magazine. I almost wept tears of joy, I was so excited. I bought a Modern Bride magazine and a Martha Stewart special that focused on how to choose your wedding colors. Fast forward almost a year of battling over colors, wedding size, reception size, location, vendors, guest list, and everything in between, and here we are. I have my beautiful wedding dress and soft, simply sweet veil. I have 4 bridesmaids who I know will be in my life forever (whether I like it or not), and I am marrying the most beautiful, perfect, handsome man that God has ever created with another person in mind. He is everything to me, and as we learn more and more about each other and I find a new complexity to his nature, I find one more thing that fits me as a person beautifully. A fit-throwing, back-stabbing, drama-inducing, silly, spoiled college boy has evolved into a strong, quietly-confident, ever-loving, ever-sincere, ever-sensitive man who would do anything to pull the two of us through. I think manual labor has knocked the silly spoiledness out of him. What was once a pimply, bulb-tanned face with eyes wide with opportunity is now a face tanned from the sun, covered in stubble, and eyes softened with wisdom and sincerity.
