but first there was us

sometimes i think about what i will tell ruby about her dad and i. how we met, how we loved, how we were before she came into our lives. how will we explain to her how young we were when we fell in love?

i want her to know how hard we loved. how fast we fell. i want her to know that we were crazy. that we were too young. that we would do it all over again in a heartbeat. someday i want her to love like her dad and i do. i want her to follow her heart and experience letting go to a crazy, fearless love. i want her to have our open hearts and never see love and family as secondary to anything else. i just hope it's when she is thirty. :)

i was seventeen the day i met nick. from two sides of the state, our worlds collided on a hot july day and we were never the same. my heart could never go back to the way that it was before i met him. the summer before my senior year of high school, i visited the college he attended. i was assigned to the opposite side of the dorm than i was supposed to be. i complained about my placement. i was in a different area than almost everyone else visiting from my school. he was working on campus, and supposed to be working in a completely different dorm. somehow we both were given the wrong destination, and there we were, outside of Hitchcock 316.

i remember it distinctly but not in the same way that i do other memories. something about it feels hazey, soft, out of body. we came face to face and i will never forget the feeling i had. like i had met him a million times before. oh, it's you. we've met before. something so familiar.

sometimes i imagine that holding ruby for the first time will feel the same way. oh, it's you. we've met before. again, so familiar.

like somehow we all lived together in another time and space and were waiting to be together again, to be whole again.

i was eighteen the day i told him that i didn't want to date him anymore. i was so young. i was scared. i was afraid of loving him too much. i was reckless. inside of my own head and absorbed in my own issues. i didn't know what i was doing or who i was supposed to be. i felt like i needed to be alone to figure it out. but he wouldn't let me be alone. and we didn't stay apart long. we couldn't. i've never been able to stay away from him. gravity pulls us back together, back to where we are supposed to be.

i was nineteen the day he took me up to the water tower of the tiny town we were living in. snow was falling harder than i had ever seen. i turned around and he was on his knee. i didn't know much about life. i still hadn't figured out who i was supposed to be. i was still lost. i didn't have a whole lot to give. i knew i wanted to be the person that he thought i was. the version of me that i could see in his eyes. the way that he looked at me... it was almost like he saw someone that i would become. so, i decided it would be okay if we were lost together.

i was twenty on the day we said "i do". it was a beautiful day, and i carried sunflowers down the aisle to meet him. he graduated college the day before. with his job offer to teach in seattle, we packed up the rest of the belongings from our apartments into the back of our beat up car. we drove along the border of Washington and i watched as wild sunflowers danced across the terrain of the hillside of the highway edge. we had our wedding gifts, some mismatched furniture and a shoe box filled with just enough cash to pay our first month of rent with a little to spare for food. i remember looking over at him as he drove and the sun went down on my first day as a wife. i kept thinking, this is it. this is all we have. this is our life now. everything we have is in this car.

i was still twenty when we found our first obstacle of marriage. i knew something wasn't right with my body. i wasn't sure what it meant. i went to the doctor and they gave me answers that changed me. it was benign. but it was there. a small tumor in my brain. in the weeks following we found out that it wasn't harmful to my general health. i wasn't going to die. what it was doing was changing my hormone levels. i would be okay. it couldn't hurt me. but i didn't feel okay. i felt...broken. i felt like it could forever change the other half of my heart. one half was for nick, but the other was being saved for a baby. i felt in my gut that the road to our baby was broken. but he knew it just had a few more turns. he never looked at me differently. he wouldn't let me wallow or pity or go to dark places of what if. i believed from that day that i found out about my tumor that we would never get pregnant. he believed we would. he was right, as he usually is.

i was twenty-one when he convinced me that i was smart enough and good enough to go back to school. i enrolled in college. my ideas began changing. there were late nights and tears over math homework. he was there, steady and calm. my voice of reason, my study buddy, my editor, my support. i said i wanted to quit a time or two (or ten). he never let me lose sight of my goals.

i was twenty-two when i began completely changing; he was changing. we were growing, as people do in their twenties. we moved from the suburbs of the city to the heart of the city. we were surrounded by people all the time and life became faster and slower at the same time. my ideas on everything... the way i ate, the way i dressed, the way i talked, believed, acted, it all seemed to be different. i looked at him one day and realized how much we had both changed. we hardly seemed like the same girl and boy that promised each other the world a few years before. but i also realized that though we had changed, we had done so together. by some miracle, we had grown seperately yet our roots seemed to intertwine, planting us firmly together through everything we had been through. we continued on this path of growth, parallel and merging when we needed to. we grew and grew. we made friends, we lost friends. we grew in our educations, we dove into our faith. we stayed out too late, drank too much, and laughed really hard. a lot. we learned to cook, we traveled a little when we could, we dreamed of things to come.

i was twenty-five when we celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. i was twenty-five when i realized how absolutely crazy young we were when we got married. i thanked God for this choice, in all of it's craziness. i became aware of how lucky i really was. i could look back finally and see the miracle of our friendship and our love. i had always loved him, i had always been addicted to him in this weird way. like i said, gravity. but it was at twenty-five that i thanked God that i had never lost him along the way as i was becoming the person that i was going to be. it's hard enough to keep friendships in your early twenties, yet alone a marriage. he was so much a part of me. he is the best of me. he put another little diamond band on my finger, and it sort of felt like a new chapter in our life together. we were now mature enough and had enough life under our belts to really understand the promises we had already been keeping all along. someday i think i will give that diamond band to my daughter.

it was on that five year anniversary that we made wishes for the next five. he wanted me to have a little faith that it would happen for us. we sat by a campfire that July night, watched the flames and listened to our favorite songs. we talked about what if. what if it could happen. what if there was a little soul that could be intertwined with ours? what would we name her? a song began to play that was about a child. he knew that it usually made me cry, and he wanted to change the song. i told him it didn't make me sad anymore. we didn't know it there by that fire that night, but that little soul was there already. i was already a few weeks along. and a few weeks later, we would hear her heart beat for the first time.

i'll admit, i don't know how to sort between "us" and what will be, "the three of us". i don't know how to tell her that her dad and i were everything. i don't know if i will remember what it feels like to be just the two of us, because without her we could never go back to being whole again. she is a part of us now.

we are changing again, and i feel it. i feel the pull, the push, the loss of something that was. i guess loss can't be the word for it. it is just simply change. we will never be the same. but as i know we do, we change and we grow and we get better. we have grown up together and i love him with such a weight that it buries me. i have never been afraid of that, and neither has he. i guess we've always known that the sum total of what we are is better than we could have ever been on our own.