How I Got Here

You really never know how simple a time childhood is until you become an adult.  You miss the carefree days of climbing trees, playing games, watching the clouds and literally taking the time to smell the roses.


My childhood was great.  An American dream.  My parents provided everything I needed and more.  I had friends, played sports and enjoyed school.  Everything seemed to come easily to me.  I swam in my first race when I was 4 years old and was so proud because I beat the 5 year old in the lane next to me.  Eat that sucka!  I was part of the state champion gymnastics team, a competitive soccer team, member of national champion cheerleading team (rah,rah,rah), sprinter, pole vaulter, top ten in swimming and did my first triathalon the summer between my junior and senior year.  Yea for me!


Good grades came easily and I scored in the top tenth percentile in all the standardized tests and was first chair saxophone in junior high band. I had boyfriends, went to every school dance and usually had a date to the neighboring high school dances too.  Wow, wasn't I cool!  Not really.  


I was an insecure high school gal just like all of my peers.  I hated the way I looked and tried to hide it with personality and an unhealthy obsession with exercising.  I knew I could flirt well and used it to get attention...(I would like to make it clear that I was a very moral gal-I flirted but I didn't deliver).  There were a few close friends I really let get to know me but otherwise I enjoyed having friends in the various existing cliques.  Of course, there were the ones that I hated and the ones that hated me.  Now that I am older I realized the stupidity of it all...but it is just a right of passage.  


During my first year of high school I had an acquaintance inform me that a girl I had never talked to decided she hated me.  Why she hated me?--I don't know. I, of course, had the "logical" teenager reaction and spent the following years hating her back.  She committed suicide three years after we graduated.  Wow.  Dead.  Suicide.  Why did I hate her again?   


Though I didn't really believe in myself, I was able to solidify religious beliefs during my high school years.  I knew there was God.  I knew He loved me.  I knew He had a plan for my life.  I knew He'd help me when He could but I had to help myself first.  I still haven't quite figured out the details yet.


College was okay.  After knee surgery my senior year, my physical therapist had me convinced I should be a physical therapist.  It sounded good to me, so I packed my bags and planned out the four years of college followed by physical therapy school.  It didn't work out that way.


I started out at a relatively prestigious private university an hour or so away from my house.  I hated it.  I made it one semester in the dorms and then left to move back home to my beautiful room in suburbia.  I continued my education at the public University downtown.  Then one night at a bonfire, I met this 21 year old, 6 foot tall, blue-eyed blonde.  I lost my heart that night.  


He and I spent the next two weeks being inseparable.  Then I moved to Washington, D.C. for a congressional internship.  I was so depressed.  The boy I left at home was amazing.  So...I did the best thing I could and got engaged to him on July 4th weekend, two months after we met.  I was 19.  (P.S. Washington was AWESOME...but more about that later)


I can affirm that getting married to this man was the single best decision I ever made. True, I was young, I was nieve, I was inexperienced, and I am now on food stamps because of him and the children we have are on government insurance, but I would still marry him all over again.


We got married four weeks after my semester in D.C., and started our life together.  Education is very important to both of us so we continued school.  Looking back, school had always come so easily to me I had never learned to study.  I still wanted to do something in the medical field but could not figure out why I was getting my first C grades in the sciences.  Instead of realizing I actually had to study, I had a professor tell me I was a great writer and should consider majoring in mass communications.  So...I changed my major and took the easy way out.


During my last year of college I lined up four positive pregnancy tests on the back of the toilet, and deduced that I was probably bound for motherhood.  My husband was in the police academy and we had just signed our first mortgage.  It wasn't the timing we were planning on.


I tried to call my husband after I had taken the pregnancy tests, but I couldn't reach him.  I had no choice to go to class and tell him later.  I picked up two infant T-shirts at the university bookstore to tell him.  When I arrived home I tossed the bag onto the counter and casually told him I'd bought him something.  He opened the bag, saw the T-shirts and thought I had bought matching shirts for the two of us.  Not exactly.  


At my urging he took out the shirts and unfolded them.  I could see the wheels turning in his head when he finally asked if we were pregnant.  I smiled, and told him we were.  He went pale, looked right at me and said,"I need to lay down."  


Eventually, he recovered and our first child arrived the following summer.  Just in time for me to graduate two weeks later.  We spent the next few years trying to get adjusted to being a police family.  It wasn't easy.


After a few years of being a cop, couples are either stronger than they were before, or they are divorced.  A job like that just messes with families.  We had some real tough times but came out of it like married war veterans.  In the end, it is really hard to imagine putting kids through college on police salary of $43,000 a year...so my husband debated if he wanted to go back to school.


There was a lot of thought and prayer that went into the decision.  We talked about me going back to work but we believe in the importance of mothers being home with their children when possible.  Besides, daycare is so expensive, I wouldn't be making enough to make a difference.  We decided that law school was what we should do...and here we are.  In a new state, a new town, with a 3 year old, a new baby, and no money.  


We are starting a new part of our lives.  And I am all together happy.  But I never, ever, imagined I would be driving my kids to the human services office to pick up our food stamps card while mightily praying the meth addict who was there the week before would not be there again. (No one should ever have to smell a meth addict...yuck!)  


For this formerly middle-class white girl...it has been an experience.