Guest Blogger Week: A love story
I am a journalist and illustrator, and I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I am a new mother, and still more or less a newlywed. My husband and I spent our “honeymoon” on a three-week trip through China last August, adopting our daughter. We waited two years for that honeymoon, since we’d spent every spare penny we had at the time on the adoption process, which we set in motion just three months after our wedding.
In fact, marriage and adoption were, for us, tightly interwoven from the start. My husband proposed on mother’s day, and that was no coincidence. We were legally married just six days later…although that first marriage was a secret! We didn’t tell our parents until months later. Our actual wedding, which took place on a gorgeous ranch outside of the ski resort of Vail, was planned for the following September, but we were married in the eyes of the city court months earlier. We knew, you see, that we would have to be legally married for at least six months in order to apply for adoption.
Our beautiful daughter has been home with us for nine months now, and every day - literally every morning of my life - I wake to a pure, brilliant flame of astonishment at the life we have cobbled together…the amazing man who married me, and the daughter we can’t imagine our life without. I marvel at all the tiny twists of fate that brought us together, the hair’s breadth, the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, without which we would never have known this life as a family, this vast, enormous, giddying kind of love.
Every night after we put our daughter to bed, my husband tells me in an awed voice, “I couldn’t have done this with anyone else but you.”
And it’s not just something he says. He means that literally. The same holds true for me. I could not have done this - had this life, this marriage, adopted this child - with anyone else. I firmly believe there is no other man on earth with whom I would have taken this leap, or with whom I could ever have been this profoundly happy.
Because, here’s the thing: I never wanted a family. I believed, for the bulk of my life, that I wasn’t cut out for parenthood. I was fiercely independent, a traveler, a wanderer and a loner. I spent weeks alone in the desert every spring and fall, hiking and camping. I had had some long-term relationships, but every attempt to live with another human being ended badly. I had a terrible aversion to commitment, and for nearly ten years I had an actual recurring nightmare about getting married, complete with heart palpitations and cold sweats. For me, “married” meant “trapped”.
When my husband and I met, we were working as journalists for competing newspapers in the Vail Valley. We met, basically, because he stole my best friend - my buddy in the newsroom, and my constant companion. They formed a band together, and my life would never be the same. I resented him for it - the interloper. But when my best friend met the girl he would eventually marry, and dumped us both, we were thrown together and quickly formed a friendship. We had, we discovered, something in common. Each of us had recently ended a long-term relationship (6 years in both cases) and both of us believed that we were not cut out for a marriage, parenthood or domesticity.
When our friendship turned into something more, it seemed like the perfect alliance - no pressure, neither of us pushing for any sort of commitment. We camped together, we hiked together, we went on long road trips and climbed high mountains together. And so it went, until one day we realized that something strange had happened: each of us, in our own way, had begun to realize that a massive shift was taking place in both of our psyches… we wanted to raise a child together. Curiously enough, the very same month that my now-husband first hinted at the idea of parenthood, I stopped having my marriage nightmare. It never returned.
These days, I am astounded by the thought of how easily we could have missed finding one another, not just my husband and I, but our daughter as well. Had we not overcome our respective aversions to marriage at the same time, had we not both felt at home with the idea of adoption….in fact, had my husband not taken my hand and lead me to the city courthouse to be legally married on the exact day that he did, we might never have qualified for adoption. A few months later, China’s Center for Adoption Affairs changed their regulations for adoptive parents. Any later, and we would have been disqualified.
A week after our adoption dossier arrived in China, we made the decision to switch into the “special medical needs” program. A week after we received our referral for a 7-month-old girl with a cleft lip and palate, our agency stopped participating in the program that allowed us to adopt our daughter. Each and every time, it seems, by pure blind fortune, or by whatever power you believe in, we slipped through just as the proverbial door was about to slam.
For all this, for the wonder of waking to our daughter’s shining face every morning, for our family days spent riding bikes through the old neighborhoods of our town, or gardening in the Colorado sun, for her rusty giggle and her sticky hugs….for all this I have my husband to thank. He is, hands down, not only the best man, but the best human being I’ve ever have the good fortune to meet.
Recently, on my own blog, I posted this list of reasons why I feel so incredibly, profoundly fortunate to share a life with this man:
- He’s a fabulous cook.
- He’s stoic to the marrow of his bones.
- He has a copyright symbol tattooed directly between his shoulderblades.
- He likes to garden, and grows beautiful vegetables.
- He is utterly unequivocal. Look up “unequivocal” in the dictionary, and you’ll find his picture.
- He once wrote me a note that said “I love you more than bacon.”
- He wears converse hightops with the laces undone. He wore them the day I met him (with a cowboy hat) and he wears them still. He wears each pair until the soles wear through and the seams burst, and then breaks out a new pair.
- He has a very deep voice.
- He is a superb father.
- He reads every newspaper he can get his hands on, every day.
- He knows how to make a pinhole camera.
- The other day, when I was under the weather, he brought me a double-chocolate Blizzard from DQ.
- He plays a mean guitar.
- He doesn’t know anything about cars.
- In his world, there is no “can’t”. Together, he believes, we can do anything we set our mind to. Anything.
- He follows in nobody’s footsteps.
- He has been throughout his life a chef and a journalist, sometimes consecutively.
- He’s completely devoted to those he loves.
- He doesn’t watch sports, but he’s always game for a six-hour hike in the mountains.
- He once gave me a can of SPAM-n-Cheese as a gift. He also once gave me a trip to San Francisco for my birthday.
- He’s not afraid to go to the opera.
- He sometimes brings me flowers for no reason.
- He is a brilliant comedian. I’ve never met anyone with better comic timing.
- He owns his mistakes with dignity and humility.
- He loves camping in the desert.
- He has a work ethic out of another, more diligent era, and he never, ever takes a sick day.
- He gets emotional about dogs.
- He’s not afraid to make fun of himself.
- When his mountain bike was stolen, he bought us each a three-speed cruiser with the insurance money, so that we could go on breezy afternoon rides on his days off.
- He has trouble pronouncing the word “wolf”, which makes me laugh, and which is (I swear!) only a small part of the reason that I chose a house on Wolff Street when we were looking for our new home.
- He always has a new adventure planned for the next day off.
- He shares the housework with me 50/50, and never has to be asked.
- When I asked him to adopt a little girl from China with me, he said “yes”.
Written by Maia
