A Boy and a Girl

A Boy and a Girl

My husband and I were both raised in middle-class homes.  I was born in New Mexico three and a half months early, weighing in at over 2 pounds.  I guess my first feat to accomplish in this life was to live.  When I was less than a year old, my parents and I moved to California so that Stanford could pick me up for a research study as I was born with my lungs extremely underdeveloped.  Children born as I was didn’t live long in the mid-80’s…. Until they realized (through my study) that moving to sea-level will allow the lungs to grow the remaining essential components needed for breathing.  Once I was medically stable, my family and I moved to Colorado.  What a beautiful place to grow up.  It was a small, quaint town where everyone knew what was going on with everyone else.  The mountain scenery was like what you would see in a painting in an art gallery… just plain breathtaking.  I moved back to New Mexico in the middle of my freshman year of high school, and moved yet again right before my senior year of high school to Texas.  No, my parents were not military…. We just moved a lot.  I do come from a broken home, which is not unheard of these days.  My mother and father have both been married three times, and thus I have one half older brother and two half younger sisters.  My parents both loved me dearly no matter what and I was very blessed for that.  My junior year of high school is when I learned of the private university.  It was very academically challenging, and as just an average student, I longed for that challenge. My father decided, before my senior year of high school, to have an important dinner conversation.  He took me to one of my favorite restaurants in town, and I ordered my favorite dish.  He then proceeded to tell me, “Just like your brother, I will not be paying for your college education”…. It was a formal dinner meeting… to discuss that I was to somehow be responsible for my future.  Despite this talk, I decided to apply to the private university.  I did not really expect to get in, until I checked the mail on a March afternoon… I had done it. Now I just had to figure out how to pull it off.

My husband, Studmuffin we will call him, was born in a small Texas town and that’s where he stayed for the majority of his childhood.  He was born at over 9 pounds (quite the opposite of me).  He lived with his grandparents for the majority of his childhood and they were wonderful to him. He also comes from a broken home, as his father has been married three times and his mother twice. He has two half-brothers and one half sister. He was sporty growing up.  He was the quarterback of the football team in middle school, played tennis and golf.  One afternoon, his junior year of high school, he was at a family gathering when his father called him into a back room.  His dad then proceeded to say, “There’s no money, and we cannot afford for you to go to college.  You must go into the military to fly jets.” Studmuffin then took note of the glasses on his face and knew that wasn’t an option for him.  He also, in that moment, recalled that his half brother and sister (one in grade school and the other a toddler at that point) already had their college paid for by his father who got them a college fund.  As a product of divorce, Studmuffin’s college fund was wiped away in court proceedings (just as mine was).  Most of Studmuffin’s friends were going to this private university.  Angry with his father, he applied to this private university to spite him.  On Valentine’s Day, the day after his 18^th birthday, he got notification that he had been accepted.  Now he too had to figure out how this would work.  He just knew that it wasn’t the military as his father wanted, so he would do anything to make it happen.