The title of this blog is because today is what would have been my fifteenth wedding anniversary if I were still married. I'm feeling a bit nostalgic and want to recap my life since then, but I'm gonna go back 20 years to kinda set the context. Mid Summer of 1989 I took some friends from one of my high schools to a pool/volleyball party with friends from a different high school I had attended. This was the first time these different groups had been in the same mix and some tight friendships grew out of it. One of my friends had brought another friend from another different school. I thought she was just about the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, but she seemed stuck up and aloof to me, not really getting involved in anything, just kinda disinterestedly hanging around the fringes until everyone went home. I didn't really meet her or learn her name 'til about half a year later. Flash forward a few months and I had moved to Albuquerque to start school at UNM (University of New Mexico). While I was there I had some cool and fun friends who, unfortunately, were pretty heavy drug users. Throughout much of high school I smoked pot, ate shrooms, did acid, but being around people who did heavier things all the time kinda dragged me into heavier drug use than I was used to from high school. I'm not blaming them... I made my own choices... but it would have been better for me not to have been around it at all, especially since I was living on my own for the first time. Fortunately Albuquerque is close enough to Tucson to allow me to drive home every few months to visit family and hang out with friends so I was able to maintain my close friendships. On one of these visits back to Tucson I was with my friends when She showed up and was totally involved with the group, talking, telling stories, laughing etc. I learned her name was Jennifer, but she preferred Jen or Jenny. I ended up talking to her mostly alone for hours that night and thus started the closest, most emotionally intimate friendship I've ever had. It grew over the following months and years and is something I will always cherish. My time in Albuquerque was less enjoyable, I saw some pretty bad things happen. The worst was when one of the guys I used to get high with - one of the funniest, most laid back people I've ever known who never seemed to have an aggressive bone in his body - lost his cool when he was high at a party once (just pot and beer that night) and started beating up his girlfriend over what would normally not even have been mildly upsetting. Not to make excuses for him, because there is no excuse, but he was high and his perspective and good judgement were impaired so his mild nature was gone. Fortunately it didn't take too many of us to step in and stop him, but not before he broke her nose. Saddest thing was, she blamed herself and wouldn't file a police report. That's one of the reasons I hate drugs now and am fearful for my friends who are around people do them. That incident started me really questioning the kind of life I was living and whether I wanted to be around those people anymore. So, after 2 and a half years in Albuquerque I moved back to Tucson when I fell into a deep depression and started getting scared of all the drugs I was doing and how much I was looking for my next high on heroin, crack, meth, coke... anything. I was afraid that, even though I was always so mellow, one day I might lose my cool and be that guy. Once back in Tucson I quit everything cold turkey, except for smoking and drinking, both of which I cut back on heavily (even though I had recently turned 21). Not to sound cliche, but over several months it was like a cloud was slowly lifting from my brain and I was actually able to start thinking clearly for the first time in years. Most of my friends in Tucson never knew what I had got up to in Albuquerque, but they all noticed and liked the change I was going through. So, for any of my Tucson friends reading this... yeah, that's what was up and I'm sorry, and thanks for all you did for me. So back in Tucson, Jen and I became ever closer. Since she was the only girl in our close group of friends, most of the guys tried hitting on her from time to time. She was so different from all of us. We were all freaks and geeks, while she was always one who fit in so easily with the popular crowd. One of her favorite things to talk about with me was how much of a fool the other guys would make of themselves sometimes with their awkward advances. I had once fleetingly thought about her and myself as a couple, but that kind of talk put the brakes on it. I never really thought of her as a girl, she was just ... Jen. Always there for me, almost like family, but not. On January 23rd, 1993 I attempted suicide for the first time. I won't go into details about it, but she was the only person who stuck with me and gave me what I needed out of a friendship while I was recovering, even though she was the friend who I hurt the most when I did that. My other friends were good to me too, but not quite in the same way. It took quite a while for things to get back to normal, but eventually they did and most of my friends became even closer, especially Matt, who friendnapped me for a month to go live with him and his house mates in Whittier where he was going to school. That was a great healing experience. I even had a short fling with one of the girls in the house. I still think about her from time to time and wonder what would have happened if we had ended up together more permanently. She was the ultimate geek girl and we were well suited for each other. When I got back to Tucson again Jen and I kind of became the anchor for our group and just about everything we all did together either involved or originated with us. Things started to change between us over spring break in 1994. We had all talked about going to Las Vegas for spring break, but it turned out that only Jen and I could go. We had a great time. We took turns driving and whoever wasn't would read aloud to the other from a book we had both just started. Vegas itself was fun as always, we both won a couple of buckets of quarters playing video poker which helped pay for gas and food for the trip, but what really stands out in my memory was in our hotel. She always had a tense back so I used to give her back massages all the time... nothing sexual, even though she would sometimes take off her shirt and bra, it was just me helping her relax. I was always a perfect gentleman, never trying to catch a peek or cop a feel. She liked deep hard massages and my hands were particularly strong from rock climbing, so it worked out. So, anyway, one night in the hotel I was rubbing her back and we were chatting about inconsequential stuff. It turned out to last about 3 hours until my hands started cramping and I couldn't keep going. After I was done, she turned her head to look at me and said "God, Jay, that was better than sex." At this, alarm bells went off in my head and I realized she wasn't just Jen, but yeah, she was a woman and she had woman parts! I mean, of course I always knew, but I never really thought about her that way until then. For me it started a little sexual tension between us, nothing overt, but there. The tension kept growing for me after we got back to Tucson and a couple of weeks (and a few more back rubs) later I couldn't hold back and I told her about it and that my love for her was changing to more of a romantic nature. She took it in stride, but wanted some time to think about it before she responded. The next three days were torturous for me. I was convinced she was starting to think of me the same way she thought of the other guys in our group with their clumsy attempts to bed her. Much to my elation though, she called me at work and told me she was feeling the same way I was. I honestly can't remember a thing that happened for the next week I was so wrapped up in thoughts of her. We went out for our first real date date a few days later and by the end of it we were already talking about getting married. We tried to keep our relationship secret from our friends for a while until we were for sure, but it was kind of hard to hide the surreptitious hand holding, the adoring gazes or the puppy she bought for me (Emma). But we didn't have to hide it for long. On May 16th, 1994, shortly before her graduation from the U of A, we made our engagement official with a big diamond engagement ring and everything. She even gave me a diamond "engagement earring" which I never took off but I lost it down a shower drain years after we were married. That was the last earring I wore until very recently. Our friends weren't surprised that we were together, but they were pretty shocked that we were engaged so quickly. The next 6 months were taken up with wedding plans and planning for our future together. It was pretty convenient that at the time I was working for a flower shop as their "computer guy". The family who owned the shop were great and they gave us all the wedding flowers and set up etc. as a wedding gift from the shop in addition to the individual gifts they all gave us. It was quite a nice gift, they went all out, and had their best people working on it. What they did for us would normally have cost close to $2000. So all of the above was leading up to... On Saturday, November 26th, 1994 Jen and I got married. My father, as a minister, performed the ceremony, which was nice for him because he didn't get to do it for either my brother or sister. Our friends, of course, were our attendants, but since Jen didn't have a lot of girlfriends most of her side were "bride's men" except for her sister. Her best friend other than me was her Man of Honor. It was so funny because he's a serious man's man and he hated the big flowery boutonniere he had to wear (in all honesty it looked more like a corsage :D ). My side was a few of our guy friends, and one of their girlfriends, to balance it out. The ceremony was nice and the reception was a lot of fun. We even has some crashers, one of whom caught the garter. It was at the nicest hotel in Tucson, the Westin La Paloma. That was great too, because we honeymooned at the Westin in Maui and the nice lady who coordinated the wedding for the hotel called and arranged for an awesome free upgrade for us, so instead of a golf course view we had a beautiful ocean view with a lovely balcony. After the honeymoon we moved into her mom's house while she went to live with Jen's sister. That was really good for us starting out because we just had to take over the mortgage payment which was only $320 a month since they had bought the house in the 70s. That was about the same amount I paid for a studio apartment in Albuquerque after I moved out of the dorms. The next few years were great for us. When I got a real good job (thanks to the confidence Jen gave me) we moved into another house that we rented from July 1996 through December 1999. During this time we tried for months and months to get her pregnant, and we were on the verge of going to see a fertility specialist when she finally got pregnant on January 15th 1997. I remember the date exactly because 1) I had been traveling for work and was gone except for the weekends and 2) Jen had miscarried once so her doctor wanted to have an early sonogram to make sure things were okay and the sonogram tech was able to pinpoint the day of conception based upon how the baby was developing. October 18th, 1997 was, and will always be, the best day of my life. That's the day my daughter was born. The doctor had wanted to induce labor that day because the baby was getting pretty big. Jen had originally planned on a natural birth, but decided to have the drug (I don't remember what it's called) once the contractions really started. The labor was relatively short, only 4 and half hours, and my daughter was 9 pounds 8 ounces at birth. She was the talk of the maternity ward, I overheard some of the nurses saying "Oh my goodness, did you hear about the big 9 1/2 pound baby who was born in only 4 hours?!" The hospital staff were very nice and let me stay overnight in the room, even though it's not normally allowed. I think it was because Jen's mom was (still is) an ER nurse at the same hospital. I didn't sleep at all, I just stared in awe at both my girls all night long. Things were great with our new family for about a year until I started to fall into a depression again, made worse by the pressures of new parenthood and the pain of being away so much, traveling for work all the time. And here's the thing I am most ashamed of in all my life. Until now, I've told only one other person about this, only in the vaguest of terms, and that person was not Jen, but if she reads this and thinks back, she'll know exactly what I'm talking about. On January 4th, 1999 I attempted suicide again, for the last time. That was the beginning of the end of our marriage. After that I emotionally detached myself from life and started drinking heavily again, mostly due to guilt and shame. It didn't help that later that month, on the 31st, Matt, a friend who had helped my healing so much after my previous suicide attempt, killed himself with a bullet through his brain. I was angry at him for taking himself away, and, irrationally, I was angry at him for beating me to it. I was also irrationally angry at Jen for seemingly not knowing nor caring how depressed I was. In hindsight I can't really blame her. She was going through the pressures of working and new parenthood too, and I've been dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide since I was 8 years old and am exceedingly good at hiding it - how was she supposed to have known? Eventually I recovered from the worst of the depression I was in, but I remained emotionally detached. Later that year, in September, we bought a house that was still under construction, to be finished in December. It was a crazy holiday season, going through the closing, inspections and all the other minutia of buying a new house. We were determined to be in the new house by Christmas. So with lots of help from friends and family, we finished moving in on Christmas eve, 1999, even though Jen was nearly dead on her feet from the flu. Christmas day I made the favorite meal I've ever cooked. Ham, Turkey and all the other holiday fixings that go with them for 12 people. It wasn't my favorite because of the food, which was old hat by then, but because I was cooking it in my brand new kitchen in my brand new house and it was quite an accomplishment after so quick a move. Things in the new house kept us busy and interested for a long time, but for me it was all on the surface. I still hadn't gotten over the shame and I didn't want to open myself up from fear of discovery. We both kind of complacently went along with life for the next year or so, not really enjoying anything, just existing. In April 2002 we separated. I moved into an apartment and Jen stayed in the house. We equally shared custody of our daughter, half a week at a time. We briefly tried getting back together in June, but realized that nothing had really changed, so we decided to divorce and it was finalized in November of that year. We sold the house for a small profit and split the proceeds. I moved into the last place I lived in Tucson and Jen moved into a house she rented. We maintained a friendly relationship, but our close intimate friendship was broken beyond repair. Out of all the things I've ever lost, that is what I will always miss the most. Over the next year and a half I just lived, not really doing anything noteworthy. I kept drinking heavily, but never when I had my daughter. Being drunk around her when I'm the responsible parent is a line I will never cross. In August of 2004 I met and started dating Peggy. In September of that year Jen, with my agreement, started looking for a way for her job to transfer her to San Diego, and in October it became reality. Peggy and I were still new in our relationship, but instead of ending it, she moved with me when I went to San Diego to stay close to my daughter. It was a hard move to a place I didn't particularly like, but I did what I had to do. Peggy and I had some good times and I will always think upon her fondly. Jump forward a few years... thanksgiving weekend of 2007 I had to have Emma put to sleep after 13 and a half years. Strangely enough, the day it happened was also November 26th. That was an excruciatingly sad time for me. She wasn't my daughter, but I'd had her since she was a wee little puppy and it was hard to say goodbye. I must have watched Jurassic Bark 100 times since then, trying to exorcise the pain. At the end of that year the apartment complex we were living in told us they were remodeling our apartment and we had the choice of ending our lease or moving into a more expensive apartment on the same property, but we had to be out by the end of February. We chose to end the lease and our relationship and Peggy moved back to Tucson and I found another apartment complex to live in, one which was less expensive, in a better and more convenient area and I really liked the place a lot better than where we had been. It was only about 2 miles from my daughter's new middle school so that was great! In October of 2008 I found Firefly. My favorite show ever. That in turn led me to Dr. Horrible, Buffy, Angel and eventually to Dollhouse. And of course that led to the Dollhouse forum and, of course, the DOTT and other OT threads for other Whedon shows, where I met some of the best friends I've ever known. In late spring/early summer of this year I foolishly let myself fall too hard, fast and deeply for a girl with whom I had almost no chance of ever having a normal meaningful relationship for several reasons, not least of which was nearly 2000 miles separating us. What we had was wonderful and I wouldn't give it up for anything, but all good things end and I ended up with a broken heart. It's strange to think of it this way, but the heartbreak was both more and less painful than my divorce was. The divorce I could see coming miles off while this was like a sudden drop off a cliff. The pain was more intense, but it passed much more quickly than the slow unending emotional pummeling of ending a marriage, and maintaining contact with her and her family for the sake of our daughter. Still though, if I had a magic wand I would erase the past 3 months and all the miles between us to see if we could make something of it. But... wishes, horses, steak. If you've been reading my previous blogs you may have seen me whining and moaning over this. Also of note, again already blogged about but I'll mention it here for the sake of completeness, mid-August I lost the apartment I liked so much and have had to move back to Tucson to live with my dad until I find a new job, hopefully very very soon. Another thing I already wrote about was meeting and having a short but sweet relationship with Jeremy, my first male lover. On another positive note, I got to meet my geek idol, Wil Wheaton, over Labor Day weekend here in Tucson. :) I've been up all night crying through writing this. Maybe not the best way to start Thanksgiving, but the catharsis was sorely needed. So, I'll end this in the spirit of the day with a few things I'm thankful for: Always first and foremost, my daughter. She never fails to bring a smile to my face and it's amazing to know that I made half of her. My wonderful family (excepting my evil brother). They've been a rock I can always count on. My close friends, both meat world and virtual world. I don't know how I would have gotten through this past year without them. Pie. Nothing really special, but I'm thankful that I'm going to be eating some today. :D Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
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