photo by Rachel Ford James

Leah, Andrea and I have been talking about and planning for a few months now to share our stories.  Our testimonies.  We feel that it is important to share our stories with you for several reasons.  We want to be vulnerable, even though it’s hard.  We want you to feel connected to us as well.  I have been putting it off because frankly, some of this is hard to share.  But I feel like it is time.  Please allow me to share a bit of my life and my heart with you.  And for the record, my husband has read, encouraged, and given permission for everything I will share.

I have lived in Oregon all of my life. I was born in Portland and I don’t have any plans to leave any time soon. I am the oldest in my family of four kids… three girls and the youngest was finally the boy my parents had been trying for.

I would describe my dad as steady and hard-working. He has had the same job for 30+ years. Growing up, and even now, he was present a lot, but not involved in my life. I always knew that he loved me, but he doesn’t really know me. He doesn’t know what I am interested in, what is going on in my life. And seriously, to this day, he does not know the names of my girls. For some reason, it was too hard for him to tell them apart when all three came at once, and so learning who they are, has not been a priority for him.

I was always closer to my mom than my dad and still am. She is more able and willing to be involved with my life and interested in what is going on with me. I would describe her as hard-working as well, and loving, but a little unsure of how to express it. She was a stay at home mom with us 4 kids until I was about 11 years old (6^th grade). At that point we were just not able to pay the bills, so she went back to work. Right or wrong decision, I don’t know. And I don’t blame her for it… but I saw how this decision changed our family– and not for the better. Even as a Jr. Higher, I knew that one day, I was going to make sure that I was home each day when my kids came home from school and I would have snack waiting for them. I understood on some level how important it was for kids to have that peace and security in their home, although I must admit failure on the “having a snack waiting for them” part. This of course is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about being a stay at home mom.

Growing up we moved around a lot. For several years we moved every 2 years or so. Later I learned that it had almost everything to do with money. The housing market back then was WAY better than it is now. And every couple years, whether it was intentional or not, we would sell our house, having earned substantial equity, pay off debt and bills and buy a new house. This helped create in me, I believe, a desire for adventure, for change, for something new.

The most traumatic move for me was between my 2^nd and 3^rd grade years. We moved from Oregon City to Gresham, which as a 3^rd grader, seemed hours away. It was only as an adult that I realized that it was really only 30 minutes or so! At the beginning of 3^rd grade at a new school with new people and nothing familiar, I became shy and completely uncomfortable with my surroundings. I would get stomach aches every morning because I was so anxious about going to school. My mom would let me stay home for a while before she finally figured out what the stomach aches were about, and then as hard as I’m sure it was for her, she made me go to school. I continued to get stomach aches while at school and spent a lot of time laying down in the nurses office. Eventually, somehow, the lunch lady caught on to my problem. She was so nice to me and she would take me into the cafeteria as she was getting ready for lunch. She would talk to me and give me free chocolate milk. Eventually, I began to make friends and then school got much better.

By the time I was in high school, I had decided that I liked boys a lot more than girls. Boys were so much easier to get along with and there was not so much drama involved all the time. Plus, there was the added benefit of getting male attention from them, since I lacked that in my relationship with my dad. I desperately wanted to feel beautiful. I wanted someone to like me for who I was and for how I looked. But compared to my friends, I always felt like an ugly duckling. Although I was never overweight, I was never happy with my body. I constantly battled acne although not as badly as some. I never knew how to really connect to people, which is also probably why I liked boys better. I fought hard to not be a “girl”, to be tough, to not show any emotion, and God-forbid never cry in public.

My senior year in high school, I started dating Josh (my now husband). We had been friends since before I started high school. He dated one of my friends for 2 years in high school and I dated one of his friends for 2 years. He was always like a big brother to me, but until that point, I had never really considered dating him. The day that he came to my house after a basketball game (I remember that I was still wearing my cheer leading uniform) and he asked me to be his girlfriend, I knew. I just knew that he was the one that I was going to marry.

It was right around this time that my parents decided to divorce. Our house (which I loved) was sold and mom moved to a townhouse, and my brother and I went with her. My dad bought a house and my sisters went with him. It was an amicable divorce without too much drama.

As Josh and I became closer, we struggled, mightily with remaining pure. We both wanted to be pure, but hormones are crazy when you’re 18 and 19. It was a very difficult time. Although we didn’t have sex before we were married, I know that many lines were crossed that shouldn’t have been. About a year into dating, Josh proposed and I accepted. We decided that having a long engagement wasn’t a wise plan for us, since we were already struggling so much, so we decided to plan a wedding 6 months out. To make a long story short, we were told that our church didn’t feel comfortable marrying us. It was suggested that we do some mentoring with an older couple before they would marry us.

So that is what we did. At the end of our three months of mentor-ship, we asked the church again if we could be married. Again, they said no, and there was no further offer of help. We were left without any options at that point and we didn’t know what to do. Several months later, still feeling backed into a corner and without other options, we decided to elope.

Within one week of the decision, we applied for and secured an apartment and lined up a justice of the peace judge to come marry us. We were married in the living room of our one bedroom 400 square foot apartment, on December 5^th 1998, with only some dishes, a microwave cart and some sleeping bags to our name.

To be continued…..

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