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Friday, March 18, 2005

 

A love story

Ten years ago tonight, I walked into a bar and fell in love. Everything about how we met danced with cliché: we met in a bar; he told me he was an artist and offered to show me his sketches (I said yes and followed him home); it truly was love at first sight.

If I can’t remember my life before the boys, I certainly can’t imagine life without Beloved. We were living in different cities when we met, and I spent the better part of a year making the six hour drive from Ottawa to London and back every second weekend to be with him. We started seeing each other in March, started talking about him moving to Ottawa in early summer. In September 1995, we planned for him to move up in May 1996. In October we bumped it up to February. We finally settled on New Years Eve, 1995. We were married on July 3, 1999.

I remember the day I knew he was The One. Before we met, I had planned a backpacking trip through Europe. It was to be my big adventure, a trip through five countries all by myself – no tourguide, no travelling companions, just me and my Let’s Go Europe. The trip itself was amazing, terrifying and wonderful – fodder for another blog.

But on the very last day, I got lost in the Paris RER and missed my flight home. Beloved had driven from London to Ottawa to meet my flight, and was staying in my apartment. I called him at 7 am Paris time – sometime in the middle of the night in Ottawa – and tearfully sobbed that I had missed my flight, I was stranded, and the only way I could get home was to fly into Toronto later that day. Would he drive back to Toronto to meet me? He never hesitated.

I knew if he could calm hysterical, exhausted me with an entire ocean in between us, he was The One. And I was right. There is no one who could be a better father to my boys than Beloved, no one I would rather see at the beginning and end of every day. I am a lucky, lucky girl.

How did you know it when you met The One?