The Marriage Years - 2011
Each year of my marriage to Courtney could be a chapter all its own, but for another book. Olivia arrived just before our Fourth Anniversary, and Ethan arrived shortly before our Sixth Anniversary. Neither of those are significant years in terms of how long one has been married, but those are when the kids arrived so there is that.
If you have been keeping track, the Chapter(s) of this blog have so far recalled a brief history from 2002 up until 2010. These were formative years for me. High school (HS) was just that, but college and Master's Commission, back to full-time college and then working for the ministry full-time right afterwards, these were ages 19-28 of some pretty severe discovery.
On paper those years are not very special, but they shaped thinking in terms of everything from religion to even something as critical as parenting.
Court and I were married in 2010, on December 4th. It was a Saturday wedding at 11am in North Richland Hills, TX. Courtney required that I be up there at 8am for some reason, and thus began our first conflict in that I did not need three hours to put on a suit. I think I showed up around 8:30am, and she was upset with me. In hindsight, she probably thought I was going to chicken out and no-show? I needlessly waited for about an hour before getting dressed. I ended up walking around the venue just looking at stuff and being useless. I still walk around generally useless to this day, actually.
Either way, the necessity of why my timing is important to her was and remains an issue of conflict in our relationship. I always view that people who pack their schedules are terrible managers of time that matters. Perhaps I value more someone's availability than their ability to be structured.
Of course, that is the world I would love to live in.
Year 1 - 2011
We were married by 11:13am, and I believe we were dearly departed from our wedding party by 1pm. We would spend our first few hours together decompressing from the reality of what our lives had become. In the limo, on the way to the airport we both remarked that it was as though we had not been breathing until that moment. Her and I felt finally some sort of peace, some sort of closure, some sort of contentment that we were now bound to each other. We reached a point on the highway where we could let cruise control dictate our speed for a while.
The first year is everything we were told it would be, minus severe issues and adjustments. We eliminated a lot of pettiness in our three years of dating, and to this day we are very grateful not to have brought that into our marriage. 2011 starts a month later, I am parking cars as a valet and she is still working for the ministry as a graphic designer. Our year happens with our very first Valentine's, my birthday, then her birthday where I gave in and bought her a cat, and then big change happened. My career professionally was stalled, and I joined a lot of the unemployed people during that time. Court let me quit working valet because it took me away at night and some of the places I would end up working were honestly beneath me. Trust me, I grit my teeth and did the work but not without knowing my days were getting numbered. Fast forward to present day, the inconsistencies and troublesome nature of that company finally caught up to them. I remain blessed to have left when I did.
A friend connected Courtney to another friend who had Dribbble invites to hand out, and Courtney started submitting work through Dribbble. This friend eventually started to mentor her, and later that year Church Media Group hired Courtney to join their design team in November 2011. For an entire year, my wife would get up at 5am to leave our house by 5:45am to get to Southlake by 7am so she could leave at 4pm and with any luck arrive back at our home by 5:30pm.
Me? I did temp jobs, whatever I could do to contribute.
We went shooting for our first anniversary.
