How it Happened:

I was 13. Mom was in Chicago visiting family. I was in the upstairs bathroom. My 7th grade science fair was the next day. It happened. My body deemed this moment in time the second that I should be ushered away from childhood and into womanhood. I was ecstatic. Having read Judy Bloom books and Are You there God it's Me, Margaret since I was 9 years old I was overjoyed to be on the level as the characters in so many books I read growing up. I was an equal to my friends at school who had already been so lucky. But I was alone and mom was in Chicago and I wasn't about to talk to Dad about this one. My older friend Bethany was my savior and she and her mom both celebrated with me. Little did I know the implications of this momentous occasion.

Life has progressed. I finished high school in my hometown of rural Maine. I headed west to California in search of an adventure and earned a college degree as a byproduct. During this time my values changed, I loved life. I wanted to travel and experience and use all my senses to know life in its fullness. Men and relationships, while always a distant longing, where never at the forefront my my thinking. I never thought I was pretty enough or what Mr. Right would be looking for in a partner. I was a great friend. Marriage was a long way off. I wasn't going to succumb the way my siblings had so early in life. I feared mediocrity and mundane living. I wanted to feel alive.

Then, one Tuesday morning I walked into my new internship at a human rights organization in the Pico Union district of Los Angeles. I met Fuser. I didn't give him much thought because I thought he was married. Turns out he wasn't. After our first official date in early February, two weeks away from my 20th birthday I knew I was with my future husband. I'd always heard stories about people who 'knew' right away. I never understood that concept until it happened. There was no bolt of lightening, no ray of light, just a sense that Fuser was home to me and the awareness that this was the beginning of something completely different than I had planned on my agenda of life.