“Our story”

By request, I’m going to tell the story of how Seth and I met and a bit more about our history. And I’m making Seth add his own commentary, against his will and better judgment.

After I graduated from Colby College, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had worked in financial aid when I was an undergrad so college admissions seemed like an obvious choice. After a month of being back home with my parents I accepted a job in admissions at St Lawrence University in Canton, NY.

I worked there for a year and a half with this lady named Sara before I met her brother. I had seen him once before when he’d come to the admissions office, and I remember thinking he was cute and seemed like a sweet brother. One frozen December day, Sara and another admissions counselor went around the office rounding up people to go to a formal ball at the Remington Museum in Ogdensburg. Formal events were rare in the North County, and in college for that matter, but they’d been common during my year abroad at Oxford University and I’d missed them. I readily agreed to attend. I had my old Oxford formal attire still, which involved a slinky black satin dress, chunky heels, and a feather boa.

We gathered at the other counselor’s house that evening, and as we went to load up the cars to carpool up to Ogdensburg, Sara’s brother Seth drove up in a his little red BMW 318is and asked if anyone wanted to ride with him. I took one look at that sweet little ride and immediately volunteered.

Seth: I didn’t want to go to the event because I was afraid it would be like a prom for grown ups. I figured it would be stupid. And I didn’t want to get dressed up. I only went to the event because Sara told me Holly was going. I’d been harassing Sara for Holly’s phone number for months but she wouldn’t give it to me.

I don’t remember the drive, but I remember getting out of the car at the museum and commenting that I needed a moment before we went in because my garter had let go of my stocking. I remember his looking at me for a long moment when I said it.

Seth: I don’t entirely remember what went through my head at that moment but I generally remember thinking it was a good thing Holly was relaxed enough about something like that to say it out loud. It was a sign she felt comfortable with me, which made me happy. I also felt it was a good sign she would hike up her dress and fix her garter in the middle of the parking lot and didn’t get prissy about it.

The night is a bit of a blur honestly but I remember having a great time. There was heavy flirting, and I remember being surprised and thrilled that he returned my attentions. Frankly we got on like a house afire and didn’t run out of things to talk about for even a second. Toward the end of the evening, the topic came around to ice skating, and Seth asked if anyone wanted to go skating the following day. I love skating, and agreed in a heartbeat. I was surprised I was the only one who volunteered.

The next day Seth picked me up in that sweet, sweet ride, and we went to brunch, then went ice skating. I remember coming out to him at the skating rink while lacing up my skates, thinking I wanted to get it out of the way in the beginning because I saw relationship potential, but if he was going to have an issue with my also being attracted to women, I wanted to know up front. He was utterly unfazed.

Seth: When she came out to me I was like “well that’s cool.” It’s not unusual for people to tell me important things about themselves and I just was glad she felt comfortable telling me. And I figured she was more open minded than your average bear. The women I had dated up to that point were too wrapped up in being who they thought someone wanted them to be to be brave enough to announce something like that to me.

I think we spent every day together for the next month. We just talked and listened to music (he had good taste) and went for long drives and watched movies and just in general became fast friends.

But nothing happened. I wasn’t sure what his reticence meant. There was heavy flirting, but nothing more.

Seth: I didn’t kiss her because I didn’t trust my own judgement. I’d come out of a relationship with a cocaine addict who should have had her kids taken away by CPS who threatened to have me beat up when I broke up with her. My thought process was “clearly I’ve failed in every relationship I’ve had in some catastrophic way, so maybe I should start a relationship very differently than I did in the past. Maybe I should try starting a relationship where I ask questions first and f*** later, rather than the reverse.

Seth lived about a block from my house but after hanging out at his place late each night he’d always walk me home. Finally I just grabbed his coat by the lapels one evening and laid one on him. He kissed back. Quite nicely I might add! I remember closing the door to my house behind me and leaning my back against it and sighing in excitement and relief and sheer smittenness.

Seth: I just walked home and was like “well, that happened!” Honestly if she hadn’t kissed me it could have been another month or more before I made a move. That’s how much I trusted myself. I was having a blast with this girl and was not going to screw it up by rushing things.

I remember spending the New Year with him – it was Y2K – and even though I’d only known Seth for a month, I knew that if the world was going to end in an apocalyptic technological meltdown, I wanted to be with Seth for it. That was a bit of a let down. The Y2K part, not the relationship part!

When my lease was up in June, I gave up my adorable first apartment and we moved in together with Seth’s cat into this crappy basement apartment in a building with no foundation, and infested with mice and rats. Hooo boy was it a winner! Ha! At least the cat loved the endless rodent hunting.

Around the same time I met Seth I had started to apply to law schools and got accepted to some top tier schools. I chose Cornell because they gave me a scholarship, but I wasn’t ready to leave Seth or move far away with him yet. So I postponed law school for a year to stay with Seth and keep working for my amazing boss at St Lawrence for another year. I really did love that job. Cornell agreed to hold my admission and scholarship for a year.

By the time that year was up, Seth was ready to follow me to Ithaca. It was a HUGE ask of him because he was manager of a bike shop in Canton and loved that job, and would have trouble finding good work in Ithaca. His family was in the North Country too but his parents were moving around the same time to Charlotte NC. Follow me he did.

Seth: Following Holly was a brave and daring thing, especially for me. I had two options: move to Charlotte with my parents or follow Holly to Cornell. I never considered staying in the North Country. I loved the bike shop but I knew I needed to leave. I needed something more. The adult in me recognized I should get more experience in life. At that point I was way past the longest relationship I’d ever had so I thought there was really good potential for this relationship. Charlotte would have been the end of it. So I went to Ithaca.

We’d been in Ithaca for about a year and a half, and had our first dog, when Seth proposed. We’re both kids at heart and loved Legos, so I had gotten us a Lego Advent Calendar that year. I remember his waking me up early one Saturday morning, which was unusual, and asking me to open that day on the Advent Calendar. Pre-coffee, I duly opened the day, and sat staring and blinking at a satin ring box and a gorgeous green gold diamond ring from our favorite jeweler, Micky Roof. It took long ticking seconds for the gears in my brain to catch up and realize what was happening!

Seth: I knew she was going to say yes but I wanted the whole thing to go as planned so I was very nervous. I was very proud of my sneakiness in breaking into the advent calendar. I’d melted the hot glue that sealed it with a hot saucepan and carefully slid out the box to take out the gift for the day and slid in the ring box. Then heated the saucepan again to reseal it.

We decided to have a small actual wedding rather than elope because we figured his mother would hate me forever if we eloped. Ha! Ah well. She’s never liked me much regardless of our having a wedding for her. If I had to do it again I’d get the same dress (I loooooved my dress – my mother-in-law didn’t) and elope and have a vacation instead of a wedding.

The day itself was quirky really. Some of the key guests arrived nearly an hour late (they’re Austins. It’s a thing). They hadn’t turned on heat in the chapel yet (it was mid October) and it was about 55 in there. The instruments of the musicians who came to play a commissioned piece for us were so cold they were out of tune. One of my bridesmaids (with whom I no longer speak – I got rid of her toxicity a number of years ago now) was in a sulk all day and barely smiled for photos. One of the guests who was a friend of Seth’s turned out to be terribly jealous I was marrying him and smashed cake in his face and then puked out the front door of the venue because she was so wasted. The woman who ran the B&B where we had our reception was… odd… and turned up in a lot of photos. The man we borrowed an antique car for the day from turned out to be a bit of an asshat.

Seth: Oh god. The day started off raining. And then yeah. People were late. I remember my groomsman giving me grief about “who organized this thing” because it was chaos. But when you add my uncle and his family and my sisters to the mix, all bets are off. It still blows my mind they didn’t turn the heat on in the chapel. And then there was Jeannette. She was drunk when we got to the reception. And then in classic style of my life it’s my wedding day and my reception and I have to leave in the middle of my reception to return the car to this asshole who decided he needed his car back immediately despite telling us to take our time. It’s not like he gave me a Ferrari 430. It was a 1970s diesel Mercedes. It was barely a classic car. But we powered through.

But on the other hand it was a really lovely ceremony in Sage Chapel at Cornell and you couldn’t get a more beautiful spot for a wedding than that. I to this day still adore the Micky Roof rings we got. And we did have family and my friends there – from law school, from my year abroad, and from high school – whose presence I really cherished. And most importantly, WE GOT MARRIED!

About 10 years after our first Remington Museum Gala, Seth and I went back to it again. We traveled up there from Syracuse. While we were there we told the director of the museum and some other folks that we had met there 10 years earlier and word got around the event. We wound up being sort of celebrities at the event for a few more successive years, and our story was even published in a North County newspaper at one point. Sadly, they stopped having the formal ball in December and now have a more laid-back harvest event each September that we haven’t been to. It’s just not quite the same. But we have a lot of beautiful photos and memories of that Remington Museum Gala.

We’ve now been together for 21 years and married for 17. We’ve had a few bumps in the road along the way where we’ve grown apart and had to work hard to get back to the camaraderie and companionship we love. Therapy – a recurring theme in this blog – has helped a few times. We drive each other bananas in a few ways. My ADHD makes Seth nuuuuuts and my depression has at times been quite cumbersome when it’s been active. And Seth sometimes bottles things up and refuses to talk about them and builds up resentments, or he has a “the grass is always greener” approach to commitment that can be problematic. We are a work in progress like every other relationship ever. Covid has taken a toll in that we haven’t had date nights and can’t safely schedule them, so romance has been on the back burner a bit. But that said, we also survived 14 days in quarantine and got along great while spending the time cleaning, which I don’t think most couples could do.

Seth: I think that pretty well sums things up. I think it’s good for people to see things aren’t perfect so they know they’re not alone. People sometimes look at other couples and think everything is perfect so it’s good to pull back the curtain and show some warts too. Shit sucks sometimes and we’re real human beings and we get mad at each other like any other couple.

But I love the man from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else, especially on this crazy foster parenting ride we are on. Seth is an amazing father. He’s still sexy and funny and loving and still has (mostly) good taste in music.

Seth: What’s wrong with my taste in music?

Me: You blew a set of speakers on Celine Dion.

Seth: That’s good music! And your taste in TV shows is extremely questionable.

Me: HA! Ok I agree with you there. I watch some absolute crap… but “Hoarders” inspires me to clean.

Seth: Dr Phil???!

Me: Hahaha! Ok, you’ve really kind of got me there.