Growing old together...thoughts about my wedding twenty years later... Part 1

21 years ago I fell in love with my opposite...That's what they say isn't it "Opposites attract"...And 20 years ago we planned and had a whirlwind wedding...One of our good friends took our wedding photo's and I'm forever grateful for that gift, I have a beautiful album that I look at every August.  This is me on my wedding day.  I recently showed a friend some photos and she exclaimed.."you are like a princess...You look like Cinderella.."  If I could have found a small Cinderella figurine for my wedding cake that is what would have been on my cake.  That is what I wanted to look like, so twenty years later to have someone still see that is wonderful.

As I think back I realize that I didn't really understand how opposite my husband and I were, young love has a way of making everything seem perfect. As life goes on those differences have a way of either pulling you apart or pulling you closer.  I think we have been lucky because we have found how to live together and stay true to ourselves and enjoy our differences.  I'm quiet, I need a lot of solitude, I don't try to make any thing in life be perfect.  My husband is loud, he is the life of the party, he wants everything to be perfect.  I often look at him and think I could never live in that type of brain.  I could live with very little material items and my husband attaches memories to every item he has.  He collects things and I throw things out.  We even say words differently.  To the point that I stopped saying certain words so that I would not be corrected.  I like thick milkshakes he wants them thin...why would anyone want Ice cream in a cup...

I have a need to be places 15 minutes early and my husband doesn't feel the need to leave until you are supposed to be somewhere...We typically get places just about on time, I learned to just say we need to be someplace a half hour earlier than we really needed to be there.  My husband will talk and say whatever comes to his mind without thinking, and I think about what I'm going to say before I say anything. My husband has learned over the years how not to say things that will cause me stress, and I have learned to be more social. It is not easy being married to your opposite.  We are also not close in age.  We grew up in totally different time periods, and I worked for everything I had, while most of what he had was given to him.  He would talk of his summers at the beach as if everyone had that, and how after this summer of fun he then got a special weekend treat before school started.  And I would think of working all summer and the special treat was using my money to buy school clothing.  I talk budget, saving, and being frugal, and he is eating, and buying as if there are no worries...I will not lie to you finding our middle ground is not always easy.  Good friends have looked at us and asked "how did you ever meet and end up married...

Meeting and getting married that is the easy part of life...Learning to live with someone and love them for who they are and not try to change them, but allowing them to be their true self that is the hard part of life and marriage... But in our 20 years of marriage we have found ways to stay close, and yet be ourselves... And we have done what our wedding song talked of...We grew old together...Not that we are really old yet...but we are 20 years older....We still have to work everyday to grow in love together, to keep connected, and we laugh often about how different we are from each other....

One thing I have done over the years is find songs that fit our life and our story, as I share our stories and our wedding photo's this month I'll share my favorite songs too.
Our wedding song was "Grow Old Along With Me"  sung by Mary Chapin Carpenter.
A new song that I find I love that fits our life is "Lucky"...I feel lucky to be in love with my best friend.
G.G.

How we met and my conversion story....

On August 24th my husband and I will have been married 20 years. I'm not sure how 20 years went by so fast, our children are both almost grown up, and we have a lot of grey in our hair.  Every year in August I get our wedding album out and look at our wedding photos.  I thought I'd share the photos and the stories this year.  I imagine that someday one of my children, or grandchildren, or great grandchildren might find this crazy blog site of mine and read about the things I've done.

This photo was taken on my Baptism day.  I Joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in September of 1995.  I was looking for God, and praying for the right church to join.  At the time I was living in a small apartment in Plainfield New Jersey.  My brother and his wife had a little daughter who was very sick in Vermont.  I had started to pray for her to get better.  I hadn't really prayed to God in years.  But with the thought that this beautiful little girl could die, I knew I had to at least pray for her to get better.  Then the thought came to me that praying wasn't enough, that I needed to also go to church.  I lived across the street from a Catholic church, and my drive to work was one that had a different church building on every street corner.  I was quiet and shy and really wanted to attend a church, but I wanted  to go with someone.  So I then began to pray for a friend to go to church with.

My Husband was a customer of the bank that I worked for.  He would come in and talk about his ideas about life and sit and talk to me about the beach.  When we first met I had been dating someone else, and then when he came in a few weeks later I told him that I was now single and he could ask me out on a date.  He asked me out for that night to go to a party and I said no.  I had just left a relationship with someone who was only interested in parties and drinking and I just didn't want that in my life anymore.  I wanted the date to the beach with lemonade that he had talked about.  Eventually we did end up going out on a first date.   We sat on a park bench and talked about ourselves, and we talked so much that my husband got hungry and decided even though he wasn't going to spend any money on me that we would go out to eat.  He said to me that night "you are like a pot of gold, but I'll find the tarnish"  He was never going to get married, and was sure I had issues and once he found them it would be his reason for not dating me.  I did get my beach date which was wonderful.  And then my husband asked me to go to church with him.  He told me he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  I didn't realize it at the time, but he had just joined this church.  I thought he had always been a member of this church.  He told me that church was 3 hours long.  I agreed to go, but thought I would die being in church for 3 hours.  Yet this was what I had been praying for a friend to go to church with.
That Sunday  morning in late August we went to church together was the first time we went to church together as a couple and we never stopped going.  I loved the church, the feeling I felt there, and knew I had found what I was praying for.  I had found a good friend and God.  I met with the church missionaries and was baptized into the church in early September of 1995.
My husband and I  continued to date and he continued to tell me he would never get married.  I was OK with that because I had my own plans.  He had car projects and things that he wanted to do in his life, and I was planning to move back to Vermont.  While I liked New Jersey, and going to the beach with this nice Guy, and he was cute and fun I was always planning to move back to Vermont.  I didn't tell him this.  I just said that I was fine with him never wanting to get married.  I told him that I was OK with just being close friends, and that I too was not ready for marriage.  And then in April he came home from his trip to the Washington D.C. Temple and asked me to marry him.  I laughed at him.  I thought it was a joke, as we had both said we were not going to get married.  And yet he was serious and said he wanted to marry me.  What had changed this man?  The man who had told others " he would not get married even if the hand of God pointed down from the sky and said Bowlby you get married or else.."   Well I guess God told him in the Temple that day that he better marry me.  What is funny is I was almost to the end of my apartment lease, and was planing to move back to Vermont that August. After much confusion and disbelief I finally said I would marry him.
I think that we shocked a lot of people.  His best friend came to my work and said to me " I thought you said you didn't want to get married.  What are you doing?"  Here we were two people who didn't think we wanted to get married setting up a wedding.. So he proposed in April and we were married in August.  One year after we had met.   We were the first convert couple in our ward to go from Baptism to sealing in the Temple... I wouldn't change any of it.  I like to connect songs with our life and I recently found a cute song that goes with our meeting.
I Do..by Colie Cailat
How did you meet your spouse and do you have a conversion story?
G.G.

Missing our Manasquan Beach days....

Summer makes me miss our beach days...When the kids were little and I was a stay at home mom every weekend we went to Manasquan beach.  We would drive down around 3pm and stay till about 10pm... It was my husbands job to watch the kids and I got to sit with my feet in the sand...or walk and collect sea shells..

Our kids loved the beach...At first they just loved to play in the sand, and get their toes wet..

As they got older they learned to swim, and ride the waves...We always had dinner at the beach, either Carlson's "Cheese burgers and fries"  or GEE GEE's Pizza...

This was our summer, week days at the pool and weekends at the beach...you went down for a few hours and felt as if you had been gone for days.  We haven't found that favorite spot here in Utah, that place where when you go you feel relaxed and time seems to go slower.  I hope at some point we find that, as life just seems to fly by here and we never really feel like there is time to rest.

I love looking at all our old photos...We had some wonderful summers...Hope we get to go back in a year or two...
Do you have a favorite place to go in the summer where time just goes slower and life is just perfect for a few hours?
G.G.