Best Mistake I Ever Made

So, I Didn't Marry an Axe Murderer..

When Joey left to go back to St. Louis after the weekend, it nearly killed both of us. I was so upset that I drove around the block in the opposite direction because I couldn't bear to watch his car drive away. It was like losing a limb. We had determined over the weekend of bliss that we would get married eventually. We didn't know how or when, and neither of us really expected it to happen as quickly as it did. But five minutes after he pulled onto Rt. 70 to head back to Missouri from Ohio, he called me, sobbing as I was, and said "I can't do this. I have to come back." We determined then and there that he'd be coming back the following Saturday, as soon as he could tie up some loose ends at home.

During the course of the four days we were apart, a lot of big changes happened. I met his mother via a long phone conversation. My daughter talked to Joey several times on the phone. I turned in my notice at work because I knew I had to move to be with Joey, and the commute would be too far. I began packing up our belongings, and gathered up whatever money I could find in my accounts and lying around the house. I withdrew my daughter from school and used the internet to find an apartment for me, Joey, and my daughter in a town within driving distance of all of my relatives. And, other than a few select friends online and Joey's family, I told no one of our semi-eloping plan. Partly because I knew everyone around me - my family, and friends - would try to stop me from making what they perceived as a huge mistake. Everyone in the chatroom who knew about it told me I was crazy. But I didn't care.

On February 4, just four days after we had spent only a weekend together, Joey's parents and three of his siblings and his dog Mick came with him back to Ohio. He brought only a duffel bag of clothes, his guitar, and his CDs with him. We had lunch with his family in a noisy McDonalds, and then they said their goodbyes and left their son here in the hands of his chatroom fiancée. By that evening, Joey and I had paid the deposit on an adorable little apartment in a tiny, quiet little town called Leesburg, Ohio. We made a few nightly journeys back to my old house an hour away, stuffing my little Corolla full of as many of my things as we could, particularly essentials like dishes and clothes and bedding and my daughter's toys and books.

Just over a month later, on March 10, we were married in a tiny courthouse by a nice judge who wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and read our ceremony off of an old faded Xerox copy in front of my dad and sister, and Joey's parents and five siblings, who acted as onlookers and witnesses to the occasion. Having both left our jobs, we had no money for rings, but Joey's parents gave us some they had. And, today, as I'm writing this, we've been married just over four months - surviving all sorts of family and financial traumas and changes along the way.