Tag: UAM

If you missed Part One, you can find it here!! 🙂

So… we hung out Halloween night and spent a lot of time talking.  This is where I’m unsure what happened next.  I’m not sure if we exchanged numbers at this point or not, but somehow he was invited to my house to watch movies.

• We need to take a break here so I can explain that my house (aka a trailer!) was a place that lots of people gathered to hang out.  I bought the trailer when I transferred to UAM (University of Arkansas at Monticello), and I lived there with different people over the next 3 years.  Carly, my cousin… Sara, a (non-traditional student I randomly met in Priscy’s Video store in Hamburg)… and Stacey (she only lived with me for a little while, but not long).  Sara was called a “non-traditional Student” because she was already in her 20’s and we thought it was hilarious, so we called her that all the time.  Anyway, I’m not even sure who all lived in my house at this time, but I think it was Carly and Sara.  The point was that we always had people over all the time for movies or just to hangout, so I made sure Ron (cute dude) was invited one night not long after Halloween.

Okay… so he comes over to the house and we do the normal flirty things that teenagers who are pretty shy always do.  We held hands on the couch surrounded by tons of other teenagers who were pretending not to notice that we were holding hands! 🙂

After the movie, he hung out a little longer than most of the people.  I walked him outside and he actually TOLD me he was about to kiss me.  He wasn’t the first guy to announce the kissing thing, so maybe it’s not as weird as I think, but he was just so sweet about it, and I think that’s when I fell in love.  I remember thinking how soft his lips were… 🙂  Okay… that’s enough about that, so we’ll jump forward a little… he left and I ran back inside waking everyone up to tell them I had just gotten a kiss!! 🙂

Writing this and thinking about it makes me think that I was more of a normal teenager than I thought I was.  Oh, and I keep saying teenagers, but I was already 20 and he was 21.  It’s okay… I was still acting like a teenager, so it’s okay! 🙂

The next couple of months are a blur… I know that somewhere in there I had about a million moments of fear and suspicion.  I was just the most insecure person in the world.  I kept waiting for the phone call saying that he had found someone else (that happened to me before).  I kept waiting for him to break up with me the whole time.  We spent so much time together and when we weren’t together I was constantly wondering who he was with.  I don’t think he knew that I was worried about this.  I mean, I didn’t call him all the time or stalk him or anything, but I was trapped inside my own head and so scared the other shoe would drop at any moment.

I was starting to feel a little better about our relationship at Christmas time.  I had already met his parents and grandparents (I’ll tell this story another time).  He gave me diamond earrings (I have no idea what I gave him… maybe a book).

Well… I don’t need to spend any more time trying to express the amount of relationship anxiety I had during this time, and really probably throughout the first years of our marriage, but it would be redundant.  I spent a lot of time worrying about things that weren’t even worth worrying about.  I think this might be a theme for the beginning of my adult life.  I’m still working on this, but I’m sooooo much better! 🙂

So… it is spring break 1999… We took a trip with the MBSF to help a church do a vacation bible school.  I was so excited because I just knew the proposal was coming anytime.  We had discussed marriage and we had talked about rings and I just knew it was coming any time.  So I spent the whole week feeling really neglected because he was being a great bible school teacher/counselor and playing in the snow, and I spent the whole week being anxious and waiting to be proposed to.  I was so sad and depressed all the way home because I was so disappointed.  I thought he was just going to break up with me.  Gosh… my now-self wants to tell my then-self to just stop it!  I was so much more dramatic than I ever would’ve thought about myself.   The story is that he wanted to propose during out trip, but the ring wasn’t ready yet, so he didn’t want to propose with no ring.  I spent a lot of time worrying about nothing… (this also is a theme of my adult life).

March ends and it’s Easter Sunday.

• We can pause right here again to say that my grandfather died on Easter Sunday morning before I was born.  He went to church that morning and during the church service, he had a massive heart attack and died right there in church.  Needless to say, Easter Sunday wasn’t ever a great holiday in our house.

Easter Sunday morning.  I had stayed with Ron’s parents.  Any time I stayed there, I slept in his bed and he had to go somewhere else.  Either his brother’s room or the couch.  So anyway, I’m sleeping and he comes in and wakes me up to give me an Easter basket.  I’m pretty sleepy, but I sit up and begin to open the basket and see what’s inside.  The ring box was in the basket and he was already on one knee when I found it in there.  The proposal was awesome and I was so excited!! I couldn’t wait to get married.

He had talked to my parents ahead of time, so they knew it was happening.  When I called my mother she told me that my daddy was so happy that it was done on Easter because now he has a good memory to help with the bad memory.  The proposal could not have been better…

Part Three – WHEN do we get married??

Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!

Amanda