Jenna’s Blog

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This is my own improbable love story - how I met and eventually married my soul mate.  Enjoy!

In the summer of 1975. my parents decided that the family would spend the summer in Maine.

That might sound wonderful as an adult, but as a 15 year-old in southern California near the beach, it sounded like social suicide and I was crazed with rebellious thoughts as only a 15 year old can be!

This trip meant giving up 3 months of days at the beach with my friends, for a tiny 2 room camp on a small lake within sight of Mt Washington - with no hot water, crank phones (it was the last town in America to give them up) and bugs - lots of bugs!

The good news was that my first cousin Nancy, was one year younger and lived in a nearby town. She and another friend Betsey were old friends from when my family lived outside of Boston. It had been 5 years since I had seen them but we were quickly caught up to speed, and what I hadn’t figured in my early tantrums, was that being from California made me instantly cool to the country teen-agers of that era, and the social suicide was magically transformed into my own Cinderella story.

Little did I know the first time I laid eyes on Scott, that he would be the love of my life - in fact he was introduced to me as my friend Betsey’s “boyfriend”. I know for some people, it is love at first sight, and I believe that can happen for some, but for me true love began with a long string of jokes.

You see, I have always been an introvert, and other than a small group of close friends, I tended to be shy around boys. In spite of that I was fairly adept at flirting due the formative years in California (yes, its all true what they say) and that summer I was having the time of my life flirting with what seemed to me to be a horde of interested boys.

Well, little did I know that Scott had indeed fallen in love at first sight - with me! And at the very same time, my friend Betsey was very suddenly plucked from our summer fun due to a family crisis which threw Scott and me together every day for a solid week as we walked from the lake to Betsey’s house to see if we could spring her.

During that week, Scott made me laugh again and again about everything and nothing. In no time at all I would smile just to see him come, and without thought or plan (on my part, 16 year old buys think very differently) we started spending more and more time alone.

Looking back at that summer, I can’t believe that our total time together was barely 4 weeks. In the summers that followed it was even less but we always managed to connect for long enough to fall in love all over again.

Our final summer in Maine, after high-school graduation, we even talked about getting married some day, but 3000 miles might as well be a galaxy when contemplating travel as a starving college student, and Scott had never been the best at writing letters. (Remember there was no aol in 1979!)

So, to skip through the next painful chapter as quickly as possible, I foolishly dropped out of UCI (University of California, Irvine) to marry a man 10 years my senior (after a 6 month courtship), and moved to the island of Hawaii where I gave birth to two fabulous kids, Remy and Chase. Needless to say, I broke Scott’s heart and suffered deeply for the error in judgment.

Meanwhile, I heard from Betsey (who heard from her husband’s best friend) that Scott had transferred from Bates College to ACU in Abilene, Texas and married a Texan girl in his senior year.

Several years later, during a business trip to Dallas, I tracked him down and called him out of the blue. Imagine my surprise when he agreed to pick me up and take me home to meet his new family! It had been four years since I had heard his voice, and I must confess that my heart melted more than a little bit.

When I actually faced him again in the hotel lobby, my heart was hammering so loud I could barely hear his greeting, although I am proud to say that my nervousness didn’t show. By the time I met his wife and two-year old daughter, Taylor (the same age as my son Chase) I had reagined my calm and enjoyed a nice dinner and an evening at church - yes, church! I won’t tell you what I was thinking during the service, but I’m glad God didn’t strike me dead!

All joking aside, Scott and I were both raised in very religious families and we were raised to believe in the sanctity of marraige, which is why he never kissed me that night after bringing me back to the hotel. We hugged each other good-night without ever uttering the words of love that were dancing around our heads, in fact, I didn’t know of his romantic (or sinful depending on your perspective) thoughts until many, many years later.

As I walked back to my room alone, all I could think of is, “I married the wrong man!” I tried to hide my desperate thoughts from my room-mate, another religious friend and colleague who would never have understood.

And what made matters so much harder was the obvious unhappiness in his marriage as well as mine. We were committed to the wrong people, and we had little people counting on us!

Well, my marriage collapsed within a year and I hurried back east to start a new life as close to Maine as I could get.

During the following eight years I saw Scott only one other time, and that was for luch during a banking conference in Manchester New Hampshire. We spent the entire lunch talking about the terrible unhappiness in his marriage and the super-human efforts he was making to keep things afloat. I struggled to say the “right” things even though I could easily imagine how happy I would make him.

I dated other men during those long years as a single Mom, and somehow Scott was always the standard. I kept an old picture of us in my journal and took it out occassionally to dream about those carefree summer days. Why didn’t I appreciate what was right in front of me? Why did I break his heart? Will I ever find love like that again?

Scott suffered even worse, trapped in a marriage devoid of love or support, he desperately craved love and affection. The only thing that kept him sane was his relationship with his four daughters. A better father has never existed. Scott fought to keep his family together in a self-less effort to provide them with a stable family environment. But of course it takes two people to make a marriage work, and eventually Scott had to concede defeat.

At the time, I knew he and his wife had separated several times, in fact we had tried to stay in touch with occassional calls (on birthdays or just to say Hi) so when he called me in January of 1994, I was delighted to hear his voice but didn’t have a clue how momentous that day was to become.

It was a Saturday, and I was home for a change with time to talk. After our initial exchange of pleasantries Scott dropped his bombshell. “We have filed for a divorce.” he announced with a combination of sorrow and relief. As I questioned hima and tried to encourage him, my mind was racing. But as fast as I tried to imagine us together, my rational mind would explain all the reasons we couldn’t be. He lived in Texas again and I knew he would never leave his daughters, and I had built up a business from scratch that I was in the process of negotiating a big sale. Part of the deal was a 2 year management contract and a seat on the Board of Directors. Besides, my children were happy in school and I couldn’t conceive of living in Texas.

Our conversation continued for over an hour and just before we said good-bye he suggested casually that we should get together sometime.

Now that can mean many things but as I instantly agreed, we were suddenly planning a trip to Peurto Rico for a long week-end at Easter when we both would be child-less.

What followed was a whirlwind romance consisting of almost nightly phone calls in which we poured our hearts out to each other. I remembered how well we communicated when we were young, but this gave us a chance as adults to delve into a deeper level of sharing given our disastrous marriages and the suffering which developed maturity and compassion.

So when I tell you that I came home from Puerto Rico engaged, you will not be surprised. But when I tell you I have been married happily to Scott for 15 years next June you will certainly share the amazement that we continually feel - to overcome such amazing odds: the difficulties with ex-spouses, combined families, financial ups and downs, and now (as if we haven’t been through enough) through the horrors of neurological Lyme disease.

I hope that our love story can encourage you that it can happen to you too.