Step by Step Parenting

This August 29th will mark four years since I’ve met my husband! In those four years, we’ve fallen in love, gotten engaged and married, blended our families, moved several times, adopted a puppy, and welcomed twins into our family. It’s been busy, to say the least!

I have written previously about how we fell in love, how we got engaged, and our wedding day. This time, however, I’m going to write in more detail about everything that happened between us meeting and our first date.

In the early summer of 2022, I decided that I wanted to go back to work. I had quit my job back in July 2020, just a few weeks before I gave birth to my first daughter. I nannied for a few months in early 2022, but eventually realized that I although I loved the family I was working with, and I appreciated being able to bring my toddler with me, that I instead preferred the structure of my old job, and I wanted a job that didn’t require me to bring my kid along for the ride. In other words, I wanted just a little bit more independence. My then-husband wasn’t entirely on board at first, but was willing to try and make something work so long as it didn’t affect his own work schedule.

That brings me to the first wrinkle in this story: yes, I was married to someone else when I met my current husband.

And the second wrinkle? So was he. But I’ll circle back to that in a bit.

My then-husband did not want to alter his work schedule in order to accommodate any new job I would find, so that narrowed my job search to somewhere that would let me tailor my hours pretty specifically. When he asked who would watch our daughter so that I could work, I reminded him that we didn’t ask that question when it came to his job — it was just assumed that I would watch her. He didn’t seem thrilled about this reasoning, but he couldn’t argue with it, either.

Since I had recently gotten back into running, and was even training for an ultramarathon, I had subscribed to receive emails from a local running store. At some point in the spring of 2022, I received an email from the store saying that they were hiring, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to finally get a job. I was excited at the prospect of working with other runners, both customers and co-workers, and I would be able to set my availability as needed.

I applied, and within a few weeks, I heard back. I was in Mexico with my daughter and her dad at the time, and I still remember how excited I was when I received the email! They told me that they wanted to hire me, but were also wanting to onboard several new hires at the same time. As such, they wanted me to start at the end of August. It was early July, so I was a little bummed at the idea of having to wait so long to start, but was mainly just excited to have landed the job!

Little did I know that just ten minutes away from where I lived, someone I had never met before had received the exact same email. Kevin had been working at a car dealership for several years, but as he was also an avid runner, he had applied to work at the running store upon receiving the email that they were hiring. Same as me, he was told that his onboarding process would begin at the end of August.

We both marked August 29th, 2022 as “first day of work” in our calendars, completely unaware that the trajectory of both of our lives was about to be changed forever.

As mentioned earlier, we were both married to other people on the day we met. It should be of no surprise, given what I’ve described above about my own situation, that my marriage was already on the rocks.

We were not on the same page, and hadn’t been in a long time, about where we wanted our life to go. Whether it was a decision about his work, my work, my education, parenting our daughter, or when (or if) to grow our family, we did not agree. It wasn’t malicious or contentious, but it was stagnant. As time went on, the constant quiet disagreements led to us drifting apart, and I often felt like I was having to give up dreams or plans in order to keep the peace. I had communicated over and over that I needed something to change, but nothing I said seemed to make any difference. We had even first discussed divorce in the summer of 2021, over a year beforehand, but nothing came of it.

I was a stay-at-home mom at the time, so naturally I felt like I was not in the best position to leave. Worse than that, I truly was not sure if I would have a better life if I did file for divorce. These fears and reservations kept me rooted in place for a long time. I knew that if a change were to occur, it would have to be set into motion by me, and for a long time, I just wasn’t ready for that. I thought that maybe if I had my own job, my own income, that I would feel more content with my life, but the opposite turned out to be true.

I can’t speak to my husband’s situation at the time with any degree of specificity, because obviously, (1) I’m biased and (2) the only information I have comes from my husband himself. It’s not that I don’t believe him, because of course I do, it just means that I am not the person to explain a situation that I was not a part of. What I will say is that, much like with my situation, my husband’s relationship had been on the decline long before he ever started his new job. In fact, I think both him and his ex would agree that things had been heading downhill for even longer than they had been for me and my ex. Like me, he was also hoping that new job would somehow improve things, that maybe if he was happier with his career, this would translate to being happier at home.

So with this hidden hopes of a better life ahead, we both showed up to our first day of work several minutes early, ready to see where this new job would take us.

Four of us were onboarded at the same time: me, Kevin, and then two others, who I’ll call Mary and Michael.

We were all sitting in the side room of the running store, scattered on the bleachers, waiting for the day to start. It appeared that we were all around the same age, so we had begun to introduce ourselves and get to know each other. We were all runners to some degree — Kevin was a marathoner and Michael was a former track athlete turned track coach — and were all excited to be working at a running store. Kevin and I were the only parents, and we quickly realized that our kids were close in age, with his two kids being four years old and eighteen months, and my daughter being two years old.

We all continued to chit-chat until a store manager came in and training began. Since there were four of us, we were split into pairs for the first week or so of training. Mary was with Michael, and I was paired with Kevin, meaning that for the first week, they would train in the morning, and Kevin and I would train in the afternoon. During that time, Kevin and I slowly realized that being runners and being parents were not the only things we had in common. We both loved to read, we both loved the same types of music and food, and we both had the same sense of humor. It quickly became a running joke that I was mean to him, and we compared our relationship dynamic to that of an older brother and younger sister.

And that’s all that happened those first few months. We joked around when we saw each other at work, but that was it. I don’t even think we exchanged cell phone numbers until the end of the year, months after we met. Admittedly, at some point during those early months, I did realize that I had a tiny crush on Kevin, but it was harmless in the way that I also had a crush on Cillian Murphy. I didn’t entertain the idea of actually doing anything about it, and eventually forgot about it. Instead, my attention during those early months was focused on trying to fix my situation at home.

My new job had brought me a newfound sense of happiness and purpose, as I had hoped it would, but it did not make me more content with my life at home as I had thought it might. Instead, I found myself much happier at work than at home, and I was even more aware of all of the ways in which my marriage was falling apart. As I grew to love work more and more, my desire to finish college was reignited, which led to more disagreements in my marriage.

After months of going back and forth, both in my mind and with my ex-husband, we made the decision to split in November 2022, just a little over two months after I had started my new job. I eventually told my friends at work, and they were nothing but supportive. Despite the heartbreak I was going through, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for the support system I now had, both because of running and because of work. I enrolled in college classes starting in January 2023, and it was my first full-time semester in at least a year. I was working a job I enjoyed, pursuing a college degree again, and surrounded by friends and family who believed in me and wanted me to succeed. I finally felt the happiness that I had been trying to find for years.

Kevin and I continued to become better and better friends during this time. Our workplace had a board in the break room for all of the employees to write out their New Year’s resolutions, and never the one to turn down an opportunity to poke fun at him, I wrote “be nicer to Kevin.” I didn’t sign my name, but he knew who had written it.

Still, my life became incredibly busy during the early months of 2023 as I tried to balance work and school and motherhood and ultramarathon training. At some point during all of this, Kevin and I had started texting each other sporadically to check in with each other, but that was it. We would send messages like, “Hey, you mentioned your kids had the flu, is everyone feeling better?” or “I know you have a race tomorrow, good luck!” We kept each other up-to-date on the happenings of our lives, but our interactions were all surface-level. I did genuinely care about him, though, and would worry about him the way I would any of my close friends.

We started going on the same group runs during this time, too, but we ran different paces and were training for different races, so it didn’t happen often. Kevin was much faster than I, and training for a road race, whereas I was slower and training for a trail race. Despite that, we found ourselves on the same runs from time to time, and it was always fun. After one of the group runs, some people were meeting up to grab drinks. Kevin and I both had to get home to our kids, and couldn’t make it, but promised the others that we would try to stick around next time.

All of this meant that when Kevin texted me on April 19th to see if I wanted to go out for drinks after work on Saturday, I thought nothing of it. I wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t also invited other coworkers until the night before, but once I knew I was the only one he had asked out, I couldn’t help but wonder… was this a date?

Once I realized that it was most likely a date, I started to get nervous in the days and hours beforehand. However, the second Kevin picked me up, I realized that I had nothing to worry about. Kevin was one of my best friends, and had been for almost eight months exactly by the time we went on our first date.

After that first date, it took us a few weeks to figure out. The divorce process where we live takes well over a year, and this definitely complicated things as we were both navigating our individual divorces, which were occurring completely independently from the start of our new relationship. If it were up to me, I think the story would have made more sense if we had met years after each of our divorces were finalized, but sometimes, love and life simply don’t make sense.

While I don’t know why things had to happen the way they did, I do know that everything worked out the way it was supposed to. I love the life we live now, and to change anything about our past would be to risk forfeiting everything that has come into our life since. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

If you like what you read, please press the “like” button! This small gesture means a lot to me, and it helps my writing reach more readers. If you really, really like what you read, consider supporting my writing in one of three ways:

1. Become a paid subscriber over on Substack! For as little as $5/month, you can help keep this busy mom motivated and, more importantly, caffeinated.

2. If you’re not ready to commit to a full subscription, consider a one-time donation through buy me a coffee (should be “buy me a Diet Coke” lol)

3. Shop my Amazon storefront! It is full of all of my favorite baby products, pumping essentials, kids toys and books, law school supplies, and more. If there’s something you need to order from Amazon anyways, consider checking out the storefront to see if I have it. If you purchase from there, I get a small commission.