In the Beginning

My wife and I met in highshcool. It’s odd having an event that dominoed from me as a teenager, reaching forwards twenty years and having effects on my three and a half decade old self; but that’s just how reality works. My own temporal dominoes are infinitesimal when compared to the trilobite I dug up on a field trip a few years before what I’m referencing here. A couple decades is nothing.

I was coming off of a breakup that, to an adult would probably seem like nothing. To my fifteen year old self, though, it felt like the world was ending. My now-wife was sitting near me in a vocation class I’d just started and decided I was too drab for her sphere of influence. A week later, we were skipping down the hallway, singing “We’re off to See the Wizard” with arms interlocked and not a care in the world. The turned heads in that hallway are an insertion of my mind. I never looked for them.

She’s seen real hardship, one of which is attested to by the foot-long scar stretching from her back to her stomach where the doctors opened her six-year-old self up and broke apart her ribs so that they could get to her heart and rebuild her aorta. Many of her other hardships come from growing up poor in Mississippi, a state that still refuses federal help for entirely political reasons. Others are associated with her chromosomes.

Turners syndrome is a condition that happens when one of the two X sex chromosomes in a female is either broken or entirely missing. In her case, it was a complete deletion. She was told over and over growing up that she would never have children, so we knew what we were getting into when we started out, but putting that decision on the back of a 19 year old child isn’t what I’d consider responsible.

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