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 caused when one of the two X sex chromosomes in a female is either broken or entirely missing. In her case, it was bad enough that she was told over and over growing up that she would never have children. The pregnancy test said different, at least until the miscarriage. That whole story repeated three times, the third one almost leading to her death in downtown DC. I left Bolling AFB that night and found her with the help of a Blackberry PlayBook and a disregard for traffic laws.

It wasn’t until 2013 that we truly moved on. By then I was given a PCS from Bolling, DC to Nellis AFB, Nevada; a diagonal line from one extreme corner of ConUS to the other. Nothing was the same there; not the climate, not the people, not my squadron. It was under this umbrella that we became foster parents.

She pulled me along this path an an unwilling participant. Without her, my motivations would have always been very different. With her, I found myself sitting in a classroom on MLK street in downtown Las Vegas beneath the sprawling spaghetti bowl that made up the center of the city. It was the part that homeless people were more familiar with and much less so the tourists who actually wanted to see Vegas.

Young Parents

We had no clue what we were doing. Even after the classes, we felt certain of only a few things. One, nobody was in charge and, two, nobody had any clue what was happening.

There’s this undertone of belief that we’re raised with. As children, our parents tend to be the epitome of confidence and knowledge. Even as adults, we morph that image onto the people in positions of power and expect that they know what they’re doing. In every case I’ve ever witnessed, they were (at best) slightly more aware and capable than some random Joe off the street.

There’s a (paywalled) essay in the New York Times that I’ve had the displeasure of working my way through. God forbid I have an addon for my browser that makes the article readable by a lowly pion such as myself. Anyway, it points to older data

Despite the attestations of