By the Thread of Grace

Everyone asks how Mark and I got back together so I thought I would post the story once and for all for all to read at their leisure.

The story of what happened between us in junior high and high school is a book in itself. Chapters of it may appear here from time to time but I won't try to recount it all here. I really would like to write our whole history and love story up as a book someday. Everyone loves a good love story. It's especially amazing to get to live it! And it's particularly difficult to try to capture all the complexity and meaning with mere words. But I'll give it my best try!


The briefest summary of our past is this:

We first laid eyes on each other in the 7th grade. My mother had remarried and we moved from Tulsa to her hometown -- Enid, Oklahoma. (Coincidentally, she married the boy she had her first date with when they were 13. They re-met at their 20th high school reunion. In my life there has always been something about coming full circle.)

The first sighting was probably sometime shortly after November 4, 1978, my first day at Waller Junior High. I passed him in the breezeway near the cafeteria. He still remembers what I was wearing (Sassoon jeans!). He says it was love at first sight. I remember my awareness of him gradually coming into focus over the course of that year and the next.

In the 8th grade, we found ourselves in Mrs. Keahlier's English class together. He sat two seats behind me. He would wad up paper to put in the trash can at the front of the room so he could walk by me. I would go to the pencil sharpener at the back of the room so I could walk past him. We passed most of the eighth grade in highly-aware silence. We may have talked once on the last day of class over yearbooks but I'm not sure.

In the 9th grade we met for real one night at a party (this too is a chapter for another day!). We both agree we fell in love that night. That was January 31, 1981. We dated off an on from then until the beginning of our second semester at different colleges.

It ended badly with misunderstandings on both sides (also another chapter). We saw each other a couple more times in college (more chapters here too!) but could never get past all the hurt.

Eventually, we both went on with our lives and eventually married and had children and jobs and all that stuff that makes up life.

Over the years I heard only a few of the barest facts about his life.

Years and decades went by before fate brought us back together.

I was 39, going through a long divorce and, understandably, trying to find myself again. I lived immersed in extensive soul-searching, reevaluating and pondering the big questions about my life.

The previous year I has started taking quarterly "runaway mommy weekends". I never left my children overnight or for more than 6 or 8 hours at a time during the first 10 1/2 years of my parenting. I had been wife and mother and all the many job titles that go along with that. After all that, I really needed to figure out how to be just myself again. During those years of my marriage and early parenting, I had lost myself somewhere between the laundry and the dishes.

The first runaway mommy weekend was with two girlfriends. We talked for 26 out of 34hours we were away. The next runaway mommy weekend I was to go on alone. The only place I felt comfortable going alone was Enid, Oklahoma. In Enid I knew what was what and who was who and there were people to visit if I wanted company. Enid was home. Or at least it had been long ago, before Mother and Grandmother and Papa were in the cemetery, before I had children, before lots of things changed.

The first time I drove to Enid for a weekend alone, I had the strongest feeling that I was being led somewhere. I didn't know where or why but I knew my life was being taken in a new direction. I felt somehow led by the hand of God or fate or destiny or something larger than myself. I felt deeply that trusting the process was imperative so I decided to move forward in faith and see what would unfold. One thing I did know what that I was being taken home, back to the source. I had a strong desire to reconcile things from my past that made it necessary to return to square one and start from the beginning.

I hadn't seen Mark in 18 years. He hadn't really been in my life in about 20. Over the years I had Googled him periodically but I could never find him. I found people FOR A LIVING (as an adoption search consultant) but I could never find him. I figured he was probably in the Oklahoma City area. But he remained elusive.

Since the summer before, when Mark hadn't come to our 20th high school reunion (or the 10th either!), doors had started to open for me about Mark's location. Gradually, doors began to open for me until it seemed like every time I came to an impasse the lock sprang open and the door openned in front of me. It had been so hard for so long and now it seemed to be getting so easy.

During the summer of the 20th reunion I found an address for Mark in Cherokee, Oklahoma. I went there but they had moved on. A "For Sale" sign in the yard gave me his wife's phone number which turned out to be at a house in Enid a block from the house my mother grew up in. So I thought I knew where he and his family lived but I could never work up the nerve to call him. What if his wife answered? I didn't want to disrupt anything. I just wanted to know what had happened to him and to discern some final truths about our relationship.

Mark was always "The One" to me -- since that night at the party in 8th grade. He was my first love and my prom date and jusst simply "The One". He was the one I always compared men and love and relationships to. I looked for him in every guy I dated. I never found anyone like him. And I never felt that way again.

So, as I was getting divorced and re-evaluating my ability to trust myself and to judge love, it all kept going back to Mark. Had he really loved me at all? Had he loved me in the same deep, spiritual way that I had loved him? Or had it all just been teenage hormones and puppy love and my own self-delusion. I needed to know. I needed to know if I could trust my gut and my instincts or if I was silly and gullible and self-deceiving.

Mark had two other relationships in the five years we dated on and off. I always took him back. I always dumped whoever I was dating to be with Mark again. But I had come to be ashamed of myself for having been so pitiful and pathetic. And I had gradually come to believe that he had just used me back them. I loved him and always took him back and gave him some pretty good adoration. What teenage boy wouldn't take advantage of a situation like that.

Slowly, year by year, I grew angrier and angrier. I wanted to put my hands around his neck and say to him, "Ok, so tell me how much of the time did you really like me and how much of the time did you use me and go ahead and tell me the truth because it couldn't be as bad as what I think". I just needed to know what the truth was. One way or the other. What was true?

I found myself in Enid on another runaway mommy weekend. I drove by the address I had for his wife several times a day -- just for curiosity. And then there he was in front of her house on a Thursday afternoon.

I parked down the street in front of my mother's childhood home and watched. His car was in the driveway and he was in the yard with his two boys and his wife. My heart fell when I saw that she was about 7 months pregnant -- now I really couldn't call him because his wife was pregnant and I couldn't be disruptive in his world.

I watched Mark go to his car and look in the car and in the trunk several times. In between, she would go into the house and come back out and seemed to be chewing him out. The boys went in and out of the house several times. I'm not sure they ever found what they were looking for.

Then Mark and the boys got into the car and backed out of the driveway. I followed as they drove to his parents house, got out, and went into the house. A couple of years earlier I had Googled up an anniversary announcement for his parents and a wedding announcement for his neice. From this I learned that, not only were his parents still living, but they still lived in the same house they'd lived in when we were in jr. high and high school. And I still had the phone number. Hmmm...

Later in the day, his car was at neither house. Over the course of the weekend, I continued my surveillance of both houses and didn't see his car again. I started to think about what I had seen and suddenly it dawned on me: over the course of 15 or 20 minutes, Mark and Traci and the boys had all had been looking for some missing item and everyone had gone into the house EXCEPT Mark. During all that time, he never went into the house. And then the suspicion hit me: That was a visitation transfer. He didn't live there. They were divorced.

On Sunday morning, for some reason unknown to me, I woke up feeling strong. This surprised me. I planned to leave town at 2 that afternoon.

Late on Sunday morning Mark's car was back at his parents' house. I somehow worked up the nerve to call him. It was time. I drove to the pay phone outside the old Safeway and dialed that old familier number. The voice that answered was that of his younger brother, Pat. Pat had always answered the phone back then when I used to call Mark regularly! And he still did.

I started my rehearsed speech: "Hi! I was looking for Mark..." before I could say "...and I was hoping you could tell me how to reach him..." Pat said, "just a minute!" I hadn't expected to actually TALK to Mark on this call -- just get his phone number and call him later after I had had time to plan what to say.

A mere 15 seconds later Mark was on the phone, saying hello with curiosity in his voice. Luckily, something had come to me to say: "Hi Mark! This is a voice from your past..." He sputtered for a second with fragments of "who" and "what" before I let him off the hook and said, "This is Anne Sturdivant." My old name sounded strange and unfamiliar to me after 15 years of marriage and another name but it was also still some old core version of me.

"How ARE you?", he asked with pleased enthusiasm. "Well," I answered, "it's been 18 years and I haven't heard more than a few words about you in 18 years and I just couldn't stand the curiosity anymore. How are YOU?"

Very quickly the conversation turned into "I'll be there in ten minutes." I hadn't expected him to even want to talk to me, let alone want to see me, let alone want to see me IN TEN MINUTES!

I waited inside Hastings bookstore, out of the cold, where he'd told me to go until he could meet me. I found myself hoping that he wouldn't be fat or bald or gray (forgetting that I'd just seen him from a distance three days before and he was none of those things).

I stood back from the door, about halfway down the aisle where I had a clear view of the door. I tried to look at books while making sure to watch every person who approached the door. It must have been more like 20 minutes because the butterflies and breathlessness had started to subside and I had calmed down just enough to actually be able to read words. I was halfway through the three paragraphs on the back of the first book I had actually focused on since I'd been standing there when I looked up to see him 10 feet inside the door and bounding toward me! He had snuck in during the first lapse in my vigilance! He looked just like he'd always looked: tall and well-built and gorgeous! I breathed a sign of relief that he wasn't all the things I'd been afraid he might be.

He saw me and our eyes met. I fumbled to put the book I was holding back on the shelf and walked toward him.

"Look at you! All grown up!" I said. He said, "Come here you!" We closed the last of the ground between us. I walked into outstretched arms and before I knew it I was in an embrace that felt wonderfully familiar.

"The years have been very kind to you," he told me, "Let's go get some coffee!" Before I knew it, we were out the door and into his car and on our way to DaVinci's, the local gourmet coffee house.

There we began the long process of catching up on each other's lives. There were 20 years missing -- it was a big job.
Not long after we settled into two armchairs in the front window of DaVinci's, before I could put my hands around his neck and roll out my little speech, he said, "I have two regrets: I regret that I didn't treat you better and I regret that I didn't marry you!" I was stunned! He had said the word "marry" about ME! The whole world changed in that instant. I wouldn't realized the full implication of it all until it unfurled over the next few months but it was clear, on some level, very soon afterward that we were going to give it another try. Neither of us wanted to let the other out of our life ever again.

We talked for four hours before I reluctantly left town to drive home to my kids and my world that would never be the same again. We talked on the phone for the last two of the four hours of my drive. He ended our conversation by saying, "I'll call you in a couple of days."

I wasn't sure I believed him. Two days came and went. Then three. Then four. I gave up after a week. On the ninth morning I found a just-missed call on my phone. It was Mark. He really HAD called. It all felt just like high school again -- all those old butterflies, all the same hopes and dreams. I tried to bat them down but they were undeniable.

It was almost a year and a half before my long-contemplated divorce finally went through. Mark supported me through that time, sharing with me the benefit of his experience with his divorce (and, by the way, his ex-wife's baby wasn't his). Gradually, we got closer and closer. When the divorce was final we decided to give it another try. No one was more surprised that I was that looking him up ended up with us being back in a relationship together. I still can't grasp that I'm with that guy from the prom!

And the rest is wedding photos! Ok, so that's a VAST understatement! But the next chapter is a story for another day!