Montana Momoirs

A few months after my husband, Brent, and I first met, we took a little day trip. We drove from our homes in New Orleans through the marshlands of southern Louisiana to the Gulf Coast, where we had a picnic and swam in the warm waters, getting to know one another better and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.

As we splashed around, Brent, being a man, thought it would be funny to dunk me under the water. When I came up for air, I saw a rather enormous dorsal fin not too far from us.

“Shark!” I yelled. Brent must have thought that my cry was a lame attempt to get him to stop dunking me because he just dunked me under again. When I came up this time, there was no question – in fact, there were three very large dorsal fins swimming ever closer to us.

“Shark!” I yelled again.

Then, and this is an action of which I am not particularly proud, I pushed Brent as hard as I could toward the sharks and ran to the shore, without so much as glancing over my shoulder to see if he had become food for fish.

As you might imagine, this moment – when I purposefully tried to feed Brent to the sharks to save my own hide – has been difficult for me to live down. I can’t tell you why I did it. I don’t remember having any conscious thoughts, like, “We’ve only been dating six months and I can always find someone else.” It was pure instinct to save myself.

For a lesser man, or perhaps a smarter one, this could have been a defining moment in our relationship. After all, if your girlfriend’s first instinct is to feed you to the sharks, will she really be there in sickness and in health, for better and for worse?

Luckily for me, Brent decided to ride it out. We got married several years after the shark feeding frenzy incident, as it has come to be known, and today we celebrate another wedding anniversary.

The day after I met Brent, I grandly announced to a friend of mine, “That is the man I am going to marry.” I’d known Brent less than twelve hours. I don’t know what it was, except pure instinct, which made me so sure that he was the one. It wasn’t as if the second that I met him, fireworks went off and brass bands started playing.

But there was something. I suppose it was a level of comfortableness, like something that fits just right, and that sense that it is entirely possible we would never run out of things to say to each other. And for the years we knew one another before we had kids, we did a lot of talking, covering a lot of ground, on everything from what our day was like to our hopes and dreams to political observations.

Of course then we had Mike, and a few years later, Peter arrived on the scene. Looking back at the afternoon that Brent drove approximately five miles per hour home from the hospital anxiously looking over his shoulder at our new sleeping bundle in the backseat, I don’t think we ever could have predicted how completely our relationship would be altered by our children.

It seems now that we talk less in spite of the fact that we both probably utter more words throughout the course of a day than we did in those early years of knowing one another. And it also seems that when we talk, we often talk about the kids – the issues and challenges facing them since that is what we now face together as a family, our hopes and dreams for them since that affects what Brent and I do with our lives. And these days, our best talks are often in hushed tones as we barrel towards home down Montana’s highways and byways with the boys sound asleep in the backseat.

But even with all of that, we’re better, stronger, as a couple than we were when it was just the two of us. Parenting is challenging. In fact, parenting is hard. It has forced us to grow individually and together. You come into parenthood with your own ideas and belief systems and history and you have no other option but to work together, through the joys and the challenges, to make everything as good as it can be for every single person, big and small, who is involved.

After all of these years together, I still feel thankful to have Brent in my life, that he is the person I come home to at the end of the day, that he is the person with whom I share my hopes, dreams, fears, and perhaps best of all, our beautiful boys. I am thankful I trusted my gut and knew that I would marry him that first night we met one another so many years ago. I am thankful that he was able to forgive me for trying to save my own life by pushing him as hard as I could towards imminent danger. And I am especially thankful that he was able to outrun those sharks so that we could enjoy one another for so much longer.