Unlivable to Unbelievable- Part One

My husband and I met three years ago and I was a "hot mess" if you will. I had a four year old little boy, was still living with my mother, and six thousand dollars in credit card debt. The only sweet part about any of it was Sean, my best pal in the world. I worked at a bank; 8:30 to 5:00 everyday, full time and when I could I was taking college classes at the local community college. By the time I got off work, picked up my son from daycare, yes, daycare which by the way , broke my heart into pieces every morning when I dropped Sean off for the whole day, i had just enough time to make dinner, clean up, get him bathed, and then bedtime. I was missing out on everything and we really only had the weekends to catch up on everything. My child was growing up before my eyes and I was missing it all. What choice did I have? I was a single mother, living at home, trying to pay off debt and the only thing I did own was a car I couldn't even afford.

Despite all this I managed to meet Greg. I wasn't looking for a relationship at that point in my life and I think I had even told my mom that I was done dating forever and was just going to live with her until I was forty. I know how cliche the whole "love at first sight" thing sounds. But what I felt when I first saw him was way beyond that. My heart jumped and for that few seconds my entire life flashed before my eyes and I couldn't stop looking at him. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I was confused because although I was feeling this life altering emotion, he still hadn't looked at me other than the half second when we were introduced. To fast foreword this a little bit, we fell so deep in love with each other that within a few weeks he moved out of his dorm room on Tech campus and moved in with me....err....well, moved in with me at my mom's house, a month after that we were engaged, and a few months after that we bought our house.

Now, before you get all excited and start thinking what we are all programmed to think, it isn't like that....at all. I am not Cinderella, Greg isn't a prince, and the house we bought (thanks to help from his parents) is not a castle or anything even close to it. This house was a foreclosure that had been on the market for months and not a "hot mess" by any means. It was just a plain old dump. A foreclosure as most of you know is a house that the bank repossesses from the owners and when it's put back on the market it is SOLD AS IS. They mean that too. You buy the house, you buy all the problems that come along with it. This was probably the ugliest, dumpiest, grossest house I have ever seen in my life. The kitchen floor was completely torn apart, maybe to match the broken window and old refrigerator that didn't work. Which, by the way, we didn't find that out until later when we put frozen meat in there only to open the freezer door and see melted meat juice EVERYWHERE. The bathroom, oh the bathroom, where do I begin. Okay, close you eyes and imagine the ugliest, moldiest bathroom you can. Okay, got it? This bathroom was worse, far worse. The linoleum floor was probably five inches higher than it was supposed to be due to water damage, and the mold around the yellow bathtub and tiles was so bad you almost couldn't tell if the tub was even yellow. Between the wall paneling, the mold, the ripped floor, and the fact that I had to hang sheets in the windows for privacy, on move in day I had my first meltdown. It was all hitting me at that moment, I was going to be living in this house, a house I had to try and make into a home for my family.

Day one, immediately the bathroom demolition begins. Everything came out except the toilet, and partially rotting sink. I was forced to walk down our crooked and uneven basement stairs and use the shower in the basement for what seemed like the longest nine months of my life. Thanks to my dad and step-mom's generous house warming gift, we now had a working fridge in our kitchen. Between trying to fix things around the house, pay off my debt, and pay our mortgage, things were tight. We didn't have cable, or internet, and to save even more money, hot dogs, ramen noodles, mac and cheese, and chicken nuggets became a few of our favorite meals. This was a lifestyle I was not used to, and as awful as it might seem to some, I adapted quickly. The sacrifices were hard, but what I was gaining in return was even better. I had a place I could call my own. All the stuff inside of it, no matter how old, or worn, was ours. We were building a life, no matter how small it might seem to some, it was our life and it was beautiful.