Dear Amelia,
In a few short months, I will have known your father for 10 whole years! Back then I was an ambitious 20 year old college student, visiting your grandparents in Virginia for the summer. Your dad was a 25 year old bartender at a local restaurant where I picked up a job hostessing for the summer. As cheesy as it may sound, the first time I saw him – he took my breath away. I mean, just look at this stud…
He says he noticed me right away, but for whatever reason – we didn’t immediately click. We crossed each other’s paths quite a bit inside and outside of work. It’s pretty typical for restaurant employee’s lives to quickly become intertwined because you work so much and see each other so often. Most nights we would get off work late and head over to the bar across the street and have entirely too much to drink. {Yes, mommy drank while she was underage. No, it wasn’t legal. Yes, I should have made better choices. You’ll do better or you won’t, but either way you’ll learn from your mistakes just like I did.}
Every now and then I would catch your dad in conversation and sometimes I’d be blown away by his insight and intelligence. Other times, I just wanted to ask him to please stop talking. Even after being together for 10 years, I sometimes still feel this way. {I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual! #marriage} I’ve learned over time to accept that men and women and people in general all communicate differently, and we all have different interests and senses of humor and that’s okay. Trust me, being married to someone exactly like yourself would be terribly boring.
As fate would have it, one night, your dad asked to buy me a drink. I looked straight at him and said, “I don’t need you to buy me a drink,” which we still laugh about to this day because in all honesty I kind of did need him to buy me a drink seeing as how I wasn’t even of the legal drinking age to buy my own.
I blame my sass on my grandmother. I learned from her at a very young age that if I wanted something I should just go and get it. My grandmother grew up in Germany and lived there until she met my grandfather, a young army soldier, in a small pub. He was getting beat up by some locals when she stepped in with her brass knuckles to defend him. They were inseparable ever since. This story proves that just like for your father and I, falling in love really can happen when you least expect it.
Although I initially refused your father’s advances that night, we got to talking and ended up sharing our first kiss in a parking garage. There may not have been actual fireworks, but I knew there was something different about this kiss from that very moment. It still gives me butterflies just thinking about it. The past 10 years haven’t been all rainbows and butterflies, but the love we have for each other and our little family keeps growing more and more, and we just can’t wait to add one more tiny set of feet to it this September.
I pray that you will one day find the same kind of love. Don’t ever settle, and try to find a man that is kind to you and others, makes you laugh and is your number one fan, loves his family, works hard, is humble and forgiving, and always tells the truth. When you find that man, marry him. And when the time is right for both of you, start a family of your own and enjoy every minute of it.
I knew that I loved your dad when we got married, but had no idea how much my heart would explode when I saw him become your father.
Love,
Mom
