Bw4K

I met my wife at a Halloween party. It's not an overly romantic story. After years of bouncing in and out of relationships, I finally resigned to "trolling for tail". With unparalleled whitest of white boy dance moves, I would spread my plumage on the dance floor of any given party and draw out my next one-night base interaction. From this position, the risk-to-reward factor was simply in my favor.

When my wife casually strolled into my intricate sex-snare of hypnotizing shoulder pops and hip thrusts, she cut in on another girl who was already dancing with me. She claims it was because she felt like I was a good boy and needed protection from that girl who was just "trolling for tail". From my perspective, I was ten feet tall. I ended up hanging out with future-wife and her friends for the rest of the night. She didn't go home with me.

The next time we met it was because she asked me out on a date. I thought that was baller. We met at an art crawl in downtown Nashville and then made our way to a belly dancing performance hosted by a local Presbyterian church. By the end of the night, we had hit it off. She left her car at the church and I took her back to my apartment on my motorcycle. It was too cold to be on a motorcycle, especially in a dress.

When we made it in, I didn't take her straight to the bedroom. I gave her the cleanest of my bachelor blankets, made her some hot chocolate, and we watched a Muppet movie. I figured I wasn't going to round the bases that night, but I felt fine with that. She stayed over, but we just sat up all night and talked. It wasn't until later in the evening that she became emboldened enough to tell me that she was just recently divorced. Oh, and she also had... Four. Kids.

I'm a slow processor. I spent the next day really confused as to what I should do and how I should feel because I had never really connected with someone on that level before. But also, Four. Kids. I met up with a good friend, the kind that isn't prone to pity or flattery, and he said to me,

"It would probably be unwise to wake up one morning to find that you instantly had more kids than your parents did..."

He paused and thought...

"But if anyone could do it, it would be you."

That was the beginning. We continued to see each other. I made a decision that could have easily been just as bad as any of the relationship decisions that I had made before, and given my track record I don't think people were necessarily wrong to be worried. I was 25 years old. The kids' ages were 7, 6, 4, and 2. I had no resume for this but for a few friends who believed in me and her love, like the peak of Everest, calling me up.