Please find part one here.

In 1999, I was living in Bellingham, having finished college at Western Washington University earning a degree in pretty much nothing helpful, working at coffee shops and day care centers. I was living with my best friend and ex-boyfriend from High School. It was an odd situation from an outsider’s perspective, as I’d call him honey when I walked in the door and he’d kiss my forehead and tuck me in to bed, in my own room where I would sleep alone.

I was furiously seeking God and Truth during this time as well as consuming a great number of scones. GOD THESE SCONES. Oh, they were so buttery delicious and completely free since I was allotted one free meal per day at the shop. They are famous scones, baked in the original shop who also created (and became famous for) THE BREAKFAST COOKIE.

I would run 5 - 6- miles a day praying or singing all while gaining a decent 10 pounds or more. I would pray each morning as the sun rose while I read my bible and I would spend the evenings with my best friend, a man, forbidden to me because of his lack of faith, laughing and playing card games and watching silly old films. It was very much an imbalance of all proportions. Physically I was working my ass off while providing nothing but crap and spiritually I was seeking a God who disapproved of my desire to hump my roommate all the while seeking to find ways to get my roommate to hump me.

I was going nowhere in my career, nowhere in my spiritual journey, and no where with my roommate.

So I boarded a train, one day in February, bound to Portland where I caught a flight and moved to Texas to another small apartment where my dad was staying in the transition of my parents’ house purchase in Houston.

I was talking about this to my husband, the one who shared that little old apartment in Bellingham with me, and he confessed not wanting to put me on that train. He admitted to that pit in his stomach, that grip of longing as I pulled away waving on Amtrak.

I can still picture him standing there and remember myself willing me not to cry.

I did not cry.

In fact, I landed in Houston, got settled in the apartment in Galveston, dug my feet in the sand at the beach and wrote in my journal:

“I did not cry. I did not cry as we pulled in to my new home, I did not cry when I called Bob to tell him I arrived, I did not cry as I unpacked nor when I read before falling asleep exhausted. I did not cry until the next day, waking up, seeing the hazy full sun rise over the swamps here when it hit me like the humidity pulsing in the window: I am here. For good. For now. And I cried. No, I bawled.”

My journal that year and a half I spent in Texas is peppered with the most obvious transition of my life thus far. I regained a love and a relationship with my father, sitting together in the one bedroom apartment we shared, him sleeping on the couch and me getting the only room to my self. We’d stay up late watching X-files eating popcorn. Boys started calling our house and he would give me the message without judging or asking more than I was ready to share. I grew to understand and respect my Aggie Father in ways I hadn’t known since I was 12 and we visited the Aggie Band (which he was a part of) and watched the bonfire and ate cold pizza the morning after sleeping in our family’s minivan.

I remember those times with my dad, just he and I, sitting on the beach in Galveston on the rocks or the sand letting the sun (OH THE SUN!) kiss our skin with the much needed Vitamin D we missed the 10 years spent in Washington previously. We talked religion and politics and I found I enjoyed his company and perspective and his outlook in general.

I found out I was his daughter more than I ever realized before.

It was only a few months after I first arrived that Bob came to visit. We walked along the boardwalk and ate seafood. We laughed at how completely incompatible we were. How I was so churchy and he never could be. How I was a hippie and he was an engineer. How I only lived for love and joy and he needed and wanted a job and a house and a settled life. I was a gypsy. He wanted a home.

I put him on a plane and cried. We talked every night after that the entire year and a half I lived apart from him. He later confessed this was the moment he knew he needed me in his life, how we couldn’t be without each other but we wouldn’t actually know this until after this time was over.

We still had to grow up and grow compatible and grow with our spiritual selves and our professional selves and our physical selves.

We had to grow up.

And while I lived on the small island south of Houston and eventually in a small suburb in South Houston, I found it: Me. I grew up.

But there is still so much to the story…