Luckiest Girl

Our doubts are traitors 

and make us lose the good we oft might win

by fearing to attempt. -William Shakespeare

For updates from Connecticut, please follow my horsemanship blog. I will try to update it regularly, but I am working on a research paper and have a couple hundred hours of practicum and teaching to do in order to get my certification and get home before Thanksgiving. As for this entry, it might be my last until I return home. 

I have been feeling the need to express something. I feel like the luckiest girl.

When you can golf like him, you can wear pink bling!

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Ok...I am fond.

I wouldn't be in Connecticut if it wasn't for the support and encouragement of Travis. When I say I could have spent the rest of my life content with just being content, I mean it. But Travis could not let me be just content anymore. He wanted more for me and made me believe that I should want more for me. A few years ago, I would not have even attempted to be here.

It starts with a jolt of awakening in April of 2011, where I returned from a trip in Arizona to confess to Travis through confused, blubbering tears that my life had changed. I made assumptions of his reaction and feared his rejection would cast doubt on what I had experienced. He listened silently as I explained. His first response was, "I believe you."

Looking back at the reason for my job at the now-defunct Service Merchandise in the mid-1990s, it was that I was meant to meet Travis. Only, at the time, I was disappointed that he had a girlfriend. I (unintentionally) returned a vending machine dollar to him at an inopportune moment for his girlfriend and shortly thereafter we were seeing each other.

Initially, he didn't understand my love of horses. I had to tell him that if he was going to have a problem with me having a horse, then I wasn't the right girl for him. I intended to always have a horse in my life. Always. I couldn't play tennis, wasn't very athletic, and was more the bookish type. So a few months later, he proposed to me on my Arab. It must have been his way of telling me that he was prepared to spend his life with a horsechick.

Anyone who knows Travis knows he has an unabashed sense of humor, relentless sarcasm, and "ludicrous speed" wit. His soft side is revealed when you hear him talk to the cat. He has an unbreakable bond with his mother and brother, likes to stay up late with his nephew playing Call of Duty, and lets his niece play rrrrough with him before bedtime. He has broken more bones than I have, but, thankfully, fewer than Evel Knievel. It's amazing that he survived a broken neck with a partial dislocation. In anatomy class this week, I was reminded that 9 years ago (almost to the day), he lived. If the dislocation at C5 would have been complete, he would have suffocated. Instead, he got back on his dirt bike and met us on the road where we were looking for him. He changed his clothes so the doctors wouldn't cut his gear and walked into Bozeman Deaconess Hospital. Two days later, Dr. Stephen Speth fitted Travis with two titanium rods, 5 screws, some wire, and relocated some hip bone fragments for the fusion. To me, this is a miracle. To him, he is immortal.

After another half decade or so, and another half dozen broken bones, he has taken up golf and has immersed himself in the game, shocking everyone (including those who have been playing since he was in diapers) with his "half swing" that can drive a ball over 300 yards down a fairway. He has won an amateur golf tournament. He has made some connections that have allowed him to play some of the best golf courses in California and Nevada, including exclusive private courses.

Travis has opened my eyes to a living, dynamic love that has grown over the past 18 years. He loves me and believes in me more than I can comprehend. I have reveled in our Yahtzee tournaments, where he has challenged me to find my inner-competitor and even roots for me when I am on a roll. He has surprised me with a horse trailer, a 30th birthday party, origami, a helicopter ride, and affection for our animals. He does the laundry. He maintains my trailer before I leave for a trip, even though he asks me to check it weeks before I leave. He changes the oil and rotates tires, changes air filters on my friends' vehicles, repairs busted pipes, and has led the way in remodeling homes in order to provide me with my dream of having a ranch house. Horse property wasn't his dream, so he lives in my dream instead. He tolerates my clutter, annual horsemanship clinic visitors, and lets me dress him for Halloween. He entertains my interest in the enneagram (he's an 8, I'm a 9) and eats my vegetarian dinners without complaining. Usually when he's upset with me, it's because of the problems I inflict on myself.

Over the years, what Travis didn't seem to understand is that no matter how much he tried to push me to look at myself in the mirror, I just couldn't see the same person he saw. I have always seen the flawed human that I am, focusing on those flaws, and vicious self-criticism told me that I was nobody special. I believed the silent voice of an inner demon over the audible voice of my husband who loved me. But this year, Travis has found a way to finally bring to my attention—in a way that I could finally hear—that I have a propensity to succumb to my doubts by failing to try something for fear of failure. I still do it, but he is supporting me so I can try to break that cycle. This, of course, scares me. I don't want to let him down.

He has waited for me: down the aisle at our wedding over 16 years ago, at marathon finish lines, and hospital waiting rooms. He is waiting for me at home, while paying the bills, feeding the dogs and Pichu, watering the braided Pachira "money tree", and letting my little blonde horse out of his muddy stall.

I just wanted to let everyone know how much I love and appreciate you, Travis. Thank you.

Yep. I am pretty sure I am the luckiest girl.