Diagnosis: Marriage (part 3 of 3)

Click for part 1 and part 2
Junior year of college is a blur. I know it happened but only because of pictures and people telling me I lived and was happy, but overall it's been erased form my memory. I do know that Mike and I did not have any communication that year, but toward the end of the year the pieces started to fall in place for us to actually get together.

I was super into singing throughout college: singing for Mass, singing for "Festivals of Praise" (exactly what it sounds like), for youth groups, retreats, weddings, recording with people doing backup vocals, blah blah blah. There was a friend of mine who led music for a lot of weddings/retreats and at the end of my junior year he started asking me to sing with him for lots of stuff. It was great and got us starting to hang out a bit, which carried over to the fall of my Senior year of college.


Mike had moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, the summer going into my senior year to take a job in banking, but as luck would have it, the friend I did music with was one of Mike's long time close friends and would often invite Mike to hang out with us when he was in back in town to visit. The occasions would usually be really random ones-- like once when I was babysitting for my sister, Mike joined the friend and a few other peeps and came over for a movie, some cookies, and a little cheap whiskey.

Another, more monumental occasion was over Thanksgiving break of my senior year when both the friend and Mike were in town to see family and they called to come and pick me up to hang out. We headed over to a friend's house pretty late at night, and Mike began his efforts to move in closer to me- literally, he sat close to me on the couch and was doing a bit more flirting than ever.

And as luck would have it again, the friend of mine and Mike's got sick, had to go home early, and asked Mike to take me home- and of course he said YES. Mike drove me home, and we spent about 3 hours in his car talking, talking, talking... When we neared the end of the talking and I was about to go in for the night, Mike took the plunge and asked me to go out for a drink with him while he was in town. I think I almost puked up my heart when he asked me, but I was just able to keep it down long enough to say yes. We went, it was lovely, and that started it all really.

Yeah, pretty confused...

We kept in constant touch after he headed back to Ann Arbor, talking on the phone almost every single night, but when the time for Christmas break drew nearer my feet started to get colder (and not because I was walking in the snow without shoes). I knew that things were either going to go one direction or another with Mike, and this made me very nervous. I was quite enjoying all the attention from Mike, from that other friend who was still calling to hang out, and from other guys on campus,  so I kind of freaked out at the thought of getting into a serious relationship.

Christmas came and Mike called to ask to take me out on a date. I said no, confusing the hell out of him and really confusing the hell out of myself. Things with the other friend dissolved and I woke up one morning toward the end of the break and realized that I had probably ruined all my chances with Mike because of the dose of crazy confused girl I had given him. I cried and cried.

A phone call came as the Christmas break was coming to a close and it was from... MIKE!!! I was so thrilled that he had decided to call again even after I totally dissed him and the reason he was calling was even better. He had made me a mix CD for Christmas and wanted to send it to me but didn't know where to send it. I gave him the address and waited. Another week or so went by and I got another call from him asking if I had gotten the CD yet. I had not, but it led to us talking a little bit more and making me feel like maybe had not completely screwed my life up. (As I later learned, Mike had not yet sent the CD, but was calling to see if I had received it simply as a pretext for talking to me. Obviously it worked.) I eventually got the CD, listened to it, LOVED it, and called him to thank him, again leading to more conversation and more phone calls from Mike throughout the beginning of that spring semester.

One of these phone calls went very late into the evening and proved to be very fortunate as a result of total fatigue and some over-sharing. I had decided to appologize to Mike for the "Christmas dissing" and tell him that I would like to continue to keep in touch. He was so sweet about it and went on to inform me that he was really let down by it and had actually written a song after it happened. I begged and begged and finally he put the phone on "speaker" and played it for me. It was beautiful, and even though it ended on a down note (I had ditched him at Christmas, after all), the song was all I needed to hear. I was done for. There was no going back. (In case you're curious, the song should be embedded below, or you can listen to it here.)



After the song, things picked up even more for us by way of communication, and that spring break I decided to make a big move and drive to Ann Arbor to visit him. It was a great trip and afterward I even turned down a date from another guy saying that I was "actually seeing someone," though I would not yet call it dating. Mike came to visit on a couple other weekends and finally over Easter break we starting calling each other "boyfriend and girlfriend."

Mike continued his job in Ann Arbor, but was at a crossroads with respect to the future. He had really hoped to go to Notre Dame for grad school and was waiting for a response to the application he had sent in early in the semester. (This is why the song says "Come to Indiana with me"--  and in the end it all ended up coming true!) He also got an offer from his banking job to transfer him to Washington D.C., where he would get promoted and get a big raise. He found out after we started "dating" that he did not get in to Notre Dame and now needed to decide whether or not to make the move to the capital of our nation, which would be pretty difficult on our relationship that had never not been long distance.

He made the decision to quit his job and move back to Steubenville, which was basically a decision to marry me, although he did not call it that then. At the end of the summer after I had graduated, he moved from Michigan to a cute little house right near my parents' home (which would later be our first home together). He got a job writing a high school textbook while I attended grad school at the same university, and he went ahead and reapplied to Notre Dame.

Things get pretty "boring" here since we only spent 8 short months dating before we got engaged and shortly after getting engaged he found out that he had gotten into Notre Dame's Masters program in Theology. So that's it: we got married and he swept me away to Indiana, and the rest, as they say, is history...

Diagnosis: Marriage (part 2 of 3)

A few strange, fortunate occurrences

For part 1 click here

I would like to highlight here a few strange occurrences that never actually got me and Mike together, but always pointed me in his direction through my formative college years. We'll pick up at my college crush on cute, guitar playing, dry humored, tall, dark, romantic Mike established early my freshman year, and sort of carrying over from high school.

Freshman year comes and goes and the fall of my sophomore year found me traveling abroad with about 100 other students from my University in a little town called Gaming, Austria. Mike had already spent his own first semester of sophomore year over there several years prior. So you can imagine my surprise when, within the first week of arriving in Gaming, I was walking with a friend and spotted none other than the Michael Hahn walking the very same Austrian pavement at the very same time as me. (He had decided to return as a Masters student to another school on the same campus). This is not an exaggeration and my good friend can corroborate my story when I tell you that when I saw him I immediately blurted out "Mike Hahn is here?!?!?! This means I am definitely going to marry him!".

Now you might think I was just being a silly immature sophomore in college, but keep in mind that I went to a college that has an alarmingly high rate of senior couples graduating already engaged. I myself went to school in search of my own MRS degree, which I hoped to find in a nice Catholic hottie just like Mike. So this was not just talk, I saw it as a real possibility and hoped for it.

However,  life went on and we did our own thing during our travels and apart from traveling on the same train for a short time randomly and him coming with me to my room to borrow the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" minutes before my bus was to take off for Poland, we really didn't connect while there. He was actually dating someone else by the end of his time and I was dating someone else the entire time I was there, plus I flirted with every guy I saw for fun. Again, not totally mature yet.

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The next semester rolls around and I don't see much of Mike since he was graduated and pursuing other things, although he did drop out of the Austrian program after that semester, I did not know this yet. I had joined a "household" (a Catholic sorority sort of thing) and one of our weekly commitments was a 6:45 a.m. Mass with the rest of the ladies in the household. I awoke bright and early on one particular morning for Mass from a dream that was extremely real and which I couldn't wait to relate to my buddies.

After Mass I went to the campus cafe with a friend for coffee and sat and told her the dream. All I can tell you now is that in the dream I married Mike Hahn and it was blissfully wonderful-- I knew all the deats then and related them to the friend I was with.

About 5 minutes later I walked over to a set of couches near a coffee table and laid down to rest until class, when I got up I looked over at the coffee table and saw a random CD resting upside down on, I walked over to pick it up. I think I almost peed my pants when it was labeled "Mike Hahn: B-Sides". I freaked out, showed my friend, insisted again that this meant we were meant to be together and pocketed the thing. I later found out from Mike that this was one of only FIVE CDS that he had recorded and given away and only to close friends and family-- I still have it in our scrapbook.

 That's all for now, stay tuned for much more tomorrow...

Diagnosis: Marriage (part 1 of 3)

Alright, I am giving in. I have opened many a blogger wife/husband love story post since blogging and while I read through the thing totally enraptured, I have always gone away with the sure thought that I will never do an "Our Love Story" post. Why? I don't know, maybe because the thought of giving other people that many gratuitous deats about my past starts to put me to sleep, and it's my life.

But then I realized that I READ THE POSTS AND ENJOY THEM. There is something fun about seeing how God puts all the pieces in place for 2 people to end up together, and even more fun when you are all too inserted into that person's life via the interwebs courtesy of mom-blogging.

Plus, it's our 4th anniversary this week.
Plus, I haven't blogged in forever and need something to jump start my re-entry into the blerging world.

Enough reasons, here we go. Read on to enjoy part one of three of the saga, the drama, the epic tale that is Mike and Ana...

taken in our earlier (chubbier) dating days

We'll start where I always start when telling the story: high school. I could start back in grade school since that is where we first met, but I do not recall the meeting, only Mike does. So we'll go ahead and start in high school.

I was a fledgling freshman and Mike was a dark, handsome, Senior soccer player who never even looked at me in the hall way. This was a good thing since I think if he had really known me then he would have gone running for the hills of West Virginia never to return to the crazy that was me in the early high school days. A combination of insecurity, awkwardness, and toooooo much drinking made for a very spastic troubled young lady. Which makes sense out of why I made sure to point out to alllllll my friends just how "HOT" I thought that dark, handsome soccer player was every. time. I. saw. him. Nothing came of things then and before I knew it he graduated and was off to college leaving me to figure my shiznit out until it was my turn go off to the same college- a leeeedle bit more mature-3 years later.

Cue freshman year of college. Like I said, I had grown up a little, I had at least stopped the drinking and had chosen to attend a good Catholic college, so things were surely looking up for me. Mike was a senior when I came in as a freshman and had gotten even more handsome. Also he had taken to showcasing his amazing guitar/vocal skills at many campus events and local bars which left me all but drooling over him whenever I saw him. At one such event he actually stopped and talked to me at length about many things which I couldn't remember even 5 minutes later because I was too busy staring at his cute face and trying to keep the conversation going as long as possible so that he would never ever leave. I was unsuccessful in that endeavor, but it was a long enough conversation to send me running to my closest friend telling her "how cuuuuutte he was and that he TALKED to me!!!" Long enough to spur on an immediate crush.

And I will leave you hanging there so that I can go run this by him to make sure I am not missing anything or making anything up and then change into a maternity shirt that fits over my ever expanding belly and then run to the store fully clothed.