the early years

Where it all began

A collage of our notes and pictures from high school I made for Christmas last year.

I first met my wife Mandy (Amanda if you meet her today) when we were juniors in high school, but the first time I really noticed her, was my first day working at Wendy's with her and her best friend Tiffany when I was 17 years old.  

As Tiffany and I were doing our extensive training, which consisted of those cringey 90s rap videos on how to fill a cup, we were joking around and having a good of a time. 

Well, for some reason that didn't sit well with Mandy. She decided to pull Tiffany aside and tell her, "don't talk to him, he's a jerk!" 

She still claims to this day, she was trying to protect her best friend from making any sort of mistake. But I think we all can agree, translated into 16 year old girl lingo, it means, "back off HE'S MINE!" Now looking back some 20 years later, if given the opportunity again, she might've played her hand a little differently. 

It didn't take long and I was head over heels for this girl. She always had this positivity about her that has always been able to balance me out. I still remember sitting in her driveway, maybe 5-6 months after we started dating, I turned to her and told her, "I think I'm falling in love with you".

To which she softly and gently replied, "ha ha ha". 

Yep, all she could muster up was one of the most awkward laughs from her that I've ever had to sit through. After licking my wounds from that brutal night, we managed to move forward. By our senior year one of our friends, of course from Wendy's, decided to buy a 50 year old single wide trailer in a pretty sketchy part of town and was looking for a couple roommates. Of course, we jumped at the chance to finally move out on our own and have our very first place together. 

I mean what could go wrong with living with friends at 17-18 years old while you're still in high school? So over the next several months we survived on ramen noodles, Mac-n-cheese, generous grocery runs by parents every so often, and whatever we could carry out at the end of our shifts. 

Then going home to a house full of people and partying nearly every night of the week. Waking up at whatever time and somehow try to show up for most of our classes in order to still graduate our senior year. Surprisingly all of this didn’t exactly earn us valedictorian consideration.  

By the end of senior year I had to be put into in-school suspension for the last two weeks just so I could make up all of my missed assignments. Mandy's early childhood education teacher, Ms. McDonald, had to set up an extra power point project that she would have to present in front of her parents and teachers, to earn enough points to pass. 

Funny, to this day I can still almost hear my grandma who raised me laughing and saying, "I told ya so Beau Michael!" 

It wasn't long after that we hit our breaking point at that old trailer. Our roommate Stephanie had a Jack Russell Terrier that was possessed by some sort of unholy demon from the depths of hell. She had managed to find her way behind the walls where she started to make a habit of relieving herself. One day we were in the kitchen and Mandy opened the fridge to grab a drink and when she closed the door cockroaches fell from behind several of the pictures hanging from the fridge. 

A week later and our grand idea of being on our own had gotten put on hold and we would soon move back home with our tails tucked squarely between our legs. We didn’t stay long soon we had enough money saved to get our very first apartment. 

One thing that I’ve always taken pride in though, which I even told the judge the day of Owens adoption when asked whether our recent move to our new house was an upgrade or not. Any move we made over the 20 some odd years, has always been an upgrade. Except maybe the studio apartment above the storefronts on Main Street in Wadsworth that Mandy “loved” and signed a lease without letting me even see the place. I’ll never let her live that one down. But from a rotted out old trailer to a single bedroom apartment, to a two bedroom duplex all the way to our first house we bought together. We always managed to progress to bigger and better homes. All of our bills might not have always gotten paid on time, like a lot of young couples trying to make it on our own we had disconnect notices from power companies and we might have to wait until we saw those big red numbers and letters show up on our gas bill before we would pay the bare minimum, but not once did we miss rent or car payments. If there was one thing I always made sure of was, we always had a roof over our heads and a vehicle to get us to work. I actually had to reassure my son Austin when we found out he was nervous that we wouldn’t be able to afford our new house and we’d be homeless. Because what normal 10 year old boy doesn’t worry about financial security. Of course times were tight, we couldn’t afford all the little extra things like going out to dinner or random day trips to places, but by no means were we ever in danger of falling behind on our bills. 

Over the course of the next 10 years we would learn a lot, from how to manage a household to how to manage a healthy relationship with each other. We made a lot of mistakes, and maybe ruffled some feathers of landlords over the years. Like that studio apartment that was above our landlords store. He did not sound too pleased when he called me while we were visiting my mom to inform me that our apartment had flooded and had also flooded their store underneath. 

Now I technically did not cause the flooding, we had a friend stay the night who had left the bar earlier the night before and was in no condition to drive. At some point during the night he had woken up to use the restroom. While leaning on the sink to keep his balance he managed to rip the sink off of the wall, disconnecting the line from the shut off and then without even thinking about it, walked out and went back to sleep. I woke up that morning to the sound of running water and no friend in sight. As I walked towards the bathroom I noticed the carpet was getting more and more saturated until I walked in and saw two inches of water on the bathroom floor. I quickly turned the water off and started cleaning up, thinking this wasn’t too bad. I put the sink back on the wall, reconnected the water and turned everything back on. Easy cleanup, I thought no one would be the wiser once it all dried out. So we left for the day to visit my mom, and being a Sunday the store was closed. Little did I know, shortly after we left, the brackets holding the sink had been bent and were not going to hold that sink for very long. When my landlord called he said a passerby noticed water running out from under the front door of their business. By the time we got home and walked into the store, ceilings had already been ripped out, damaged merchandise was being gathered and thrown in trash bags and I had to explain exactly what in the world happened. Thankfully they knew, had they sued us we wouldn’t have anything to give, we had no renters insurance, but his insurance would cover the damage so he reluctantly let us finish out our lease, at which point we both decided it was for the best if we ended our business relationship.

This trend of going from one apartment to the next lasted until I was almost 21 when our relationship slowly started to fall apart. We were both so young when we first got together and at this point we were teenagers pretending to know how to play house. We reached a certain point when we both started to question if this is truly what we wanted. Not to mention our lives were slowly unraveling which also lead to our relationship doing the same. 

When we split up for what I always thought would be the last time

I was devastated, I had absolutely nothing to show for the first few years of my adult life and no direction in life that I could see. I moved back in with my mom, which at that age, after your first real taste of freedom and independence, was a massive pill to swallow. So my mom, with her loving, get off your ass and pick yourself back up mentality that to this day still benefits me, made me make a decision on what I wanted to do with my life in this moment. Of course this next move, albeit had great intentions, was going to impact the rest of my life. 

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