A Love Story

To continue the story where I left off due to flood damage. I believe I left when I met Robyn online. So here I was finallycomfortable in my own skin willing to live a simple life alone with my dog. I had a great extended family who loved me. My parents lived a mile away and my grandparents about 3 miles and I often took vacations to see my aunts and uncles, one in the Chicago area, another in NJ, and the other in OH. I took my dog Bo to the park and he would pull me on roller blades to my parents and I would pull him back home. Life was fine.

It was lonely but I felt that was what dystonia had sentenced me to. I had more than most people with dystonia. To pass time at home I was online a lot, a dystonia bulletin board was one of my regular stops. Robyn made a post from Australia saying she recently got dystonia and had a dog. I don't remember now what the post said (to much Klonopin over the years!) but I couldn't get it out of my head and I kept coming back to it. So finally after about my 12th viewing of the post I wrote a reply, the fourth or fifth reply to the orginal post. A few days later I received an email from her; this was not uncommon, being a dystonia BB many of us put our emails on there and chatted via email regularly. But this was different, it started off the same; what do you do for treatment, how does your family react to it, etc. but rapidly personal questions were thrown in. And what kept it going was how quickly the responses came, both of us replied immediately and pretty soon it was hundreds of emails and me staying up way past midnight. Somewhere in this process I found she was my age, and single! She mailed me some photos of herself. All this time I was going blind little did I know she had a spy working for her; she was also emailing a woman in New Jersey whom I had met at a dystonia symposium. She had given her all the dirt on me.

After just 2 weeks of late nights of emailing I had wanted to propose to her, I am not even sure if I had actually spoken to her yet! We did speak on the phone several times but email was far cheaper and easier. I managed to hold off another week until I actually asked her to marry me, she quickly called me and said "yes!" One problem eyt - I lived in Michigan and she lived in Kanahooka, New South Wales, Australia. We decided I would come and vist for a week and we could change our minds if we wanted. I needed to get a passport and I remember my parents were in Florida so I went to their house to find my birth certificate, no luck. I would have to call my parents and explain why I needed it. It was lucky she was in Florida and just on their way out to supper when I called because it gave themm time to absorb the shock, and me an escape!

So June 2, 2001 I boarded a plane to meet my wife for the first time! I remember being oddly calm about the whole thing, like I was supposed to be doing this. I landed and it was June 4 already. She was there waiting for me and she was everything she said she was. She was beautiful, caring , and had a kind heart. I don't remember what we first talked about while waiting for my luggage and on the hour plus ride home (again I blame the Klonopin, lol but I remember feeling excited more than nervous - I knew I had done the right thing.

Yada, yada, yada . . . She is Mrs. Stephenson and we have two wonderful girls. The yadas were a lot of work getting the logistics taken care of but I indeed did the right thing. I love her more today I did in that airport.

Quote of the day: "Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear." John Lennon