How I Met Your Father

This is another one of those posts that I hope Himself never reads because it will embarrass him.  So far, he seems completely uninterested in looking over my ramblings, which is doubtless a good thing, since I don't want any editorial comments from the peanut gallery anyway.  This is my space, dammit.

Both of my parents went to Catholic school straight through till university.  Raised on horror stories of plaid uniforms and nuns with rulers, I told them for years that I would never go to one myself.  Which of course made them laugh when I later chose a Catholic university with no prompting from them at all.  God has a magnificent sense of humor.

Many of my classmates emerged engaged four years later.  I was not one of them--I broke an ill-advised engagement and did also have a serious relationship with someone who turned out to be geographically incompatible in there as well, but that was it.  I told Mom that if I couldn't find a good Catholic guy to marry in four years at a university with a student body that was 92% Catholic and predominantly male, I should be allowed off the hook.  (I was joking with her...this was not really the goal of my college years!) Then I cheerfully moved to a traditionally Southern Baptist part of the country for grad school and dated an atheist for three and a half years.

Shortly before I finished grad school, I signed up for an internship in patent law that was offered through the school and promptly met a handsome Irish Catholic lawyer with the most beautiful green eyes I'd ever seen.  His office was a few doors down the hall from mine.  My secretary suggested that I ask him about something organic chemistry-related (his area of expertise) I needed to understand for a patent application I was drafting; a few days later he was in my office doorway asking questions about parts of DNA that regulate how genes are turned on and off (more my scientific area) in connection with something he was working on.  We got to be friends, and eventually more.

We met 14 years ago this week.   Amazing what you sometimes find in very unlikely places when you aren't looking for it.