June 15, 2007 - 10:28 am
…and she thinks she’s my wife!!
What do you know! She is my wife!!
A few recent events that have gone thus far unblogged made me realize I don’t talk enough about Tammy. She is, after all, the most important human in my life and, probably, the most influential. So let me tell you a little bit about my wife.
Tammy grew up in Amarillo, Texas (as did I). Her formative years were not kind. She was never considered attractive by her peers and having a lazy eye didn’t help. She was tormented and rejected all the way through elementary and high school. In college, even after having her eye fixed, the effects of her poor treatment kept her from making many friends, although she did make a few. I was not one of them.
Unbeknownst to me, I had befriended a guy from her high school and church who she associated with her torment. So, she also associated me with her torment and every time she saw me at the Amarillo College Baptist Student Union, she’d hit me in the stomach… hard. Still, through a long and unbelievable series of events, she decided I was an OK guy. Later, when I moved to Colorado to finish school, she followed me. We were married soon after.
While we where dating, we both fell in love with rock climbing. The move to Colorado fed this and by the time we got married we were both climbing indoors at least once a week and performing well in amateur climbing competitions. Four months after our wedding, we were climbing in the Garden of the Gods, when Tammy took a fluke fall and hit her head. She was in a coma for about a week and (as is usual with head injuries) she came out of the coma with a major attitude change. She went from being the Tammy the meek doormat, to Tammy the don’t-tell-me-what-I-can’t-do tiger. The good part of this attitude change was that she was driven prove the doctors wrong. The bad part was that we fought… a lot.
Through the years, she’s gotten much better at controlling her emotions but she’s kept the drive. Tammy is a tough girl by any standard. She grew up yelling at the TV when the Cowboys were playing. Now she yells at the TV when Jeff Gordon is losing. She’s no red-neck (She’s still into figure skating and gymnastics), but it sure is cool to have a wife who knows sports as well or better than I do. It’s cool to have a wife that loves camping, four-wheeling, and is working on her confidence and skill at mountain biking. We still climb, though not as much, and it’s cool to have a wife who is a lot stronger than she looks.
That brings me to one of the stories I should have blogged but didn’t. (Now being rectified.)
Our pastor was teaching on the cord of three strands. To illustrate this, he had some small branches, maybe a half inch in diameter. It was supposed to go like this:
“Here is a single branch, see how easily it breaks.” *snap* “But when we but three branches together, they’re very hard to break.” He hands three branches to someone in the front row. They try and try but can’t break the three branches together. “The three branches support each other and are much stronger when they work together.”
Unfortunately, he picked Tammy as the audience volunteer. So it went more like this:
“They’re very hard to break.” He hands the three branches to Tammy. *Snap Crackle Pop* Tammy hands back three broken branches. Everyone laughs. He toss them over his shoulder and says, “So much for that illustration.”
True story.
Oh, by the way, in case you hadn’t figured it out, Tammy is no longer the unattractive outcast. She’s a total hottie!