As promised...

As promised, I wanted to do a little something to honor Ziggy's 3 and 1/2 year sobriety anniversary. With our 2 year wedding anniversary only a week away, I guess it's also fitting to maybe type out the story of us, per say.

I'm thinking this won't all fit in one post so I was thinking the hook up may be first, then the decent into hell and then finally the rising above the ashes. We'll see how it goes though.

The Beginning:
In August of 2000, I was 8 months pregnant, married to a man who was really only ever just my friend, making $8.50 an hour, living in a 1 bdrm apt and scared shitless about what was happening to me. But damn it to hell, I was determined to make it all work somehow.

I had been at my current job for a full year and I was about to turn 23. I began as a "utility clerk" which was what my boss, Mrs. Anal, titled me. In that first year, I had clawed my way into being noticed by the Accounting Department. They would give me odd jobs to do and I would amaze them with my shy manner of correcting the errors of those who were paid much better than I was in a way that made me needed rather than a threat. In time, I had my own daily set of Accounting tasks on top of being Mrs. Anal's filing, coffee making, plant watering bitch.

In walks Ziggy. He was hired as a favor to a big boss and he was unwelcomed in the Accounting Department. A department filled with non-degree carrying, hard working mothers didn't take kindly to this degree toting prissy boy. I would later come to respect his own fight for respect in that crowd, but at the time, he was nothing more than a threat to me and to all of us. I was to give HIM all of my Accounting duties to handle while on maternity leave and I laid awake at night sure that all of my hard work to get somewhere in this company was being stolen by him.

Needless to say, I loathed him. He asked a million questions and was a perfectionist to the nth degree. He was absolutely nothing more than a nuisance and I literally prayed for his demise, because I knew that he would hamper my rise to the top - I just knew it. If you had told me that I would one day carry this boy's child, I would have laughed my ass off for a week.

By time I returned from maternity leave, he was beginning to gain mild respect for his brains and his uncanny ability to take a task and completely dismantle it and then return it reassembled in a much more streamlined manner. While the women still feared him, they began to accept him for his sense of humor and they even began to mother him as their own little boy of the group. Nauseating!

It wasn't long before we became a team - him constantly the thinker and me constantly the one who brought his ideas into fruition and made them work in the day to day work that he had no concept of.

We spent a year as almost a brother/sister team. His penis and his degree helped him rise faster - this was still a good ole boys company (it still is in many ways, but it's come a far way in 10 years). He was able to stay late and be noticed as the only person in Accounting left in the building after dark. I had an infant to rush home to. He could go to lunch with the big boys because he made $30,000 a year and lived with mommy. I was on a budget and in constant fear of not being able to pay the bills and I packed bologna sandwiches.

I'll grant him that he was brilliant and did take that department from 1970 to at least 1990 in a matter of his first year, but I don't admit that to his face. To his face, I remind him that if I had a penis, a degree and was not a new mother going through a divorce, that I would have risen beyond him easily.

Years later, our boss and mutual mentor told us that she believed us to be the perfect brains/brawn team and that it was a shame that I was always labeled as the brawn when I had my own brains to show off. God, I loved that woman. Hats off to you, Ms. Carolyn.

The Accounting Department had morphed in the year that had passed. I had been officially stolen from Mrs. Anal and placed full time in Accounting (HALLELUJAH!) and the department went from an average age of about 45 to an average age of 21 in that year. I was 24/25 at the time, and Ziggy was 7 months younger than me. We were the two oldest in the group and we found ourselves with young chics beneath us to actually teach and groom. They all looked up to us and commented regularly on "what a great team" we were and how we "would make the perfect couple" - all comments that we shrugged off. I had begun a new relationship with a Born Again Christian Cuban since my divorce and I was in lurve. He was flirting with ironically, the Cuban chic in Customer Service.

As young people often do in these situations, we found ourselves at a local bar almost every Friday night. Friday night was mamma's night off from Luke, so I was free to be young and go out and drive home dangerously tipsy and dance and be nuts.

It was on one of these nights where Ziggy actually graced us with his prescence. He was obnoxiously cautious about his job and he always acted too good for us, as if he already had WAY too many friends to be bothered with the likes of us. It was on this night that I saw Ziggy let loose a little, I heard him laugh a real laugh for the first time and I noticed that his eyes were blue. Having squinty eyes and never seeing him out of the office, I had never noticed how blue his eyes were. He isn't sure of the exact date, but I know that this was the night he first noticed me as more than his teammate from work. Long after the bar closed, we remained in the parking lot, just talking, for hours.

From that night on, there would be moments when I absolutely hated him, wished him dead and hoped that he drove off a cliff - but I never, not once, ever stopped loving him.

A few months later, I broke up with the Cuban for reasons that had nothing to do with Ziggy. Our moment was not forgotten, but booze wears off and you get back to normal life on Mondays. I cried in his office the morning after the break up, which was strange behavior for me. He had no idea what to say and I could tell that he was really uncomfortable with it. However, very early the next morning (a Saturday), my phone rang and for the first time, it was Ziggy's voice that I heard. He nervously pretended to be calling to ask something absurd about work and then finally in a stuttering and stammering way, he asked me to go to dinner and a movie that night. It was the summer of 2002.

To be continued...