“We lived off ramen noodles and ham sandwiches. We slept in forty-five minute increments. ‘I miss us,’ he said. The spark of our honeymoon years quickly faded, and life together felt more like survival.”
‘I love you, and I’m home.’ He wrapped me in a warm embrace. We had a fairy tale image of what our life would be. The next year was a whirlwind of emotions.’
‘I was over 600 pounds. I feared my wife would find me dead of a heart attack. I had two choices: lose weight or die.’
“I couldn’t walk more than a few hundred feet. People avoided me in public, as if being overweight was contagious. One parent used me as a lesson for their kid. ‘Look at him. This is what happens when you don’t eat right,’ she said.”
‘That’s my family,’ he said, pointing to us. The man looked back in shock and refused to let my husband through. Our daughter Ava began shouting his name.’
“I remember overhearing Justin telling the kids they were not allowed to scream in grocery stores. That someone might think daddy isn’t their ‘real daddy.’ That he’s trying to take them. It all made sense to me when we went to the airport as a family, and Justin was stopped.”
‘When we began dating, I wasn’t allowed to tell my grandparents. ‘They are wholly against interracial dating,’ I was warned. We found ourselves without friends, but we persisted.’
“Growing up, I remember hearing family members make racist jokes. ‘They don’t belong here,’ they said. I never once cared about the color of skin. What mattered to me was who he was as a person. I thought others would think the same.”
‘My hair became dull and greasy, falling out in clumps in the shower. I was on the pill for 6 years. It wasn’t until going off the pill I realized what it was doing to me.’
“If a period can be described as glorious, it was.”
‘I remember waking up and wondering why Mike and my mother were talking about something random and not the baby. What happened to the baby?’
“They told us many times that our best option was to take his breathing tube out and he would either pass in my arms or thrive.”
‘Michael got news something had gone wrong. I was being put under anesthesia immediately. He wasn’t thinking he would have to worry about me too.’
“I was in disbelief. I thought he would be taken away from me like the girls were. I didn’t want to get attached. Even with a giant belly at 38 weeks, seeing him move wasn’t enough for me to believe. I wanted to protect myself and prepare for the worst.”
‘Who jumps into meeting a girl and her entire family and all her friends on the same day? He did. He said yes.’
“I was having complications from a birth that resulted in babies that weren’t even mine, and his only thought was to get to me as fast as he could.”
‘Three more weeks and we will never have to say goodbye again’: Man epically recounts ‘fairytale’ love story
“We knew we were blessed to have met each other. We had each found a soul mate to spend the rest of our lives with. A fairytale; a one in a million relationship.”
‘He just wanted to try and grab a snack!’: 6-month-old ‘steals the show’ by demanding mom’s breast milk during wedding
“It was a busy day for a little guy!”
