Trophy Wife

At our last anniversary, I told the story of how Stephanie and I met, and of our courtship and marriage. Well, today it's our 12th anniversary, and I still cannot believe how lucky I am to have her.

A year ago, I was working in the job I had to take when the dot com bubble burst and my first company (which provided IT services to dot coms) collapsed. I was making half of what I had been before, our savings had been wiped out in the crash while I was looking for the next contract (that never came), and I was doing a lot of questioning of my goals in life - could I even achieve them? Could I make a company work? Stephanie has always stood by me - through far worse than that - and she came through yet again.

When the opportunity came to start a second company, it was a big risk. We were up to our full complement of four sons by then, and our youngest was only 8 months old. At the same time, it was far from clear last October that the market had really turned around. Starting a specialty IT company in a time of depressed corporate spending - it's only large organizations that need what we do - was hardly a given to succeed. If it failed, we would have nothing to fall back on. We even had to borrow money from Steph's parents to hold us over until the company would start getting paid on the contract. It was touch-and-go for months on end.

There were times when we had no money and frankly I was pretty close to giving up and taking a permanent job. Steph convinced me to keep going, and the company finally started getting paid - and then really took off. It was knowing that she was behind me that kept me going, and it was her encouragement that kept me heading in the right direction. Without that, my second company might well have gone the way of my first, leaving us still worse off.

In the last year she's had to put up with me commuting for two months, and off work for most of one; she's followed me to Chicago so I don't have to commute any more; she's put up with the vicissitudes of a contract that has ever changing goals, locations and end dates and which took months to start paying off; and she's been wonderful about it all.

All of that is on top of being my best friend and the wonderful mother and educator of our sons and a good cook and funny and sweet and .... Well, let's just say that if there's a competition for best wife, I win hands down.

I love you, honey.

Happy anniversary.

Posted by Jeff at July 24, 2004 12:01 AM | Link Cosmos