Greg and Jenn met in San Antonio, TX in 1991 when Jenn walked into her friend’s auto shop that shared a garage with Greg’s brother’s shop. As she stood there waiting for her friend to get off work, Greg walked back and forth a million times being the shy guy he always is. Finding it strange that he wasn’t staring like some of the other guys he worked with, she moved in on him determined to make him notice her. What she didn’t know is that he already had. And he liked.
Being the shy guy he was, she had to help him by leading him into asking her out. She said yes and the two of them drove off in his hot rod Camero into marriage and babies and domestic life together. Literally. We had been together for about a year when we found out that we were pregnant with our first baby, Austin. We were nervous and scared, but also excited about the fact that we were going to have a baby. There was a lot of thoughts and talks about having a baby and getting married. We both agreed that we didn’t want to run out and get married just because we were having a baby, we wanted to get married when we were ready to get married. Both of our Families have been married and divorced, sometimes several times so we wanted our marriage to last and be something special. Our marriage was something we needed to come to when we were ready, not so others could justify us having a baby. That’s their issues, not ours. We told Family members that we were going to have a baby but that we were not going to get married till we knew we were ready. Some Family members were happy and supportive and others were outraged. We were disowned and told not to come around again by a Family member that we really wanted to be close to. It really hurt us deeply that they didn’t want to have anything to do with us or this baby, it made us feel horrible and betrayed. But, we were happy and loved living together in our little trailer together that Greg used while away at college years before.
We continued to work in San Antonio, Texas and learned more and more about what it meant to be a Family. About four months into our pregnancy we felt that the time was finally right for us to get married after talking lots about it. We knew that we wanted to make our marriage last so it was important for us to do it when we knew we were ready ~ we became ready in Vegas on April 10, ’92 in the front seat of our little Toyota truck with the sun coming through the dusty window, parked in the middle of nowhere Arizona on a trip back to Texas from California. We bought $6 wedding bands from Indians and exchanged vows with each other in front of God and nobody else. Months later with nothing fancy at all, just the two of us in front of the Justice of the Peace in a little old feed store in Texas, we exchanged our vows again on July 13 and made it legal. The JOP was loading horse feed in his overalls and the fellas he was loading feed with chuckled under their ten gallon hats and it only took him a little bit to get into his black robe, find his bible, and run us through our vows in his dusty office while we giggled the whole way through. We then re-exchanged our $6 interwoven silver rings we bought at a roadside stand from an Indian in Arizona after exchanging our vows in the front seat of our truck back on our trip.
We were young, on our own, and having our first baby so we decided to head to Austin, Texas to start our life, with or without support of extended Family.
Totally in love.