Tomorrow has been a long time coming

Tomorrow we find out where we will be placed for Jeremy's residency. To say it consumes our minds and conversation right now is an understatement. To be this close to something he we have worked towards for years now is a surreal feeling.

After graduate school neither of us could find a job in Columbus. Jeremy was rejected from medical school and applied for teaching positions. He finally had an offer in Dayton but our relationship was still very new. Long distance wasn't something we were open to, but neither was cohabitation. With me jobless and him inevitably moving - we gave into the later and promised ourselves we would try to make it work and have no regrets if it didn't. In Dayton. A place neither of us was very jazzed about moving to. A place that in our minds offered little to two people in their early 20s, full of ambition and liberal agendas, just starting to navigate the real world - together.

Jeremy taught high school biology, he was home by 4pm each day and was learning to cook. We volunteered, joined the local YMCA, traveled as much as possible and had our duplex toilet papered by pimple-faced sophomores. We were successfully building a life together complete with a guest room and joint checking account. And then one afternoon, as we stepped off a cruise ship in Puerto Rico, he received a phone call admitting him to medical school off of the wait list.

We bought a house, I found a stable job with benefits for both of us and we continued to make things work. Medical school was a tough transition, our partnership was now an apart-nership. He studied in the library while I learned to cook and taught cycling. We proved to each other in those first two years of medical school that we had something worth holding onto for a lifetime, despite where we lived or how much we saw each other on the weekends.

Jeremy and I didn't have a whirlwind "love at first sight" type of courtship as neither of us could possibly set aside sound logic in exchange for wild abandon. I'm actually happy that we built on our successes and throughly analyzed our failures. We took pride in our life together and realized our decisions were better made with two minds than one. We built a home together, nurtured a Jewish identity, were engaged, had a beautiful wedding, traveled, laughed, and loved. We grew as people, grew as professionals and grew as a couple. All of this came to fruition in a zip code plagued with humid summers, bleak snowy winters and the shell of a city once abuzz with industry but now the sad result of economic downturn, abandoned by urban sprawl and outsourcing.

I don't love the physicality of Dayton, I never have. But I am forever grateful and enamored with all that this city has afforded me and my family. This is the place where my mind will escape to years from now when I reminisce about falling in love and becoming a family. Here, where my faith, my relationship and my baby were born. Here, where I learned to be a wife and a mother. Here, where I learned to budget precious time and little money. Here, where I learned to be truly thankful and dutifully humbled.

And this is how I know that no matter what that email says tomorrow, our home will follow, our successes will join us and everything I need will be in one place. Our family with flourish with the warmth and security of what we've built here; armed and ready to make new memories, careers (and even more babies!) someplace else.