the ring.

Three weeks after we started dating Mark brought me roses and invited me to go to Baltimore for the evening with him. We went to inner harbor and sat overlooking the water. He asked me to marry him and slipped a ring on my finger. It fit perfectly.

I was engaged.

I went home and told my parents the happy news.

And they. were. not. happy.

Let me preface this with saying,  I am the oldest daughter. I was the straight A student who aimed to please. I was the good girl. This was out of character. I had only been dating this guy for three weeks!

My parents started to freak out and I started to freak out.
The next morning I took the ring off.

(p.s. as a parent now i can see things in a bit different of light. we were young and passionate and moving fast.)

Mark was away on a trip and he came back to find the ring off. We got together and went for a drive and ended up putting the ring back on.

But when I came back home I took the ring back off later that night.

I was a mess. I felt confused and torn.

I spent the next week in a fog of confusion. There was a lot at play. There was the quickness of everything that was happening. There was the tension with my parents. There was the God stuff that seemed to be pointing towards Mark. But there was also fear and doubts mingled in.

I had a lot of ideals and expectations on how I thought everything was going to look. I had dreamed about this my whole life so if it doesn't look exactly how I thought it would does that mean it is wrong?

I felt so confused. I took a week off of work, hardly ate and spent a lot of alone time in my room wrestling and trying to sort out this mess that felt like my life.