Once Upon A (Second) Time...

It’s rare that real life echoes a fairy tale; especially one that comes good on the first attempt! I had to kiss a few frogs and have three serious relationships with lily pad dwelling amphibians before I found my handsome prince. Me being me, I even stupidly sent my prince away before I realised he was The One. But whoever said that the path to true love was a smooth one had obviously been at the “special” fairy toadstools!

As mentioned previously, one frog was a first husband who really shouldn’t have been allowed to leave the frogspawn pool, as he clearly wasn’t ready to interact with the human race. One was a good frog who taught me a lot and helped me grow into the rounded, (sometimes) levelheaded maiden I like to think I am now. Unfortunately we ended up being more like Hansel and Gretel than the happy king and queen so things came to a natural end. Although… his mum and I are still in touch and she is truly my real life fairy godmother! And then came the evil two timing, lecherous toad who really did deserve to be banished to a place far, far away where time should always forget. I never quite managed this but after I kicked him out, twice, he did feck off to Australia, which is a pretty good alternative as far as distance goes!

It was actually after evil toad hopped off that I sorted my life out, bought my first flat and quickly met Other Half – I’d admired him from afar at the office but to no avail as he was courting another princess at the time. Unbeknown to me, him and this particular princess were not all about happy endings either and it wasn’t until at the office Christmas lunch party that my lovely, match making friend J came running up to me to gleefully announce that she’d heard my office crush was newly single – as of three days ago!

Not one to waste any time I made a move – well… I am no strumpet, but seriously, I would’ve had to slap him around the face with a wet fish to make him realise I was flirting with him! To cut a long story short, we got together at the evening version of the above party a few days later and had an amazing couple of months before I got a huge attack of cold feet and ended it. Only later, when we got back together did I realise how much I’d hurt him and it makes me sad when I think about it to this day.

Fast forward to eighteen months later, me being essentially single apart from some random dates, a couple of very short term boyfriends and also having been working on some absent father, unhinged mother and evil toad issues, I finally had my epiphany. Other Half had been working in another building for a while and although we’d said brief, curt hellos at various office do’s, I hadn’t seen him properly for some time.

He walked in, on a Cowboy and Indian’s office fancy dress day no less, and I took one look at him and nearly hyperventilated when it hit me what I’d given up. (No – he wasn’t dressed as the Marlborough Man before you ask, although he might as well have been!)

I emailed him, he emailed back, we agreed to meet for a non-date (which would be a whole other blog post!), and a week later we knew this was it – here and now and never mind what happened before. Within four months we’d moved in, three months later we were engaged, (definitely another blog post) and married a year later with Small Child arriving less than a year after that! You can ask me how I knew he was the one after 33 years of searching and I could either list a million things or just resort to the classic fairy tale ending of "you just know".

Either way, I will be telling my little girl that you should always believe in happy endings… sometimes it just takes a while before you find yours.