Searching For the Perfect Buzz

Chapter 1

Was it a dream? Could he be real? His name was Dale & he was, by all accounts, my perfect partner. In the “Looks Department” he was 5' 10" or so, gorgeous dark hair and hazel eyes. In the “Intelligence Department” he had 2 Bachelor’s degrees and an MBA. This has always been important to me, for reasons that might sound boastful, but they’re true. If you ask my parents, my mom would say: “My daughter is brilliant,” my dad would say, “Kristen is too smart for her own good.” If you asked my friends, they would say: “When she’s around I feel like I need a dictionary and a thesaurus.” If you ask my kids, they would say: “My mom’s frikk’n smart!” If you ask me, I would say: “My parents, my friends and my kids are blowing this all out of proportion. I read a lot, the internet has been a Godsend and a medical dictionary’s my ‘go to’ from the time I was 19 until… well, it still is and it’s WAY more interesting than reading a phone book.” So meeting this gorgeous man, who looked like Tom Cruise only taller and with a deeper voice who could use polysyllabic words appropriately in a sentence, seemed too good to be true. Much more on that topic to come. In the “Can He Make Me Laugh Department” Dale had that in spades.

We both had personal tests, one of his was: “Can we take a trip in a car and never run out of things to talk about?” I passed that one without a glitch. One of my tests was: “Can I talk like myself without having to ‘dumb it down’?” He passed that one without a glitch as well. My other requirements were simpler & didn’t need questions: Does he have a job? Check. I met him at work. Does he have a car? Check. It was a red…something or other, it’s been 25 years what can I say. Does he have a place to live? Check. He lived in a condo, had a roommate and it was super clean (very important, I’m NOT a maid and I am, to this day, loathe to do housework). Since he rented a room & didn’t own was an added plus. I had bought my first house 3 years earlier, so it would make shacking up in the future much easier when deciding where we would live. Much more on that topic to come.

I had a son from a previous marriage when I met Dale, he was around 7 ½ years old, so whether Dale had kids or not wasn’t an issue to me, but could he handle my son? If not, that was an immediate deal breaker. My son was a gorgeous kid! Toe-head blonde with curls when it was long and jet black eyes. As a baby he sucked his thumb and I couldn’t take him anywhere without someone stopping me to tell me how beautiful he was. His name is Adam and from the day he was born, after 4 hours and 6 minutes of labor, I knew I wanted at least one more baby, hopefully a girl — that would be perfect! Searching for perfection was my jam. The perfect husband, the perfect family, the perfect job, the perfect house in the most perfect part of town, the perfect life. I had a childhood which was nothing short of perfect and that’s what I wanted to give my children. In that area I would find myself an epic fail. Very frustrating for someone who not only craves, but demands perfection and rejects failure in any/everything.

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