About

I met my husband by chance – or maybe it was the stars aligning. Whatever it was, to this day I cannot believe that it happened the way that it did.

It was a rainy August evening in 2011 and I was getting ready for a night out with two of my best friends. Lying on Ticia’s bed, not so patiently waiting for her to finish getting ready, I hollered: “Hurry up, would ya?! What if I meet the man I’m going to marry tonight.” I should have prefaced this by saying that I never said things like that. Meeting the man I was going to marry was never on my radar. I know, I know…never say never.

A few hours later I was dancing the night away when Ticia and Paul approached me and asked that I join them on the patio – I thought that they had lost their minds. My usually intense, very frizzy, curly hair had been flat ironed, styled and beautifully coiffed that day and rain would completely destroy it. Resistance was futile and I before I knew it I was on the patio.

Standing alone under an umbrella, vodka in hand, I heard the loudest, happiest laugh I had heard in a long time. “The laugh” did a double take – he literally looked at me, turned away, then immediately turned back – and uttered his first to me: “well what do we have here?”

Over the course of our four-hour talk he revealed that he really wasn’t planning on going out that evening. In fact, he told his friends to go ahead without him and they did! If it wasn’t for Francis leaving the bar to drive back to Zach’s dad’s house, we wouldn’t have met that night or maybe we wouldn’t have met at all – but we met in the rain on that warm August night and I was changed forever.

08/10/2011 “The Saturday Special,” indeed. (L to R: Zach, Me, Paul, Ticia)

What followed were the first chapters of our love story.We went on our first date the very next day and one year later we moved in together. I don’t even remember how we began to discuss the topic of marriage because it really did happen naturally. We suddenly realized that marriage felt important – it also felt scary, wonderful, and too grownup- and mostly it felt right. I got on board with marriage pretty quickly but a wedding was another beast entirely and it was a beast that I wasn’t sure I could tame.

So my blog began with the trials and tribulations of planning our wedding and all of the lovely, crazy, beautiful things that came along with it. That chapter of my life is over and this is the beginning of a new journey…

Among these posts I hope you will find stories about what it’s like to be a:

• Grown Up: life changes and things get complicated, let’s talk about it.
• Cook: learn, explore and understand the complexities of my tiny apartment kitchen and the delicious things that are made in it.
• Bride: all Bridal related musings are still here, if you need them.
• Reader: because books, learning and imagination are important!
• Wife: marriage ain’t easy – it is also incredible and the best decision I ever made.
• Beautician: still figuring this one out…especially when it comes to hair!
• Traveller: sometimes I go places and I’m sure you do too!

I was Rebecca Marshall for almost 30 years and these are the stories of how I became (and am still becoming) Rebecca Wallace.

17/10/2011 Rebecca & Zach – when only one of us was a Wallace