Pre Family Four

Growing up, Hulkman would get confused on the word, “family”. Are we talking extended family or immediate family? So we started calling our immediate family, Family 5. To Hulkman it was like calling us all by name…we had a family identity.

Once Gremlin came along and Hulkman found out J and I weren’t having any more children, he called us Family 4.

But of course we were.

Pre Family 4 consisted of many years traveling around the country. The traveling soul must wander…it just must. Some time around 19 or 20 I ended up in Tulsa with my folks while they were stateside for a year. We actually call it our furlough from hell. It was definitely a year of mental stretching.

In the middle of my Graves disease, I found a friend who should have stayed a friend. He was a really nice guy and we got a long well, but that didn’t mean we needed to hook up. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Paco (fake name…of course) was so laid back, he was practically a snail. A very high snail. Despite warning bells trying to ring through my thyroid fog, I said yes when he asked me to marry him. We had no plans, no idea what the crap we were doing…no future.

In the middle of this engagement, I discovered my Graves and started treatment. The feeling of coming out of Graves was amazing. (I’ll talk more about that in another post.) I remember one day shortly after the fog had lifted, I looked over at Paco and screamed in my head, “Who the hey-hoo is this guy?? What what I thinking!?” It all pretty much went down hill from there. A handful of weeks before our wedding day I gave Paco his ring back and told him goodbye.

I’m not sure if I was afraid the Graves would come back but before moving away from Tulsa I wrote a list of what kind of guy I was looking for. Poor guy…the list is basically an Anti-Paco list: