Husband Chronicles Part 6: Joshua

His name is Joshua Lee. Mine is too — Lee, that is. We didn’t know then what that meant. We were just kids.

His grandparents — Nanny and Papa, same as I’ve always called them — went to our church. Nanny and my mom were close in that quiet, dependable way that only certain women know how to be for each other. My mom leaned on her, and Nanny let her. I want to give special attention to Nanny, as she deserves it. She is calm and serious, but also kind and loving. Nanny is the kind of woman with absolutely certain priorities — God, her family, and her church. The reverence that she and Papa have always carried for my family comes from those priorities. My dad was her Pastor. Which made my mom someone Nanny respected, loved and wanted to support. Because of this, I got lucky. She became my Nanny, and her sweet, dear husband my Papa.

That’s how I got to know Joshua.

His parents were divorced and his mom was wild. I can say that because as much as everyone else knows it, my mother-in-law knows it too. She actually is over five years sober now, but then she was a bad alcoholic and that made for significant chaos in Josh’s life. Lucky for Josh, Nanny and Papa are who they are. He spent a lot of time with them. And so did I. Somewhere in the middle of all of that — the sprinklers and the trampolines and the Monopoly games we’d abandon and pick back up two weeks later like nothing happened — he got under my skin.

He was two years older than me, which at eight years old felt like a canyon. I did not care even a little bit.

I was obsessed. Capital O, no apology, full-blown obsessed. I followed him around. I inserted myself into whatever was happening if Josh was happening near it. When he hadn’t been around for months — off living his busy older-boy life full of school and a crazy family and things that had nothing to do with me — he’d walk through those church doors again, I would absolutely lose my mind. Internally. Mostly.

I wrote about him in my diary when I was eight years old. I still have that diary. I still have that page.

By the time I was fifteen, something had shifted. In me, on me — both, honestly. I wasn’t the same little girl chasing him around in a pink one piece anymore, and whatever had changed, I hadn’t quite caught up to it yet myself.

Josh had been MIA for a particularly long stretch. Long enough that his absence had become a dull ache I’d mostly learned to ignore. Life went on. School, friends, the usual teenage machinery of surviving adolescence.

But Wednesday nights were sacred. Wednesday night was youth group, and youth group was my favorite thing. If you know, you know. If you don’t — imagine the one night a week where everything felt electric and alive and like something could happen at any moment. That was Wednesday for me.

I was standing in the foyer when the doors opened and Josh walked in with his best friend Frosty. Yes, that’s what he went by. Yes, people still call him that. No further questions.

I saw him from across that foyer and something in my chest went completely sideways.

I did not lose it internally this time.

And then I ran to him. Full sprint. No hesitation, no dignity, no regrets. I launched myself into his arms like we were reuniting after a war, because honestly, to fifteen-year-old me, we were.

Heaven. Pure heaven.

What I didn’t know in that moment — what I wouldn’t find out until much later — was what was happening on his side of that reunion. Because when Josh saw me come across that foyer, something shifted for him too.

He noticed me. Really noticed me. For the first time, standing there in that church foyer with his best friend Frosty watching, Josh looked at me and thought —

The little girl was gone. And he was not ready for that.

Later that night, when service was over and everyone was trying to decide if we were going to Sonic for late night cheeseburgers or Caliche’s for soft-serve custard, we snuck off. Behind the AC unit in the back of the building, hiding from sight, he put his arm around my waist and pulled me in real close.

I could feel his breath on my face, his hand firmly in control of my exact location, he grazed my nose with his. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t breathing from the anticipation.

Then he kissed me.

Really kissed me.

Goosebumps covered every inch of my skin when his lips touched mine. My soul left my body.

That was the first time I realized I loved him, truly loved him. Not just a little girl crush, but something REAL inside me. Something bigger than my 15 year old brain — or heart could comprehend.

But change was coming. Big change. That I could never have prepared for.

The Border

I didn’t know he was living life that fast. I should say that plainly, because it matters. The Joshua I knew was the boy from church, the one who made my eight-year-old heart write in a diary, the one who kissed me behind an AC unit while our friends debated Sonic versus Caliche’s. I didn’t have a window into the other parts of his world. And there were other parts.

He was running with people he shouldn’t have been running with. Making decisions that a teenage boy with a chaotic home life and too much unsupervised freedom sometimes makes. And one of those decisions landed him at the US/Mexico border with a car full of marijuana and a federal case that was about to change everything.

Nanny and Papa bonded him out. Of course they did. Because that’s who they are. And while he waited on sentencing, staying with them as a condition of his bond, I saw him more than I had in years. Which sounds strange to say. But that’s the truth of it. The legal process gave me proximity I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I was sixteen. I want to be clear about that. Sixteen, and too innocent to fully comprehend what federal prison time actually meant. I understood the words. I didn’t understand the weight. Not yet.

After sentencing, I visited as often as I could. And for the next three years, we stayed close in the only way two people can when one of them is locked up and the other is still out living a life she didn’t quite know what to do with. Letters. Visits. A kind of love that had no blueprint and no guarantee.

Joshua

I got pregnant with my son while Josh was in the feds.

When Ruben made clear he wanted nothing to do with me or the baby, the only person I wanted to tell was Josh. When he finally called he knew something was different. And without hesitation — without a single moment of calculation or condition — he told me that when he came home, which would be shortly after the baby arrived, he would step up. We would be a family. He meant it. I knew he meant it.

Because of that, I have genuinely fond memories of my pregnancy. That might surprise people. A teenage girl, alone, father of her baby gone, and yet — fond memories. The visits, the letters, the commitment that came through every page he wrote and every hour I sat with him in that visitation room. Josh made me feel held from behind bars in a way that some men never manage from right beside you.

I named my son Joshua.

I chose Ruben.

I want to sit with that sentence for a second, because it deserves to be said plainly before I explain it. I made a choice. I was a young mother in a hospital room and the father of my baby showed up, and something in me — some deeply human, desperate, hopeful part of me — thought maybe we could be what I wanted us to be. A family. The traditional kind. The kind I’d grown up believing was the goal.

It wasn’t the right choice. I know that now. I probably knew it then, somewhere underneath the hope.

From behind those walls, Josh had built something real — a plan, a promise, a future where he came home to us. I dismantled it from a delivery room, and the ripple from that moment ran further than I could have known. That choice followed Josh in ways I wouldn’t understand for years. Into other relationships. Into fatherhood. Into the quieter parts of who he became. I dropped that stone without knowing how far the water would carry it.

It was Nanny who told him about my divorce.

Of course it was. Because Nanny always knew exactly what she was doing. In fact, I wholeheartedly believe she prayed us to each other. One patient conversation with God at a time, she is the brick and the mortar that is our whole life now.

When my phone rang and the caller ID showed unknown, my heart knew before my brain did. I just knew. I didn’t even hesitate to answer.

It didn’t take us long to find our way back to each other. Letters, calls, the easy rhythm of two people who had been speaking each other’s language for years. It came back like it had never left. Because honestly, for both of us, it probably hadn’t.

The day he was released, he went straight home, got in his car, and came to me.

I need you to understand something about that moment, because it matters deeply to the fabric of this story. Up until that day, Josh and I had never shared more than a few stolen kisses. That was the sum total of our physical history — church foyers and AC units and the particular restraint of two people loving each other across impossible circumstances.

But that day, freshly out, a man driven by the kind of purpose that only the promise of family can produce — he showed me. Carefully. Intentionally. With the full weight of everything we had built together over more than a decade of monopoly games and sprinklers turning into letters and visits and — waiting. He made love to me like he had been saving it up, because he had been.

We didn’t waste much time after that. He got a job. He got us an apartment. We started doing life together, for real, for the first time.

But Josh had been away a long time. And he was still wild. And those two things together are a particular kind of combustible.

The fighting came. The drinking came. And eventually it was just too much, too loud, too often.

After one particularly bad night — the kind that ended with me sneaking out a window after being told to go to bed — he told me we were done. I came back to the apartment to find this man throwing my things, and my son’s things, off the balcony into the lawn below.

I want to be fair to myself here: I was twenty years old. Hot-headed and passionate and absolutely not ready to let go of this man without a fight, literal or otherwise. He was actually the one thinking more clearly, which I could not see at the time and would not admit for years.

My heart was breaking wide open.

And I was angry.

So I did what twenty-year-old Moe decided was the appropriate response to the situation.

I cold clocked him.

We would not speak again for twenty years.

While I was busy marrying three more men and bringing another baby into the world, life kept moving for Josh too.

He got married. They had a daughter — Jade. She just turned nineteen, and she is my daughter now too. But we’ll get there.

Somewhere in that stretch of parallel lives, Josh became friends with my second husband, Erik. While they both knew they had been connected to me, neither knew the other’s full story. And let’s face it, Erik was never going to own up to what he’d done to me anyway. The world is small and strange and occasionally has a very dark sense of humor.

One afternoon they were out riding ATVs in the desert. Josh wrecked. Hard. When Erik realized Josh wasn’t behind him anymore, he turned back.

What he found was bad. Traumatic brain injury. Blood everywhere. The kind of scene that rearranges something in you just from witnessing it. Erik had recently become an EMT, and that training kicked in the way it’s supposed to. He got on the phone. He directed rescue crews to their location when an ambulance couldn’t reach them on its own. And he held pressure on Josh’s head wound for over an hour.

He saved his life.

I need to pause on that for a moment, because the irony of it still takes my breath away. Erik — a man who literally tried to take my life — is the reason Josh is alive today. The only silver lining of Erik’s existence as a human being is that he kept my soulmate in the world that day. I don’t know what to do with that theologically. I just know it’s true.

The years that followed were hard ones for Josh. He got strung out on heroin. He got sober from it. And then he got into trouble with the law again — this time for robbery. This time the sentence wasn’t three years.

He would miss most of his daughter’s childhood. He would miss the years you don’t get back, the ordinary Tuesday evenings and the school plays and the just-because phone calls. The kind of time that doesn’t make headlines but makes a life.

And Jade would grow up anyway, the way kids do, whether their parents are present or not.

I was scrolling Facebook the way you do when you’re not looking for anything in particular, just killing time, when the “People You May Know” section loaded.

And there was his face.

An AI generated photo sketch, grainy and slightly uncanny the way those things are. But it was him. I knew it immediately.

Years before that moment, I had googled his name and found what I found — a twenty year sentence, a case number, a man who I assumed I would never see again on the other side of anything. I had made my peace with that. Or something that looked like peace.

And yet. There he was. An active Facebook user, living and breathing and apparently findable.

I sent the friend request without thinking twice.

It was August 13th. The following morning, Josh would turn 42.

Almost immediately, the phone calls started. Hours and hours of them. Twenty years is a lot of life to catch up on, and we were determined to cover all of it. The things we’d missed, the things we’d survived, the people we’d become in the space between that cold clock and this phone call. We talked like people who had been waiting to talk.

He was in New Mexico, about four months out from finishing parole on the robbery charge. I was in Texas. The distance was inconvenient and completely irrelevant.

I flew him to me.

And we did exactly what I knew we would do. What we had always been going to do, if I’m being honest with myself. We fell into each other — purposefully, directly, without apology. Like two people who had finally stopped having reasons not to.

By November he was off parole and living with me.

By March we had moved into a new place together, something that was only ever ours, and Jade had decided to join us. Her and Hannah sharing a room and having something neither had ever experienced before — a sister.

I finally got it right.

Marrying Josh is the best decision I have ever made. The one I should have made first. The Monopoly game we kept abandoning and coming back to, for thirty years, until we finally sat down and finished it.

Lesson learned.

As is my way, I’m going to be honest with you.

It hasn’t been easy.

Josh came home to me less than two years out of prison. Twelve years is a long time to be inside, and the world doesn’t pause while you’re gone. He was institutionalized in ways that are hard to explain if you haven’t seen it up close — the hypervigilance, the difficulty with ordinary decisions, the way freedom can feel disorienting when you’ve been told when to eat and sleep and move for over a decade. He was still finding his footing. Still figuring out who he was outside of those walls. Still navigating complicated, tender dynamics with his parents, his grandparents, and Jade.

I want to be clear before I go further, because this matters: Josh and I don’t fight. Even when he drinks, we don’t fight. We have made a covenant vow to each other, a real one, the kind you mean all the way down. We don’t go to bed angry. We always say I love you. We communicate with each other more clearly and honestly than I have ever managed with anyone else in my life.

But drunk Josh is still scary.

Not because of what he does to me. Because of what he does to himself.

Over the next sixteen to eighteen months, he suffered three more head injuries. All of them avoidable. All of them serious. The boy has already had one traumatic brain injury — the ATV accident that Erik held together with his bare hands — and here we were, adding to the count.

The last one was the shift.

I won’t go into the full details here because that story deserves its own telling, its own space, its own post. What I will tell you is this: twelve staples in his head, and then rehab.

Today we have a really normal life.

I want to let that land for a second, because given everything — the prison sentences and the cold clocks and the ATV accidents and the twenty years of silence and the twelve staples and all the husbands in between — normal is not a small thing. Normal is the whole thing. Normal is what we were always trying to get to.

Jade starts college in the fall. She’s living with Joshua, her brother, now — and that’s better for her, better for her and her dad, whose relationship still has road to travel and work to do. We’re patient with that. Some things can’t be rushed, only tended.

Josh and I play board games as often as we can. Including Monopoly. We finish the games now.

We spend whole days in bed watching Netflix without an ounce of guilt. We take trips. We make plans for the future out loud, to each other, like people who believe they have one. We cook and laugh and exist in the particular quiet contentment of two people who fought very hard and waited very long to be exactly where they are.

But most importantly — every single morning, we get up and we choose each other. With arms wide open and full chests and the full knowledge of everything it took to get here.

We choose this. Together.

Every single day.