Kicking this all off

A Different Drum

What do you get when you take two very visionary, passionate, spontaneous, headstrong people and smash them together into a marriage?  You get a very interesting, unpredictable, sometimes unreasonable yet adventurous life that marches to a different drum.

My husband, Taylor Mesple, and I, Rebecca Mesple, are those two people.  This blog is called "A Different Drum", and it will summarize the past, highlight the present, and share the future as it happens.  

Many thoughts and facts will be presented in a nutshell.  I live in a nutshell.  I often express in incomplete thoughts.  Give me the bottom line.  The process hinders completion.  I detest re-runs and love a new plot.  I want to be Lara Croft, not Edith Bunker.  My visionary-ness is unpredictable and active.  My husband's is not.  His visionary-ness is ruminating, savoring, contemplating, and full of warmth.  He watches the same season of "Key West" five hundred times.  He lives on "The Office" re-runs like a Koala lives on Eucalyptus.  Repetition paints a backdrop for Taylor's different drum life.  He is my Dustin Hoffman in "Rainman".  

How have these two paradigms come together in harmony these past ten years of our very interesting and awesome marriage?  I suppose, in a nutshell, great minds think alike just not in the same way.  We have become two vastly different cogs with vastly different jobs in the same machine.  To make our machine even more complex, we now have three children in the mix.  Children bring out the best and worst of your being.  I have said things to them I never thought I would say.  For instance, in my low moments, "don't make mommy tan your hide like they did way back then".  That comment was met with blank stares, completely ineffective.  Or, the deeply profound, "Seriously?  Seriously.  Seriously!  Like I said, I speak in incomplete - hey, I just thought of something.  Not the best approach with children.  They need steady.  They need calm.  They do not need Lara Croft.  They need Rainman.  That is where Taylor shines.  In this journey of a different drum, he is steady.  Often very headstrong, but steady.  We are two cogs in this machine.  Now back to the purpose of "A Different Drum".

Our family, starting on August 11, 2001, (our awesome wedding date) has never followed convention.  Ironically, we are very traditional in our beliefs, but very unconventional.  We got married in a bar called "The Soiled Dove".  I believe that is an old-fashioned, western movie type name for a prostitute.  Gulp.  Ironic, also, considering the fact that we are full-on born again Christians!  If I really dig deep into the symbolism of the situation (which is much more Taylor's territory), I would say it is a perfect start to our life together.  We both came from very difficult and rocky pasts, filled with soiled choices.  Then we came together with a deep desire and movement to let all things be made new!  Amen!

Back to "A Different Drum".  Our life together started on a different path and ever continues to be on one, with our wonderful kids bumping along for the ride.  We have lived in rentals, friend's master bedroom (with friends having moved to a small bedroom to help us), a teeny 700 square foot cabin in the mountains of Colorado with Elk fighting in our backyard, Taylor's parents' house, an in-law cottage in swanky Falmouth Maine, a gang-ish neighborhood in Maine, a middle of nowhere beautiful 2-acre home in Maine, a winter rental Island cottage 30 feet from deep water ocean in Maine, and soon...  if all things collide in God's realm as my very scary 40th birthday approaches, we shall be taking our three kids and our different drum selves to moving across the world to Australia.  AUSTRALIA!

This blog will be about that process.  Come journey with me and my Lara Croft alter ego into the vastly unknown next step on our journey to "A Different Drum".