Part II

Now, I don’t want it to sound like we had this hard or terrible life together when this all started.

Despite not having financial stability or a career that provided us a comfortable life(yet), we were so happy. Everyday was a great day and the honeymoon stage lasted for a long time. Honestly, I still feel like we’re in that stage.

But life was happening fast. When I say it was a whirlwind, it like we were on the inside of a washing machine on the spin cycle. We got married in July which left us two months to get his green card application together. Thankfully our friends threw us a surprise dinner party the night we got married so we had managed to get enough funds from that to file the paperwork. But that meant I had to do it on my own because there was no way we could afford a lawyer. We also took over the house we were staying in. It had been used as storage for the last few years as she spent more time at her boyfriends home a block away. We were on a deadline to start paying the mortgage but also had to clean the entire thing out and find renters within a months time. When we began, I counted nine couches over three different living room areas so we had our work cut out for us. We had a lot going on to say the least.

Renato was making a little money each week from teaching, traveling to do some seminars and refereeing as much as he could. I had a couple of classes a week and a paying sponsor that gave me money for each medal I brought home while wearing his patch. If you read my Logan blog then you know that I had some funds for the season so I competed as much as I could.

2016 ended with a brown belt promotion for myself and a black belt promotion for Renato. While our competition seasons were still not perfect, it was close to it as far as results are speaking. We were going to as many competitions as we could but there was one that would change everything for us.

In November of 2017 Renato got a call from Rolles Gracie. He had one more spot left in an eight man Grand Prix on a new show called Kasai. If you know Renato’s saying, it was full of playboys and he was ready to put the porrada on them. It was five weeks away and he was still not a ‘no gi guy’ but we were going for it anyways. If there was money on the line, Renato always went hard. I also got a super fight on the card so we were training hard to make a statement.

We arrived in NYC two days before the tournament and it was safe to say Renato was the underdog of the bracket. I remember the morning of we went down stairs to eat breakfast. While we were sitting in the cafe waiting for our meals to come we looked up and there was snow falling. It was like a Christmas movie: I was in Time Square in December and there was snow falling. I ran outside and lifted my hands to the sky while snow flakes fell on my face and I cried. How did a Wai’anae girl end up here? I had a good feeling about us tonight.

Most of you know how this tournament went. It was the classic story of triumph. The underdog came in and stole the show. He beat up the playboys, his wife won too, the crowd went crazy and we took home the money. The next weekend we’d do the same at the No Gi Worlds in our first year as black belts. Renato would win 5 matches and I 3 and we’d go home with our first black belt world titles. 

We were living the dream.

When I started this particular blog I was writing it with the intention of speaking about supporting your partner/spouse. But how could I do that without first explaining where we started? Not all of you know where we started. And while I want to repeat the first line from this blog again, our life was not hard or terrible, it just wasn’t what it is today. We were happy, but we were so far from comfortable and it took a lot of being uncomfortable to get to the place we’re at now.

(Stay tuned for part 3, the final part, maybe)