Zeke and Terri: The Backstory
We first met when we were 10 in Castro Valley, CA where we both grew up. Zeke remembers meeting me and my identical twin sister but I don’t remember meeting him until we were back together in 7th grade. To say that we’ve known each other forever is an understatement.
We ‘went’ together in the 8th grade, first kissed somewhere at our junior high; we can’t agree on where but Zeke will claim that as the one who kissed fewer people, that his memory is more reliable. I’ll give him that one since I dumped him after about 6 weeks.
We were friends through high school, dating other people, and dated again when we were 21. That was short lived since we were at different colleges, three hours away from each other. The story is better if we say I dumped him again so we will go with that.
We dated again when we were 24 but I’d been in a long-term relationship and wasn’t ready for a commitment. And, yes, you guessed it, I dumped him again. If you are keeping count, Zeke was 0-3. Just in case this sounds creepy, it wasn’t. He was persistent, not a stalker.
When I was 25, I made a list of everything I wanted in a guy and Zeke checked all the boxes except he was the boy next door I’d dumped three times. Late in April, we went skiing in Tahoe, drank too much wine, and decided that we would date one more time and either we’d get married or our friendship would be over.
14 months later we eloped three months before our big wedding. We were both 26.
From the beginning, our marriage was challenged. We were so very different. I was an identical twin with a younger brother and he was an only child. Even though we were both born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and had a familar foundation, we were very different people, with very different needs, and very different issues. And we were young and ill-equipped to effectively manage the differences.
The following year, after I finished my MBA, we moved to San Francisco. Zeke became a police officer and I worked in biotech. We bought our first place in the Mission in San Francisco when we were 29 and two years later, had our first child, Adam.
Zeke’s shift work challenged our relationship leaving me as the primary caretaker while working full time. When Adam was one, I was laid off from my first biotech company but fairly quickly hired at another one. We moved down the Peninsula to Redwood City, CA (in Silcon Valley) and when Adam was three and a half, we had our second child (now named) Finn.
A year later I was laid off again and started consulting which I’ve been doing for the last 18+ years. Zeke left the police force when Adam finished kindergarten and stayed home with the kids for 12 years while I built my consulting company, became an angel investor, got my private and commercial helicopter ratings, launched a podcast and a blog, and wrote my first book.
Zeke was very active in the schools, PTOs, was on the board of Redwood City Education Foundation, co-led an initiative to pass a parcel tax to fund k-8 schools in Redwood City, and helped with fundraising for our kids’ schools as well as others in Redwood City. For a few years, he managed the woodshop amenity on the Facebook campus in Menlo Park for a friend’s company.
He coached baseball for Adam and I coached soccer for both kids and softball for Finn. Zeke took care of the house, cooked (and hated it), and I worked way too much. We didn’t invest in our relationship and marriage as we should have. We built up a great deal of resentment but made every effort to be parent together for our children.
We all screw up our kids but fortunately there are therapists to help with that.
Our son Adam went to college the fall before Covid hit and everything shut down. In March 2020., we picked him up from San Diego State a few days before the rest of the schools in California shut down and we hunkered down at home. It was a challenging time for all of us.
Then in January 2021, while we’d both danced around the topic of divorce, we were both finally ready to end the marriage. We were committed to remaining friends, even looking for places to buy in our neighborhood so we could keep the family together to some extent. The kids weren’t surprised; we’d been unhappy for a long time.
But, after seriously calling it quits, and the most hellish week of my life, we accidentally rekindled the spark that we’ve inadvertently cultivated into an amazing relationship. We will share more about our experience in other blogs and videos.
Adam graduated from college this past May and is living in Denver with his girlfriend. Our second child, Finn (they/them pronouns), is a sophomore at University of Vermont in Burlington so we are now empty nesters and making the most of our time without kids and our newly built relationship.
It’s not all sunshine and roses but every day we make a commitment to the relationship and to each other.
We continue to be very different people with very different interests. Zeke was quite reluctant to take on this new enterprise of sharing our travels and adventures but I think he’s warmed up to it. I’m more of a risk taker in some areas and a total chicken shit in others.
If you’d like to follow us individually we are both on Instagram (Zeke and Terri) and I have a YouTube channel, blog and website. I wrote my first book, Piloting Your LIfe, to inspire women over the age of 40 to design and live a life of our own creation. I’m working on my second book, Piloting Your LIfe 2: The Next Adventure. while angel investing, consulting for life sciences startups, traveling, and writing. When we aren’t traveling, Zeke is a sub in the Redwood City public K-8 schools (we are committed to education) and he helps local families and realtors with small house projects.
As for us, if we can inspire you to seek out your own adventures, then we have succeeded. And we if have entertained you, then we have exceeded our expectations.
Terri