Behold, the people behind the messy parenting. Our first date was 15 years ago today.

15 years is a long time to live with someone - anyone - particularly a boy from Wisconsin who left a giant piece of wood in the closet that I banged my foot up against today. This is how we roll. He the woodworker and I the writer, and I know if our habits were reversed and computers no longer existed, he'd be yelling at me for all the paper cuts he'd receive from the journals and scraps I'd leave all over the place.

But the writing - like the handcrafted furniture and toys and frames that dot our life across two continents - is about us.

Two broken people who love hard amidst the daily mess, and the little people who inhabit the stories.

It's not clean and it's not perfect. But I can live with that.

Where does your story begin?