If you know me personally, you might know a little bit about what is going on in my life. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Leigh Wolfe. I am 22 years old but have gone through more life milestones than other American girls my age. What do I mean by that? I am going to give you a very brief synopsis of what the past year has looked like for me.

I’ll need to start by telling you about my home-away-from-home, Wofford College. Odds are, if you aren’t from South Carolina (or maybe Georgia or North Carolina), you have never heard of Wofford. It is a very small (1,600 students) liberal arts school in Spartanburg, SC. Wofford is so, so special to me. It is where my parents met (on move-in day their freshman year in the 80s). It is the school whose football games I grew up going to (despite their small size, they are a D1 school). It is where I met my very best friends. Most importantly, it is where I met the love of my life, Jay.

I’ll go into detail about our love story in a later blog post, but for now I’ll give a little summary. Jay and I met in the beginning of my freshman year and his junior year at Wofford, but we didn’t go on our first “date” (if you can call his fraternity’s spring formal to Myrtle Beach a date) until the following March. Due to complicated circumstances, we didn’t end up officially becoming boyfriend and girlfriend until October of my sophomore year.

We’re going to skip some of the in-between and fast forward two years. Jay is 24, has graduated, and has been working in the real world for about a year and a half. I am a 21-year-old senior in college. It’s the day after Thanksgiving 2017, and we’re at my parent house in Beaufort, SC. We had talked about getting married very seriously already, but that didn’t stop me from being surprised when when he got down on one knee and proposed! We knew that we wanted to be together forever. I was graduating in the spring, and he was planning on starting law school that following fall. We were both going to be starting new chapters in our lives, so it made perfect sense to start them together. We began to plan our dream wedding for June 30th, 2018!

The Plot Twist

You know how we can do all we can to try to plan our lives the way we think we want them, but that ultimately God has a bigger and better plan for us? Well folks, that is exactly what happened to us when we found out in early January that I was 9 weeks pregnant (shout out to our Engagement Baby, as we call her). While we were very shocked at first, we were almost immediately overcome with joy.

At this point in our story, Jay’s mom had been diagnosed with cancer for about a year and a half. She was extremely happy about the news of a grand baby and even picked out her grandma name, Mimi. She wasn’t the only excited one. The amount of support that we got from our friends and family was huge, which made the whole process that much easier.

It didn’t take long for Jay and me to decide that we needed to move up the wedding from June 30th to March 31st. Remember, I was still a college student at this point, and we needed to pick a date that worked with my spring break, so that we could go on a real honeymoon. Again, I’ll go in depth in a later blog post, but our wedding (although downsized from 300 people to 100 people and thrown together in two months’ time) was the most beautiful and perfect day of my life, and I wouldn’t change anything about it.

That being said, life wasn’t a complete fairytale. Jay’s mom’s cancer began to progress rapidly after the wedding. Being a second semester senior in college while being married, pregnant, and having a sick mother in law was extremely difficult. Jay and I weren’t living together, because he was working for the Governor of South Carolina in Columbia, while I was still living on a college campus an hour and a half away in Spartanburg. My friends were so amazing and supportive the entire time, but it didn’t change the fact that they were living the lives of 22-year-old college seniors, which was not at all the life I was living. There were many nights that I would call Jay or my mom crying, because I didn’t want to be studying for a test at 1a.m., while pregnant, with my husband living an hour and a half away from me. 

We received bad news from Jay’s mom’s doctors shortly after we returned from our honeymoon. They were out of treatment options, and she didn’t have much time left. My college finals began on May 14th, and I was going to graduate on May 20th. It was the week before that we realized that Jay’s mom didn’t have much longer. I couldn’t focus on studying. I knew that as Jay’s wife, it was my job, first and foremost, to be there with him during this time. I talked with the Dean of Students at Wofford, along with my amazing professors who already knew all about my unique situation (perks of going to a small school where your teachers become your friends and supporters), and I was able to walk at graduation and take my finals the week after.

Jay’s mom passed away on May 16th. It was easily the most difficult thing I have ever gone through. I loved Jay’s mom, and not just because she was my mother in law. I really loved her and was inspired by the person she was. People who knew her could tell you ways that God used her as a tool to impact their lives. There were many times when I would be trying to leave after visiting with Jay and his family for a weekend, and I would end up staying for 2 extra hours, because his mom and I couldn’t stop talking. However, as much as I loved her, my heart obviously broke for Jay more than it broke for myself. Seeing the person who I love more than anything on Earth hurting the way he did made me sick to my stomach. I wanted so badly to take his pain away in any way that I could, but all I could do was just hold him and be there for him.

As upset as we all were with Jay’s mom’s passing, we couldn’t help but be aware of everything that God had done for us. We thought that we were receiving a blessing by getting pregnant already, but we could have never known exactly how special that blessing was. As I said before, Jay and I were originally planning our wedding for June 30th. His mom would not have been there if we didn’t get pregnant. Instead she was able to be there. She and Jay got to share a mother/son dance that day. She knew that we were going to have a girl, and she even knew what we were going to name the baby – Hollingsworth Lee Wolfe. Hollingsworth is my middle name, named after my dad’s grandfather. Lee was Jay’s mom’s name. I know that I said I would keep this post short, and it is already way longer than I anticipated, but I wanted you all to really know me.

I completed all of my finals at the end of May and am a proud graduate of Wofford College with degrees in accounting and Spanish. Jay and I moved from Columbia, SC to Durham, NC. We had our beautiful baby girl on July 27th (2 and a half weeks before her due date). Jay is in law school at Duke, and we are figuring out this whole parenting thing one day at a time. Our beautiful Hollings is now 5 months old.

Why Blog?

There are a couple of reasons why I want to blog. As you have realized, my life is pretty unique at the moment. I’m young. I’m a mom. Jay is in school, and I am taking care of a baby. To be extremely honest, we have no idea what we’re doing, and that’s okay! We will be taking on life one day at a time. I want to blog about our lives quite simply because people have asked me to. People who know us know a lot about what we are going through, and genuinely care to keep up with us.

You also might not know us personally, and you might not care about our lives that much, and that’s okay too! There is still a place for you here. I won’t only be using this blog as a space for life updates. I’m 22. Not just most, but all of my friends are currently living lives that are very different than mine. They are starting their first real jobs. They are living on their own in big cities. They are going out. They are only responsible for themselves (other than a couple of fur babies). That being said, I can’t tell you how many of them have said things like, “When I plan my wedding, I am going to ask you so many questions.” Or, “When I’m pregnant, I’m going to have no idea what to do, so is it cool if I call you all the time?” Hopefully I can use this blog as a space to share any tips and tricks that I pick up while living my best mom/wife life. This is just the beginning, so I honestly don’t know where this will take me, but I am inviting all of you to figure it out with me!

Cheers,

Leigh