A love that passed the test of time... ~Kethria~

Tested love

She was 15, he 35 when she got pregnant

By SHEILA TOOMEY Anchorage Daily News

BIG LAKE -- She was a pregnant 15-year-old ninth-grader. He was a 35-year-old disabled vet. Other people called their love a crime, including, unfortunately, a prosecutor and a judge. Even sympathetic observers scoffed at George and Lisa Micheaux's "happy ever after" talk.

But guess what. They did it. He did his prison time for sexual abuse of a minor, then they got married and lived happily ever after.

So far.

The Micheauxes celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary on Wednesday by renewing their vows at a hillside ceremony overlooking Loon Song Lake, north of Wasilla. Their four children posed for pictures, and 3-year-old Cole, the youngest, insisted on daddy holding him as the Rev. Gerald Silliman, who married them in 1993, did it again.

"I don't have to do all those promises this time, do I?" George joked.

About 25 friends watched and applauded. Then everyone dug into lasagna and salad and cake and talked about plumbing. George and Lisa are finishing a half-built three-story cedar home on the lake and have reached the part where water has to be brought in from a well. They haul water now and use a portable potty, but the sheetrocking is almost finished and the tub is waiting on the porch for installation.

Ten years ago, Lisa was an angry teenager with a history of running away from home, in love with a man 20 years her senior. She got pregnant and needed her parents' permission to marry. Instead, her father reported the relationship to police. It was very illegal, and the couple knew it.

George eventually pleaded no contest to second-degree sexual abuse, and Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler sentenced him to a year in prison plus probation. Cutler split the jail time in two so he could attend the birth of their child and marry Lisa.

And that's what happened.

"It's gone by so fast," Lisa said. "It's amazing. ... It seems like 10 years has been a year."

It took five years for people to stop asking, "How are you and George doing?" she said. "It was like, 'God, can you not see?' "

George said he's never regretted marrying such a young woman. Lisa is amazing, he said, hard-working and a good mother. "The kids have always been done good." While in prison, he had the letters LOVE and LISA tattooed across his knuckles, and the sentiment still holds, he said. "Heck, we probably love each other more now than we did then."

"I've kept him completely out of trouble," Lisa said. "He is utterly 100 percent still in love with me. It's really cool."

Lisa figures she and George have shown doubters how wrong they were, but what happened 10 years ago still rankles. "I felt it was unfair," she said. Her family, the whole justice system -- they were all against her. "There was no one there for me. Everyone was trying to make him look like a bad guy."

What did she see back then in a man so much older, and not, with all due respect, some hot hunk?

"I have no idea," Lisa said. "I never believed in true love or soul mates. But when I looked in his eyes, I knew it. I thought to myself: You've got to be kidding, ... but when you fall in love, you can't help who you fall in love with."

Now that she's 26, an older woman, is she worried about losing George to a younger rival? No way, she said. "His first three wives were all his age or older, so it's not like he has a thing for young girls."

"He's my sweetheart," Lisa said with a big grin. "He's the big huge teddy bear that wants to act tough. When I met him, he hated cats. Now we have three cats and they're his."

George, 46, says he spent his youth as a special ops soldier in the U.S. Army, chasing drug runners around Laos and Cambodia after the Vietnam war, looking for hidden POW camps that might hold missing American GIs. He's been shot a couple of times, lost a lot of intestine, contracted a bone disorder, and remains on extended medical leave from the Army, living on disability, he said.

Financial problems have plagued the couple all their married life, Lisa said. The family lived for a while in a 16-by-24 cabin that was "so cute, we loved it," according to her. "We can make the best of anything, I'm telling you. We have awesome personalities. You have to laugh every day."

The Micheauxes' two middle children are daughters, pretty miniatures of their mother when she was young. After the births of Angalee, 8, who has already asked to get her bellybutton pierced, and Renee, 7, Lisa figured that was enough, so "George got fixed" and the couple settled down to raise the kids they had. While they were living for a while in Tennessee, George's home base in the Army, the mother of a friend who died in combat in 1975 asked if they would be willing to have a child from sperm her son left frozen when he went off to fight. The sperm bank was wanting to discard it, Lisa said.

The dead buddy was an only child with no children of his own and his mother wanted to keep the blood line alive, George said. The first plan was for Lisa to be a surrogate mother, artificially inseminated, then give the baby to the grandmother. "But Lisa said, 'If I do this, he's mine,'" according to George. And that's how they got Cole, a gift to both families, they said.

"There's been a lot of drama in the past," George said, watching his 10-year-old son George III jump his bike off the side of the raised porch. He meant before he met Lisa.

"I like my life here."

Ten years ago, people didn't understand how sincere their love was, he said. "I think it'll last forever."

http://www.adn.com/front/story/3760833p-3787139c.html

The link has pictures of the happy couple...

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