Cazandra and Joe MacDonald share their 37-year journey together, from a chance meeting in college to raising two sons with severe hemophilia. They reflect on parenting with chronic illness in the family, the commitment that has kept their marriage strong, and the music and laughter that have carried them through. Read more in their columns, Hemophilia 24/7 and In the Twinkling of an Eye.
Transcript
Well, hi! I’m Cazandra Campos-MacDonald, known as Caz. I have two sons with severe hemophilia living in New Mexico, and I am in the world as a hospice chaplain.
My name is Joe MacDonald. I am the lead pastor at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Cazandra: So Joe and I went to college together, and one of my roommates, Charlotte, Joe and her were best friends. I had never met him until one fated night.
Joe: I was having my 24th birthday and depressed that I was almost a quarter of a century old. And so Charlotte says, “Well, let’s go to this actually classical bar and drink our sorrows away.”
I spotted this gorgeous woman playing an oboe on stage, and I’m like, “OK, who is this?” We proceeded to have more than one drink, and she thought I was the most obnoxious person she had ever met. Told Charlotte never to bring me around her again.
Cazandra: So see, you know, we went to a Christian university and learned how to drink there — so, yeah.
So we went to Margarita Monday, and then I’m like, “OK, you know, he’s not too bad.”
Joe: I had another friend who is a musician, and Cazandra kind of —
Cazandra: Oh, yeah.
Joe: She wanted me to hook her up with him.
Cazandra: Yeah.
Joe: And so I said, “OK, I’ll cook this four-course dinner. I’ll kind of get you together.”
Two days before that dinner, I cooked enough for two people, called Cazandra asking, “Where’s Charlotte? I’ve got this food, I don’t want to go to waste.” And she said, “Oh, I’ll come over and eat with you. And so we sat and talked, and we realized —”
Cazandra: And listened to some Ella Fitzgerald. And I’m like, “There’s more to this guy than I thought.”
Joe: Yes. And so we realized we don’t want to set each other up with anybody else but each other. And that was 37 years ago, almost. Yeah.
Cazandra: Yeah. And I was 19 when we started dating, thinking about our youngest son and him being 19. I’m like, oh my gosh. You know, it’s been a lifetime of changed careers and paths and kids and chronic illness. And it’s been amazing.
So when in 1996, we had our first son and so immediately went to the internet, which was a little scary at that time. I mean, it still is. And we saw the statistics of how couples who had kids with chronic illness just divorced.
But, boy, I tell you what, it was almost like the minute we found out about that diagnosis and didn’t even know, we just got together in a way that, I still look back and go, man, two young kids at that time could have easily said, “I’m done with this. You can deal with that.”
And I think the thing that has kept us going is always laughter. You want to tell them about the songs?
Joe: We have made up so many songs from Broadway, you know —
Cazandra: Or the Spice Girls
Joe: Or the Spice Girls. Julian dancing.
It was very evident that Julian was a musician from me carrying him over to the warming station when he was born. I started singing to him, and he just stopped, stopped the crying and everything, and looked up. We would play some of his favorite songs in the car that he absolutely loved, and at 2 years old, he was just singing and singing.
After the song ended, we ranked him, and we would say, “Well, that was a 9.8, son.”
“No, Dad, no, Dad — I got a 10, I got a 10.”
So we had to hear it over again. And he went for those points, and we eventually gave him a 10.
Cazandra: And music throughout this journey, making up lyrics to the Spice Girls songs about infusing and —
Joe: Yeah
Cazandra: And, you know, just fun things. It’s something that has kept us going.
And a lot of people are like, how can you laugh about things? It’s like, well, if you don’t, what is the result? It’s just too important. We still have people, that we hadn’t seen since college, for a long time, still go, “Are y’all still married?”
Cazandra: “Really? You’re still married?”
Joe: The one thing no one ever got, the one thing we didn’t even realize, actually, until Julian was born, is we may have been two totally different people, but we had the same idea of our commitment to family.
And that has been the glue that kept us together, because immediately when Julian was diagnosed, it was not, how am I going to deal with this? It’s like, how are we going to move through the world? What are we going to do? And we’ve taken that stance through our marriage. It’s been an us and not an individual.