Love, And Family, Keep A Couple Together
It was overwhelming for Marika Esteves to meet everyone in Isaiah Smith’s family at once. His mother is one of 10 children; his father had 12 siblings. “I keep meeting someone every time we go to a family event,” Marika says.
Meeting Isaiah was low key. “I was sitting with my best friend on this church stoop. … He knew her best friend,” Isaiah says. When Marika walked by with her best friend, the two best friends introduced Marika and Isaiah.
Marika and Isaiah were both sophomores at Johnson and Wales College in Providence; she was hospitality major, he was an electrical engineering student.
“I was the only one with a car” on that day in September of 2005, Isaiah says. “I used to give Marika and her best friend rides to the grocery story once in a while. She had her own little style about her which I really liked.” He never said a word to Marika. “I had to build myself up.”
Marika told her friend she liked Isaiah, and when Isaiah heard that, he began talking to her on their grocery trips.
As the semester progressed, they began meeting on the church steps where they had been introduced, and later walked to a nearby mall for coffee or studied in the library. In January, they made their dating “official.”
“Toward the end of the school year, I met her parents,” Isaiah says.
“They interviewed him,” Marika says. “Later in the summer I brought him home” to Glastonbury, her hometown. “They thought he was a nice guy.”
Marika and Isaiah worked in Providence that summer. Isaiah’s family, including second and third cousins from Bridgeport, went to the fireworks every summer at Seaside Park, which is when Marika met them. “Since day one my mother always referred to her as her daughter-in-law,” Isaiah says.
Just before their junior year began, “We found out we were having our first daughter,” Isaiah says. “We grew up pretty fast.”
He returned to school and worked full-time in a paid internship at a ring manufacturer. Marika took the school year off and worked full-time for Sweet and Savory Creations, preparing food and serving occasionally with the catering company her godmother owned.
“It was difficult the first couple of months,” after their daughter, Jaydn, was born, Marika says. They lived with her family and Isaiah would come down on the weekends.
“It was challenging. We had a strong core to help us out,” Isaiah says, grateful for their families’ support. He worked for the state Department of Transportation during the summer, and found his own apartment in his senior year, which enabled Marika to visit with the baby on the weekends.
When Isaiah graduated in 2009, he returned to the DOT, and through their leadership program, he met a man who owned an electronic manufacturing company. Isaiah began interning with the company in Waterbury without pay and washing dishes for the catering company as needed at night.
When the manufacturer told Isaiah he was looking to hire someone, Isaiah accepted his offer. “I was fortunate to get a job in my field. … At the time, 2009, there weren’t a lot of jobs.”
A year later, Marika, Isaiah and the baby moved into an apartment in Manchester. Isaiah commuted to Waterbury for three years before switching to a firm in Seymour for two years.
During that time, the catering business closed, and Marika earned her Professional Baking certificate at Manchester Community College to become a pastry chef at a Glastonbury bakery.
In June 2013, their daughter Parker was born, and in October, Isaiah became a sales application engineer for Speedline Technology, Inc. in Franklin, Mass. The company is 80 miles away, but he primarily works from home when he is not traveling the eastern U.S., Mexico and Brazil, to demonstrate and advise clients on optimizing their equipment. “I travel twice a month,” for a week each trip.
“Marika is the backbone of the family. She does a lot and she’s amazing at it. … She has dinner prepped every night. She does homework with Jaydn. The lunches are made for school,” Isaiah says.
“I have everything put together. I have everything under control,” Marika says. “I get the kids ready in the morning. He gets them ready for bed. He does the dishes, too.”
Marika gets Jaydn on her magnet-school bus at 7:10 a.m., drops Parker at her mother’s house, and goes to work at her new job as an office manager for a construction company. “I’m learning as I’m going. It’s very different. … I still do baking for family and friends.”
They spend the weekends at Jaydn’s soccer, karate, dance and voice classes, doing “family workouts” with their children outdoors or yoga and plyometrics indoors at the home they bought in Manchester last December.
Marika ran cross country and track in high school and is training to run her second half-marathon in Hartford on Oct. 10. Isaiah, who played basketball and baseball in school, is on a flag football team.
On July 5, 2014, they finally took a breather to get married. Isaiah took Marika out to dinner in 2013 on the January anniversary of when they started dating, and toward the end, her parents, their daughter, and his best friend Roger, who introduced them, joined them while he proposed.
“I was not expecting it. It was out of nowhere,” Marika says.
“We’ve been together a lot of years. I always felt like we were married,” says Isaiah, who wanted to make sure they had enough money for their wedding and honeymoon by themselves in the Dominican Republic.
When Isaiah is not traveling, “We sit down as a family and have dinner together,” he says. “We always make sure we kiss each other and say we love you,” when they part for the day.
They attend each other’s family events, too, including the Juneteenth celebration of The Amistad Center for Art and Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, a tradition with Marika’s family every year.
“Family,” Isaiah says, “is very important.”
Copyright © 2015, Hartford Courant
Leave a Reply