Mark loves Peri: A 50 year love story

On the Cary Junior High School playground in 1972, Mark Meyer was hanging out with his friends when he noticed someone eavesdropping on them. Peri Barker from the grade below overheard a joke they were telling and couldn’t help but laugh.

“So I kept telling my story, and she kept laughing, and I’m like, ‘This is pretty cool, she’s liking my stuff. She thinks I’m funny,’” Mark says.

From the moment they noticed each other, Mark and Peri were inseparable, despite once being called into the principal’s office for holding hands on the playground. Mark’s dad drove them to the movies for their first date. He would ride his bike over to Peri’s house to see her.

The next year, though, he went off to high school at Thomas Jefferson, starting a period of on-again, off-again dating for the couple. Through their ups and downs, though, they always remained friends. During his senior year, Mark was dating someone else but still asked Peri to the prom, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend at the time.

When Mark went to play football at Texas Lutheran College — an over five hour drive from Dallas — Peri sent him off with a care package. The two were still seeing each other, but they also wanted each other to fully experience his first year of college and her final year of high school.

“We had decided that we weren’t going to try it. We didn’t say we can’t date anybody else. He was going off to college, and we knew that that’s OK,” Peri says.

At the time, the only way they could speak to each other was when Mark used the single dial up phone shared between his entire dorm. At the same time, Peri began dating Jeff Barker, a friend from W.T. White High School. Mark knew there was another guy in the picture, but as a teenager, he didn’t realize how serious they were.

“How could he measure up to me? I’m playing football!” he jokes.

Peri and Jeff graduated high school and started college at the University of Texas and Texas Tech, respectively. They got to know many people during their first year, but her relationship with Jeff began to grow. She let Mark know about this while visiting him at Texas Lutheran.

“She just kept bringing his name up. About the fifth time she brought his name up, I said, ‘It’s time for you to go back to the girls’ dorm,’” Mark says. “I walked her back to the dorm, and I didn’t even see her off the next day. I was so upset.”

During her junior year, Peri transferred to Texas Tech to be with Jeff. The couple graduated in 1981 and got married that November. Despite their breakup, Peri and Mark’s families remained close, so Mark attended the wedding with his mom.

“Horrible wedding … It was so long. It was like, you know, keep stabbing me,” he jokes. “But my mom walked up to her at the reception, in front of everybody, and goes, ‘You were supposed to be my daughter-in-law!’”

They all laughed it off, and after the wedding, it seemed like Mark and Peri were more or less going their separate ways. What they didn’t know at the time, however, was that they would always be part of each other’s lives.

The Barkers moved into an apartment together in Dallas, and soon, Peri was pregnant. One day, Jeff noticed a flyer from the HOA with Mark’s brother’s name on it. Mark and Peri had unknowingly moved into the same apartment complex. Their lives were busy, though, and before their paths could cross again, Peri gave birth. Two weeks later, their baby died, and the Barkers had to grieve their first tragedy.

“It’s really hard losing a child because people handle things differently, and you just don’t know how you’re going to deal with those circumstances,” Peri says. “But we both had a lot of faith in God, and we were able to get through it.”

Jeff’s job with Proctor and Gamble took their family all over, from Ohio to California to Maryland, with the Barkers even spending a couple years in Argentina. By this point, Peri and Jeff had three children together.

During this time, Mark was building a family of his own. After his first engagement ended, Mark says he started taking his life more seriously at 30 after getting into an accident with a drunk driver. He was living in San Antonio at the time and having fun driving his brand new sports car.

“Just before that wreck — you can call it the Holy Spirit, you can call it the angel, doesn’t matter — it said, ‘You need to put on your seatbelt.’ So I put on my seatbelt, and I had this horrific crash, and I realized that something saved me,” Mark says.

After the accident, he started going to church again and got baptized for the second time. Soon after, Mark started dating his first wife, Vicki. How did they meet? Through Peri’s brother, Kevin, of course. The couple eventually got married and had two children together but later got divorced.

In 2002, the Barkers moved back to Cincinnati from Argentina, and Jeff began experiencing some health problems. He was soon diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Jeff was able to manage the symptoms for the first three years after his diagnosis, but Peri says in the last four years of his life, the pain put Jeff in a wheelchair, and Peri had become his caregiver. After a difficult journey, Jeff died in 2009. “It was really difficult on the kids, but I think it made them stronger, more compassionate,” Peri says.

Through a mutual friend, Mark found out about Jeff’s death and reached out to offer his condolences to Peri. They exchanged a few emails, with Peri thanking him for reaching out. A few months later, when it came time to send out her daughter’s high school graduation announcements, she decided to send one to Mark.

In response, he sent back a gift. Along with a hand-carved cross he decorated with shells from the beaches of Puerto Rico — where he lived for a bit as a child — he included a message for her daughter.

“We don’t get to see God’s beauty in those seashells until they go through the storm and die. And similarly, others can’t see God’s beauty in us until after we die,” he wrote.

Peri once again reached out to thank him, and the two started communicating more regularly over email. In December, Peri told Mark she was coming home for Christmas and wanted to see him. They met up for lunch and brought their kids to meet each other.

After Christmas, Peri went back to Cincinnati, but she and Mark still kept in touch regularly. Eventually, she asked him what they were doing.

Mark says, “The email was saying, ‘What are you thinking? I have older kids. You have younger kids.’”

He took the night to think about it, and sent her an email back saying, “I don’t know what I’m thinking, but I say we give it to the Lord and see where he takes it. Because I don’t know you as a mature woman or a mature mother or a mature Christian, but I want to.”

Peri’s youngest son was still in high school, and she told Mark she wouldn’t move anywhere until he graduated. Mark told her he already knew that. The two started dating long distance at the beginning of 2010, with modern technology making it much easier than their first go-round in the 1970s. Every night, they would Skype each other at 9 p.m. In October of that year, Mark went to visit Peri in Cincinnati.

“All my friends, they saw what our family had gone through, and they were so happy that I was happy, and they really liked him,” she says.

In 2013, Peri’s son graduated from high school and started at Texas Tech. Peri moved back to Dallas to be with Mark. They got married that Christmas in a small ceremony in the Dominican Republic that brought together all of their kids into one family.

These days, four of their five kids are married, and all of them live in Texas. Peri and Mark are now Mimi and Pops to three grandchildren. Peri’s daughter still has the cross Mark gave her, and it hangs in her own daughter’s bedroom.

Looking back, Mark admits he “blew it” that day with Peri at Texas Lutheran, but they both acknowledge that everything worked out the way it was supposed to.

“It was meant to be where our lives went and how they came back together. I was supposed to be in that place of taking care of Jeff and having my three wonderful kids, and he had his two wonderful kids,” Peri says.

Today, Mark and Peri live in Coppell and spend their time traveling with each other and their children.

“We may not be finished with tragedies, but … like Romans 8:28, ‘God works all things for good, for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose,’” Mark says.