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In December 2007, our little family grew. Josh and I adopted a rescue puppy named Juna, a tiny white puffball who quickly stole our hearts. She was part husky and part collie, a dainty girl with pointy ears and bright eyes rimmed with dark fur. Tucker seemed pleased to have a companion, though Juna quickly learned that she could herd her new big brother by jutting her rear end in his direction.
Co-parenting the puppy with Josh was both fun and challenging. I played the role of puppy chaser. The fence posts were wider than the puppy, and thus, our yard was susceptible to jail breaks. Most nights she found a way out, so I’d throw on some shoes and sprint down the icy street—sans coat or hat—until I could finally corner Juna and scoop her up. Josh played the role of fence mender, and he spent a good deal of time freezing his ass off in the yard, reinforcing the fence with chicken wire.
Our new home and the addition of Juna made the holiday season extra special. In mid-December, we threw a housewarming party for just about everyone we knew: moms and dads, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, picnic leaguers, book clubbers, college friends, coworkers, lots of kiddos, and even an extra puppy. Our little rambler was packed to the brim, and I’m sure that the laughs, the shrieks, and the puppy yips and yaps could be heard down the block.
Josh and I may as well have been married, what with a Christmas card, a big tree (which Juna joyfully knocked down after first eating a string of lights), and the challenge of celebrating with both of our families. The weekend before Christmas, we did “Sibling Christmas” with my brothers and their significant others at Mancini’s Char House, an old-school supper club in St. Paul. Christmas Eve was spent with Josh’s family for fondue, a gift exchange, and gluttonous cookie consumption. On Christmas Day, we joined my family at Andy and Hilary’s, where we ate ham and rice pudding, showered Ethan with toys, and played my mom’s holiday-themed word games.
The festivities continued through the end of the year. A few days before New Year’s Eve, a bunch of friends gathered at Brad and Missy’s big suburban house for the first-ever “winter picnic league.” Brad and Missy were a fun-loving couple with a cute baby boy named Louis and a recently constructed gingerbread trailer park in their kitchen. They often came up with creative party ideas, and this was no exception. It was bitter cold outside, and both sledding and grilling burgers were on the docket.
While the guys were out on the patio burning stuff, the women gathered in the living room to gab and keep track of the two babies. In addition to Louis, the junior picnic league roster included Spencer and Melissa’s daughter, Piper. Earlier in the evening, Chris and Corri had announced that they were expecting their first baby, so the chitchat naturally gravitated toward all things baby.
I hung back a little and listened to birth stories and nursing advice. I was so happy for the moms and the mom-to-be, but I felt more than a little wistful. None of them knew that I’d had fertility issues. Heck, most of them didn’t even know that I was divorced, and I certainly hadn’t mentioned that my biological clock was ready to, oh, explode.
On the way home that night, I drove slowly, clutching the steering wheel and trying to be strong as big tears rolled down my cheeks. I cried in silence for a few minutes before trying to speak, and when I did, I couldn’t form an intelligent sentence. I could only muster a whimpered “I want to have a baby.” And between sniffles, “So bad.” And Josh took my hand in the kindest way and said, “You will, baby. You will.”
After Josh dodged my efforts to talk about getting married, I let a week go by before not-so-subtly asking him what I really wanted to know: What the hell was he thinking? Rather than talk about marriage, we got into a discussion about our communication styles, and I learned that springing things on Josh and expecting an immediate response was a fool’s errand. He needed time to process. A few days later, he finally got back to me about the commitment issues, and frankly, he hit this one out of the park. He composed a letter called “State of Love and Trust” and posted it on his blog. I was floored. He wrote:
Dear Primary Love Interest,
I know I don’t express myself emotionally very well. I am a man, after all. Granted that some men are better than others (screw you, Hugh Grant—you f’ed it up for all of us), and I may be skewing towards one end of the continuum, but most men seem to be somewhat poor performers in this category. Probably because we talk about football and donuts when we get together with each other, and with the exception of Homer Simpson, there is not a great deal of emotion tied to donuts. I realize it’s not the most ideal trait in a life partner. Rest assured, though…I’m working on it.
As you queried the other night, yes, this has indeed been a common motif in relationships in my past. And yes, I am fully aware that a good relationship requires care and some degree of “work” (trust me, I’m FULLY aware). But that is a tricky thing, you know? How much is work, and how much is “work” and how much is Work, and what is the significance of each? And when it is incredibly easy to be with someone, as I feel about me and you, it also becomes easy to get complacent and take certain things for granted….like saying you look hot in that tube top, or no those jeans fit you perfectly and don’t at all make your butt look big. Unless that’s the look you’re going for—I don’t know what’s “in” these days because my Cosmo subscription lapsed. Regardless, I know that the way I feel about you means that I would do any amount of work/”work”/Work to make things…er…work. Clarification: I KNOW things will always work between us…I have Trust in that…but I would do these things to make us both as happy as we deserve since we so directly and dynamically influence each other’s happiness now. P.S. I don’t use caps lock and capital letters frivolously.
I’m not a good enough amateur psychologist to really hash out what from my childhood made me this way (I have a few hunches, at best), but I think it’s what made me a good athlete—that never too high and never too low temperament. And having male roommates for my entire life didn’t help but hammer home these habits. Especially the silent ones. It might seem odd, but it’s always been a positive attribute in my life, an easy way to be, until now, and so the habit is hard to break given the decades of positive reinforcement it has received. Just remember that this is the first time I’ve spent more than several nights a week and the weekends with someone with pleasantly different anatomy consecutively, and it takes a little getting used to. I am, however, REALLY enjoying the constantly clean house and that there is ACTUALLY food in the fridge all the time. But please know that it is a process and that change is sometimes slow and don’t be afraid to help shove it along whenever you feel you need too. My easy-going temperament also means that I readily absorb helpful criticism, as well. Lucky you!
It’s odd, because women get painted with the “moody” label, but I am too, though it’s often really hard to detect on the surface. With me, it particularly applies to being in the mood to talk about serious things like new pets or kids or marriage or State of the Relationship type stuff. Most of the time when you bring them up, I might make a joke or two, and not really engage in the conversation in any great depth. I seem to put it off ’til later, but later doesn’t always come soon enough. Part of it is that I’m not aware ’til later (when you make me aware) that you are really serious about talking about these things in depth. Part is that when I’m home I’m trying to mentally decompress from work and life and these topics seem very Serious and are daunting and require many arbitrary mental energy units to address. Make no mistake, I’m not trying to avoid these conversations. In my head, I have a vague notion of “crossing those bridges when we come to them” and that the whole buying a house together situation should answer some of them for you already. I’m sorry for not communicating those assumptions of mine frequently enough, but I know we’ll get to all those questions and their answers eventually, and I’m still learning what you need and how to provide you with it.
Like I said…I’m working on it.
The autumn months of 2007 brought much happiness for me and Josh, but a few growing pains, too. We both loved home ownership, and even Tucker the Lab mix was jazzed. He had a beautiful new yard to rule, complete with a plentiful population of rabbits. Together, Tucker and I learned the neighborhood the same way I’d always explored new territory—on foot. Whenever I got out my running shoes, the dog turned into a complete maniac, zigzagging around the living room making heinous noises.
Josh spent a good deal of time out in the garage, making his own ruckus with various saws. He insisted on putting a television and an old loveseat out there, basically so he could drink beer in style while taking breaks from his woodworking projects. “Who needs to hang out in the garage when we have two TVs in the house?” I asked. Clearly, that was a stupid question. You’d think that having three brothers would have prepared me to understand men.
Speaking of my brothers, Andy and Hilary recruited a huge group of family and friends to participate in the Brain Injury Association’s Walk for Thought in October. Their son, Ethan, had recovered fully from the Shaken Baby Syndrome injury he’d suffered in the spring. Team Ethan raised more funds than any other team, and we had a great time walking around St. Paul’s Como Park on a crisp Saturday morning. It was one of many days that reinforced my decision to move home to Minnesota.
Yes, moving home had been a good move on many fronts. In November, Josh and I celebrated the first anniversary of our final “pseudo date,” the turning point in our relationship. One year in, our biggest problem was my own discomfort with the fact that we didn’t have quite the same—how shall I put this—heat that we’d had before moving in together. It’s not that I minded the rhythm we’d settled into. I was actually fine with it, and Josh assured me that it was OK—natural, even. I tried to take his word for it, because what did I know about normal?
As Josh and I became increasingly comfortable sharing our lives, I realized something that came as a bit of a surprise to me—I did want to make it more official than a mortgage. Right after my divorce, I’d wondered if marriage would ever feel necessary to me again. After all, what did it really mean? But the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that yes, I still believed in marriage, and I wanted that for us.
One Saturday night around Thanksgiving, I couldn’t help but blurt it out. Josh was cooking up a two-hour culinary masterpiece, and I was drinking a glass of wine and pretending to be willing to help. We were flirting and kissing between veggie chopping and sautéing, and I just had to say something, right then and there. “You know,” I teased, “I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to get married again, but you’re starting to make me sure, especially if you keep cooking like this.”
I told him that I didn’t want to get married right away, but that I would want to eventually. Josh kind of laughed it off like I wasn’t really serious, and—Lord, help me—I had no idea what to make of it. I let it drop, and we went on to have a wonderful late-night dinner, but the conversation left me feeling insecure. Maybe it had been a mistake to move in together—you know, that whole why-buy-the-cow thing. A dreadful analogy that clashes with my feminist sensibilities, but still. The last thing I needed was to get into a situation where I wanted more than he did, but maybe I already had.
One year and two days after I left my ex-husband, I sat in a Minneapolis real estate office signing stacks of documents with Josh, my long-time friend turned delightful someone more. Everything had fallen into place, and after our purchase was official, we met up with our parents and Josh’s grandma at our new house. After giving the grand tour, we all went to our favorite Indian restaurant to celebrate over cold beers and vindaloo.
In our first few weeks as homeowners, we were absolute machines. Josh started to build a beautiful cedar fence for Tucker, and I went to town on the interior. Unpacking boxes, hunting for the perfect sofa, and sewing funky throw pillows became my new obsessions. Multiple trips to Home Depot, Target, and IKEA confirmed our suspicions that our 1950s rambler might have strong money-pit potential. We gave up eating out entirely. We were much more interested in spending our dough on curtain rods, power tools, and buckets of expensive low-VOC paint with clever names like “Wet Concrete.”
We were the picture of blissful domesticity until the untimely death of our washing machine. But, what was another six or seven hundred bucks that we didn’t have, right? “Forget the bar, baby—let’s go to Sears!” And the funny thing was, it felt good. The appliance dude botched my credit application and issued my card under my former married name—egads—but nothing could stand in the way of my happiness. I thought that our new front-loading, high-efficiency wonder was pure utilitarian sexiness, and it was then that I realized that I was officially old.
Never fear, dear readers—we were still having fun. The house had a full second kitchen, and my home-brewing darling was busy setting up his “Brouwerij Basement,” which translates to something along the lines of basement in which one boils giant kettles of liquid boyhood (with Belgian flair, naturally). Josh had sole jurisdiction over the basement kitchen, and I quickly decided that I’d take no responsibility for anything that went on down there.
Did I ever envision that life in my thirties would include having a kegerator in my family room? No. No, I did not. Nor did I expect to be divorced and shacked up with a good buddy from college, but that’s what makes life so interesting. In a book or a movie, a nicely timed twist of plot can be a real thrill, but in real life, it’s nothing short of breathtaking. As I stuffed a load of commingled boxer shorts and flowered undies into the new washer, I smiled. “Truly,” I thought, “God must get a real kick out of watching people rise up from rock bottom to plain old peace.”
*****
Blog Housekeeping
I am thrilled to be the July 14th featured blogger on SITS! The Secret is in the Sauce is a fabulous community of women bloggers who support each other by leaving comments.
My blogoir (blog meets memoir) format is a little unique. The events of this post took place in August and September of 2007.
If you’re visiting for the first time, please consider starting my blogoir at the beginning, “How I Left My Husband on My Lunch Break,” or checking out my Fast Track page to get up to speed on the story. You can also find me on Facebook, where you can see photos that relate to my story, and on twitter. Thanks for visiting!
In the weeks leading up to the closing on our house, I was a wreck. I was thrilled about becoming a first-time homeowner with Josh, but I was also incredibly anxious. It wasn’t the stress of coming up with piles of money, nor was it the weight of the commitment. I think it was simply the idea that I was finally almost home. Yes, after living in eleven different rental properties in eight years, I was ready to have a permanent address.
While I was cautiously optimistic that the end was in sight, I didn’t feel like I could take a full breath until I was sitting in my living room with a glass of wine, a good book, and my honey at my side. On some level, I was worried that it was all too good to be true—the house, the man, the stability. It was all so civilized—a far cry from the day I sped away from my ex-husband with little more than my dog and my purse.
I could see what I wanted on the horizon: a family, which would start with me, Josh, and Tucker, and would hopefully grow to include children in the not-so-distant future. But it was bigger than that, too. I hoped that our little clan would be closely tied to our own roots, and I was excited that Josh and I had started to get to know each others’ families better.
Josh and I were both the oldest of four. Between the two of us, we had six younger siblings, ranging in age from 21 to 29. Josh had two sisters—Jessie and Rachel—and a brother named Andy who was still in college. Jessie had a three-year-old son named Aidan, and Rachel had recently married Brian, a great guy who she’d met while living out west. What made the whole situation downright idyllic was the fact that our parents were all still married to each other. Jeez. And, every one of these people lived within a 45-minute drive of our new house. I could already envision the BBQs and birthday parties.
Josh had met my family during our first year in college, when I’d often invited friends home for Sunday dinner. He’d also spent a fair amount of time at my parents’ house during my recently-divorced-and-living-in-the-basement phase. Still, I was happy that he was able to come along on my family’s summer vacation right before we moved in together. We rented a big lake home in northern Minnesota—a house that would go down in family lore as “Weird Don’s” because the owner was a cranky old dude named Don.
If it was hard for my family to see me so quickly attached to another man after my divorce, they didn’t let on. All three of my brothers and my sister-in-law had stood up in my wedding, so I wondered if they’d felt a certain investment in my marriage, but it felt like they were solidly on my team. I think the general consensus was that my marriage had been a mistake. Josh was welcomed with open arms, and at Weird Don’s, he was even foolish enough to stay out around the campfire with my brothers after I went to bed. This is a sure recipe for a four-Advil hangover.
I didn’t have a chance to vacation with Josh’s family that summer, but I did attend the employee appreciation picnic for the family business. I hadn’t been around his family much yet, so it was a good opportunity to talk to his parents and siblings over BBQ and cold brews. Josh’s dad, Larry, had started his own company several years before, and Rachel and Jessie both worked for him. Josh’s mom, Rose, did a lot to help make the company a great place to work—including providing home-baked goodies every week.
One of the many wonderful things about getting to know Rose was that she asked a lot of questions. She had a good deal of practice, as several of her children—including my boyfriend—were on the quiet side. At the picnic, Rose and Alex, Andy’s girlfriend from college, asked me about my divorce. What a relief! I’d been pretty sure that Josh had mentioned it to his mom, but I’d been wondering whether the rest of the family knew that I’d been married before. I don’t know why, but it really mattered to me. Something about authenticity.
It seemed like Josh and I would fit in nicely with each others’ families, but I knew it would take time to feel entirely comfortable. I couldn’t help but wonder, “At what point are you really part of your significant other’s family?” Did it take a ring? Or was cohabitation sufficient? Having already gained and lost in-laws, I really hoped that this would turn out differently. Still, there was always a risk. But since I was willing to put my heart on the line again for Josh, I figured that I could sure as hell go ahead and love his family.
After I’d had a chance to think about Josh’s three-to-five year procreation timeframe, I decided to tell him how exactly how I felt. It was scary, because there was a chance that my biological clock would freak him out, and where would that leave our relationship? I pretty much wanted to have a baby tomorrow, and while I knew that was extreme, I was hoping he’d meet me somewhere in the middle.
So, one night as we were curled up in bed, I broached the subject again. I shared my fears, my instincts, and what I wanted out of life. I explained how women’s fertility starts to decline at a ridiculously young age. Sure—many women successfully get pregnant in their late 30s and beyond, but it can become increasingly difficult, and given my own health history, I didn’t want to take any chances. And on a personal level, I’d always wanted to be a young mom. There’s nothing wrong with having kids later in life—or not having them at all, for that matter—but that’s not what I wanted.
I apologized for putting this on him so soon, but I had to get it out in the open before moving in together. Josh is a very even-keeled, practical person, so he expressed concern about wanting to be in a better place financially. But. Deep breath. He wasn’t opposed to trying to get pregnant a little sooner if it was that important to me. We didn’t talk specifically about timing, but we agreed to toss out the idea that we had to wait three to five years. Neither of us felt particularly attached to social convention.
So that was a huge relief. Marriage was the furthest thing from my mind—I just wanted to build a life with Josh and keep working on becoming the best version of me that I could be. Once we were on the same page, we revved up our house-hunting engines. By the end of July, we had an offer accepted on a cute little starter home just a few minutes from downtown Minneapolis.
We didn’t know how it had happened, but we were suddenly bound for the ‘burbs. And we were excited about it. Tucker would have his own yard, and Josh and I would start our life together, twelve years after we first became friends as first-year college students in Burton Hall.
After my would-be anniversary, I finally got some professional help. I found a kind, insightful therapist whose office was just a short walk from mine. I relished these breaks from work and wished I could just stay in the quiet waiting room, drinking tea and flipping through magazines. During my walks back through Dinkytown, I would process what we’d talked about, and by the time I got back to my office, I usually felt okay. Good even.
In therapy, I got to babble on about all the junk that had been weighing me down—guilt about my divorce, frustration about my career, and anxiety about my biological clock. More and more, I realized how much I’d been worrying about my ability to have kids. There were many things in life that I couldn’t control, but I realized that I could dig a little deeper into my fertility issues. I didn’t want to wait until I was ready to have kids to find out what challenges I might face.
So, proactive one that I am, I went to see a specialist at the university. She checked my hormone levels and ordered an ovarian ultrasound to follow up on the polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis I’d been given back in Illinois. Everything came back normal, which was a relief, but I still didn’t know why I couldn’t have a cycle on my own. Since my divorce, I’d gone back on the pill anyway, but still.
All of this fertility business got me thinking—it might be a good idea to see exactly where my boyfriend stood on the whole baby-making issue before we bought a house together. You know, since I was already envisioning us with a passel of tots—beanpoles, no doubt. Little scientists or writers, basketball players or runners, or maybe kids who would blaze their own trails and teach us new things.
The opportunity to talk arose one sticky July evening as Josh and I walked Tucker on a loop through my neighborhood, mostly as a reprieve from my stuffy apartment. What began as a casual stroll turned into a rather epic conversation.
“Honey?” I started. “I need to ask you something before we buy a place together.” Does anything strike fear in a man’s heart more than a Big Talk? But I forged ahead. “You want to have kids, right?” I knew he wanted to have kids—I’d seen his list of baby names, for God’s sake. He nodded. “MmmHmm.”
That’s how the conversation started, but if he read between the lines—and I’m sure that he did—it went a little deeper. I wasn’t just asking, after all, if he wanted to have kids in general. I was asking if he wanted to have them with me, the woman with whom he hoped to own a house soon.
I proceeded with caution, “Well, when, exactly, do you see that happening?” He had to think about that for a while, but eventually, he said, “I don’t know—maybe three to five years?” Three to five years. A perfectly reasonable timeframe for a thirty-year-old guy who’d been dating someone for eight months. So why did I feel so damn disappointed?
On the evening of July 3, 2007, I sat in a movie theater in Uptown Minneapolis, stuffing my face with popcorn. If I hadn’t left my husband in August, it would have been our two-year wedding anniversary. The previous year, John and I had taken his kid brother and sister camping over the Fourth of July weekend. Things were so ugly that we couldn’t have pulled off a civil anniversary on our own, but the kids had created a much-needed buffer.
One year later, that life felt like a strange—mostly bad—dream. And, in fact, I still had the recurring nightmare that I was trapped with John. Lately, it had been a variation in which I’d actually married him a second time. The dream had no real plot. I just sat around wondering how I could be so dumb.
Roughly nine months after my divorce, I was experiencing a new phenomenon: a former wedding anniversary. I came to see the musical Once with Josh and our friends, Chris and Corri, and it took me on an unexpected emotional rollercoaster. The two main characters, an Irish guy and a Czech girl, are musicians who meet by chance in Dublin and form a strong connection through singing and playing music together. It turns out that the girl is married, which seems terribly unfair. Juxtapose fate, longing, and soul with duty, resignation, and reason, and there you have my conundrum with this movie.
I hated Once, even though I was assured that it’s actually terrific. Josh and our friends adored it, and they loved the soundtrack so much that we went directly to Cheapo Records to buy it. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to hear those songs ever again. I couldn’t shake the chorus of “Falling Slowly,” a haunting song that was woven throughout the story:
Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You’ll make it now
When Josh and I got in the car, I cried in silence. It was impossible to explain to him why July 3 made me feel so awful. The feelings had been there, but the movie had brought me to the brink. All break-ups are hard, but there are certain scars that are unique to divorce. I’d walked down an aisle, danced a first dance, and honeymooned on a beach. It had been public and official, yet fragile nonetheless.
When I’d found myself in a sinking boat, I’d realized how much I valued my life. The boat wasn’t salvageable, but I was, and I’d chosen me. Selfish? Maybe. Unheroic? Perhaps. But I’d abandoned that ship decisively. Perhaps my former anniversary would always feel a little sad—I suppose that’s natural—but I didn’t need any “help” feeling like crap from a movie. No, in future years, I would insist on seeing a comedy.
*****
Blog Housekeeping
Congrats to Megan from Rochester, MN, for winning the HeddyFreddy giveaway! Thanks to everyone who entered.
I’m leaving soon for a much-needed vacation (a westward road trip), and I don’t know whether I’ll have internet access. If I’m unable to post in the next ten days, rest assured that I’ll be writing!
There were many upsides to living with Megan. She was a Ph.D. student who loved watching silly shows like “So You Think You Can Dance.” She loved my dog. She wasn’t around all the time (no matter how much you love a roommate, this is always a good quality). And, she was a great running partner. A couple times a week, we’d run together at the crack of dawn, winding our way through the city streets to the path along the Mississippi.
I was training for Grandma’s Marathon, a beautiful run along Lake Superior that I’d done twice before. Minnesota’s North Shore holds a special place in my heart. When my brothers and I were kids, our family didn’t do Disney. We did tents, hikes, lakes, and rivers. I loved zipping up my flannel-lined sleeping bag after a long day of eagle sighting and marshmallow roasting, and the boys would howl with laughter as I told crazy bedtime stories about a woodchuck named Armando. If we got lucky, we could hear a loon calling from the lake. If we were less fortunate, we could hear a mosquito motoring around our tent.
So I loved the North Shore, and I’d decided to run the 2007 Grandma’s to prove to myself that I still had it at thirty. On a routine morning run with Megan during my taper phase, we debated various strategies for running a good marathon. I’d never been a particularly crafty runner. Megan was a major strategist when it came to the elusive personal record, but she admitted that she’d rarely been able to stick to her well-thought-out plans.
I’d already run four marathons, so I knew that the experience is entirely unpredictable, no matter how much you prepare. Mentally, you can lose it. Physically, you can tighten up. Not even Gatorade, gooey energy substances, or cheering crowds can stave off that damn wall sometimes. Case in point: the 2002 Boston Marathon, where Megan and I had run into each other a few miles from the finish line, both walking and near tears. That was the race where I’d stopped to use the restroom and thought about just staying in the porta-john rather than run another step.
I’d had a couple of great marathon experiences, too—personal battles where I’d been a woman on a mission, dedicating each of the last five miles to one of my family members. Even during these “good” races, I’d felt tremendous pain, so I’d come to expect to feel terrible at some point during every marathon. I’d learned to approach the pain differently, to believe that if I just stayed focused, I might run right out of it, just like I ran into it. Such is life. The setbacks are going to hit you—the question is, will you be ready for them?
In mid-June, I ran Grandma’s Marathon with three of my girlfriends. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, but after five or so miles, I felt like I’d already run fifteen. Generally speaking, this is not a good sign. I kept telling myself to hang on, that I might feel better after a few more miles. Counterintuitive, I know, but it often works. My friends kept saying “we can do this,” but my legs were saying, “no, we can’t.” I stayed in our little pack for as long as I could stand it, but eventually, I let the others go.
I was determined to finish, even if I had to walk the whole damn way. Josh and Dad were on the course in a couple of places, and I was both embarrassed and thrilled to see them. It’s important to have people in your life who will still cheer for you when your best effort is a hobble. All in all, the marathon was a disappointment, but I didn’t let it crush me. I hurried back to the Twin Cities to attend a late afternoon wedding with Josh and my parents. As I hit the dance floor that night, I gained some perspective.
I had run a terrible marathon that morning, but I was dancing. At a wedding. And I was happy. I’d been through far worse in the past year than a piss-poor 26.2 miles. I’d seen rock bottom and had fought my way back up. Did I still have it at thirty? Hell yes, I did.
*****
Blog Housekeeping
This one’s dedicated to Megan, whose birthday was yesterday. She still has it at 32, and I just know this is going to be a great year for her.
If you haven’t already entered the HeddyFreddy giveaway, please do! Comments will be open through Sunday. Guys are welcome to enter, too. It would make a great gift!
I turned thirty on a glorious spring day—the kind where one should really sit in the grass barefoot with a good book, watching puffy clouds cruise by. Alas, I had a desk job, so no dallying in the sun for me, but my spirits were high nonetheless. To celebrate my big three-o, I gathered with friends and family for dinner at the Happy Gnome, a St. Paul restaurant with food to satisfy the snobs among us, lots of craft beers, and the best name ever.
Turning thirty had been a big deal for me. It had me thinking a lot about where I expected to be at thirty, versus where I actually was. Naturally, that got me thinking a lot about where I wanted to go next. A few months before, I’d set a few goals for myself, including a writing class, a marathon, and a new job. I was on track to follow through on all of them, and this had given me the sense of control that I’d lacked in my marriage.
In addition to working toward the three goals, I’d also managed to move out of my parents’ basement. Living there had been instrumental to my healing, but moving out had given me proof that the healing had indeed occurred. My time in the basement had definitely served its purpose. On top of the psychological rewards, I’d paid off about 75% of the debt from my marriage, and symbolically, that meant detaching myself even further from my former life.
Getting out of debt meant that I could really move forward, and Josh and I had been talking about buying a place together. Yes, that’s right. I was recently divorced and was seriously contemplating buying a place with my boyfriend of six months. It sounds crazy, but it just felt right.
My birthday dinner was a delightful mix of the important people in my life: Josh, my parents, some of the Picnic Leaguers, my running buddies, my roommate, and even one my brothers. It felt like the perfect day, and the birthday love continued. A couple weeks later, Josh gave me a belated gift that he hadn’t had time to finish. It was a beautiful pencil drawing that he’d titled “Besar,” which means “to kiss” in Spanish.
It was me and Josh—softly sketched organic shapes—sweetly intertwined. It was hard to tell where one body ended and another began, and that was perfect, because that’s exactly how I felt when we were together. He wrote a beautiful card that explained the drawing—words that expressed things I already knew, but which felt wonderful to have affirmed. He wrote of the comfort he felt with me and how happy I made him, and my heart felt all gooey when I read it. I knew what painstaking care he took with his drawings, most of which were incredible likenesses of photographs that inspired him. This was a much more abstract piece, and I loved that he had taken a risk on it.
Maybe I was a complete loon to be contemplating a commitment as large as a shared mortgage so soon after my divorce. I probably was. But I had a good feeling about my thirties, and I thought it was high time that I started trusting my gut. After all, the key to happiness is not chasing after what you’re supposed to want. It’s realizing what you do want and making it your own.
You can look to your family, your friends, and your religion for guidance, but in the end, you also need to reach into the wisdom located between your own ears and within your own chest. Now, I don’t know much about gnome mythology, but if I had to guess, I’d posit that the happiest gnomes trust their tubby little guts. So as I entered my thirties, I gave myself permission—orders, even—to do the same.
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