A Girl...

Lucky

My mom's email says it all: "So...you got new 'boots'?" To which I replied, "No, I really got new boots. The brown ones we saw in the mall." As Amy said this week, don't make me put up a sidebar widget for my menstrual cycle.

The last entry wasn't about anything in particular so much as it was about everything in general (in addition to being about actual boots because I really did find some and they are working out quite well, thank you). Mostly, the post was a public notice to myself to remember that being patient has always been good for me, has always brought forth the very best things, even if I have to detour through hell first.

In the entry I linked to yesterday, the one in which I introduced Simon, I wrote that I loved him, but what I didn't say was that I'd loved him for a long time already. The details are private, but the larger story is that bringing this relationship together wasn't easy, and some of the same factors that complicated our being together have continued to complicate things like meeting each other's families, moving in together, getting married, having kids. From my perspective, it seems like everyone else has it so easy: fall in love with your high school or college sweetheart, date a few years, get engaged, get married, buy a house, get pregnant exactly when you want to, one, two, three, and all the while enjoy the loving embrace of family and friends and know that everything is exactly how it was meant to be because it's exactly how you'd imagined it.

Although my life today is different in many ways than I might have imagined it at, say, age ten or twenty, it does at least somewhat resemble the best-case scenario I'd conjured a few years ago, when Simon and I got together, and that is no small triumph. But the road here has been through dark woods on unsturdy ground, and sometimes the self-pity creeps back in because, GAH, no one else has to go through this stuff! The women who have miscarriages at least have one child already. The women who are undergoing infertility treatments are at least rich enough to afford them. The women who are legally of age are at least married. And while I know all of this isn't true, and that I don't have it bad in the least (I know this, really, truly), still...just as you can always find someone out there who has it worse, you can also always find someone out there who has it better, and sometimes, when my guard is down, those better-thans get the best of me.

Perhaps what makes it harder to accept that I'm living a different story than your standard boy-meets-girl romance is that I once was. Simon was too, and even moreso. And although neither of us would trade in our new life for the old, there's still a tension between the ease (even dissatisfied, tenuous ease) of "simpler times" and what, to me, sometimes feels like a years-long course of Interminable Waiting 101, with an instructor who doesn't care if you've already learned all this stuff and have had enough and would like to graduate already, please. The thoughts that creep in are masked to look like resentment (at who? at what?) but I know that underneath it's nothing serious. And that is when I take myself by the shoulders, shake, repeat, because I could so easily not have any of this, not now, not ever, and so what the hell am I complaining about?

Simon and I spent the Monday holiday painting the media room and hanging art on the walls while listening to the Star Wars musical. For dinner we made stirfry out of whatever we could find in the fridge, and then because the t.v. was unhooked, we covered the living room floor with blankets and pillows and spent the evening watching on-demand Netflix on the laptop in front of the fire and then maybe laid some plans for the future. Get it? Laid? And it only took six years.