We can stand on the edge
And look out into space
And be awed by the wonders we see
~ Fame the Musical
Or
“One person couldn’t feel all of that at once! They’d explode!”
“Honestly Ron, just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon”
~ Harry Potter
Disclaimer: this gets personal.
It’s hard for me to explain what’s going in my head right now.
In books, and films, and stories of all kinds, they always try to tell you that getting married is supposed to be the happiest event in a woman’s life. The ultimate goal, the thing you strive for more than anything else. All that 1950s sort of stuff. Never mind of course that marriage started off as a financial arrangement between two sets of parents and had naught to do with love until only a century ago or less…
Anyway, popular culture tells us all this stuff.
And don’t get me wrong I am happy. I’m excited, I’m terribly excited. I am bouncing off the walls “ooh-look-at-the-pretty-flowers”, happy. My head is pretty much all full of tomorrows…
And yet…
I’m also vaguely terrified, and overwhelmed…and unexpectedly sad.
Terrified because well – it’s a big new thing and what if I don’t live up to my own expectations, what if I burn everything and find out that my previously endearing quirks have become annoying? What if I am, in fact, too free spirited to be good at being married? None of which I think is actually true, but the fear is there and I actually believe it to be quite natural.
Overwhelmed because well, it’s a lot to plan and a lot to figure out and balance out all at the same time. Although that part is almost finished, and thankfully I’ve had a great deal of help with it.
And as for sad…?
Allow me to explain that part. Or try to. Because I’ve tried to explain it to a few people recently and only a handful of them understand, I seem to be met with “well maybe you’re just not ready” looks…which is not at all the case. I am definitely ready to be married. And I’m realizing that I’m probably going to be fairly good at being a wife. But there’s something else…
Because what the books and the films and the advice columns don’t mention is that as you’re walking towards the end of that aisle, you are – by the very nature of walking – walking away from something else. From one version of normal to the other.
I am incredibly close to my family. For various reasons it has always just been the three of us – the three of us against everyone else – we don’t let people in easily and usually even when we do, they don’t – for reasons of their own – stick around. I’ve grown up more than a little insulated, overprotected and overprotective. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. I never really…had to grow up. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I act like a 5-year old or anything. Things just, got stuck somewhere along the away and stayed that way. We froze time.
And now…that’s going to change. A lot. Not in a bad way, not at all in a bad way, but change is frightening at the best of time, and when the change is this big it’s a lot to take in. When your life has followed the same basic pattern for 36 years it’s a big shift to know that in less than a month, all of that is going to change. When you are the closest person in the world to two other people, the fact that your relationship with them is about to shift in a way you may or may not have been prepared for is …a loss? An awareness? I don’t even have the word for it.
So as much as I am on the next precipice of my life, and I am more than ready to start the next leg of the journey – I am also at an odd stage at looking back at what my life has been, and…not exactly mourning for it, I mean it’s not like I am moving to the ends of the earth, it’s not as if this really is the turn of the century and I’ll never see my family again (quite the opposite) but…I am very aware of the change, and the sense of loss that goes with it. And I am working through that, as fast and as honestly I can, but it’s something that the books and movies and advice columns don’t talk about, so I didn’t really know it was coming…
So yes, I am happy, I am ecstatic and excited and all those other things. But there’s just…there’s more to it than that.
Just a little.
But still…despite that odd, unexpected emotional twist…at the heart of it all still…
Bring on tomorrow…
I can’t wait….