Beautiful Boy

I held a baby today.  Not a baby, a newborn.  A baby that wasn't even twenty-four hours old.  A baby on its actual birth day.

[No, I do not suddenly have "baby fever."  My cell phone reminds me every day at 10 PM to happily pop a pill in support of that.]

I have to admit, I was kind of dreading seeing the baby.  Not the baby itself, I have a heart for crying out loud.  I love babies and kids, but I was dreading seeing my good guy friend from high school and his wife and their perfect little family.

My friend and his wife are both blonde and blue and gorgeous, as is their 20 month old son.  [Is it just me or do new parents have some weird thing with the months?  I heard a lady on a plane the other day say her daughter was "38 months."  I so badly wanted to say, "Lady, your kid is fucking three years old.  What am I?  347 months???"]  There is something different to me about kid number two though.  In some weird way it's fine if my friends get married and have a kid, but kid number two is somehow way more "adult."  No more starter family/starter home...if my friends were on a sitcom with me, kid number two would mean they were being written off of the show.

You can work one kid into the storyline, but two?  Doesn't happen.

This is going to sound horrible, but I am horribly competitive, always have been, so bear with me.  Having friends be a step ahead of me and married is fine because I haven't found the right person.  Having friends be two steps ahead of me and married with a baby is fine because I don't want a child right now - someday.  But having friends my age be what seems like three steps ahead of me with a whole family...I suddenly felt like I was massively behind in some way.  I realize this is not a competition, but still.  When friends start having kids (singular or plural) it naturally makes me reflect as to what exactly I am doing with my life.  What am I contributing to the world?  These people created a life.  Last week I created a great phad thai dish, recycled my wine bottle, and sent my resume in for a sweet sales/marketing position at an amazing ad agency.  It doesn't matter, that whole miracle of life thing trumps all, and now they've gone and done it twice!

That, and for the second time in my life I just got dumped.  Well, I'm pretty sure I was dumped.  [Who am I kidding?  I was dumped.]  I was dumped in the worst way you can dump an extreme extrovert who thrives on confrontation and discussion:  I was ignored.  I actually have an e-mail from him saying how wonderful I am and that he would call me tomorrow.  That was almost three weeks ago.  I love words and the slight nuances of meaning that different ones can possess.  I love analyzing which words people choose to use.  I can take harsh words, but no words???  The whole thing became so ridiculous, I am actually not sure what to say.  This never happens.  Being ignored lets my overactive imagination wander far too much and has been downright torturous.

"I'm not going to be IGNORED, Dan!"  Don't worry, I'm not making rabbit stew a la Fatal Attraction.

So I'm feeling a little behind the eight ball in general, recently dumped, and dealing with some family issues...then the cherry on top that surprised me:  I will be 29 in a few days.  I never have a problem with how old I am.  Years are simply an arbitrarily determined quantification that mean little to me.  My inner child is alive and well and I still wear the same size jeans I did in high school - I will shout my age from the mountain tops!  But suddenly I'm going to be 29, AND close friends who graduated high school with me are married with two kids, AND I just got dumped in the style of a 13 year old, AND I'm job searching and roommate searching, AND I think I have a bug problem in my kitchen somehow, AND my mom is talking about finally leaving my dad after 33 years of marriage because she dreads counseling so much, AND my beloved brother and I are at odds (long story) ...and I'm going to go sit in a hospital room with my 29 and 30 year old friends and their two adorable little boys and rehash all of this?  I'll admit it, I threw a little pity party for myself.  (The music was excellent.)

Post pity party, I dolled myself up, bought a sweet Toy Story balloon for the new big brother and some trashy magazines for my friend, now the mom of two, and headed out to the hospital.

I was greeted by a squealing almost two year-old who thinks that playing with my hair and me holding him upside down are the only things more fun in this world than playing with the balloon I brought him.  My friend and his wife are so laid back and down to earth and grateful to have a healthy newborn.  I got to hold the baby, Connor James.  [Thank God they picked a lovely name!]  I had forgotten what it was like to hold an actual newborn and be present for the start of someone's life. 

I watched my friend try to change his older son's diaper and his wife had to help.  Not because he couldn't do it, but changing the diaper of a kid at twenty months is equivalent to trying to get a cat into a bathtub.  His feet are no longer small enough to hold in one hand, reinforcements help.

My friend and his wife asked for updates on my life.  I told them the latest with North Dakota and that I did not think this is what my life would be like as I turned 29.  They told me how they never intended to have two kids already.  I knew their first was an unplanned "honeymoon baby," but they had apparently wanted to wait and when she switched birth control...  [Note to self.]  My friend shared with me how when his wife first told him she was pregnant again he was not excited.  Of course now he is, but his honesty was just what I needed.  This is not what they thought their lives would look like at 29 and 30 either.

During all of this, in my arms I had a seven and a half pound little person holding and squeezing my finger the entire time.  It was pretty amazing.  It was Connor's first day on Earth and he already made someone's day.

A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

C married a wonderful man and I was maid of honor the bride's bitch/wedding planner/music coordinator/only voice of reason in their wedding.  [Ugliest bridesmaids dresses ever.  No, really.  I could go on, without exaggeration, about the ridiculousness leading up to this wedding, the actual event, and how hideous these things were for days - another time.]  Naturally, those involved in and attending her wedding, whether I had met them before or not, wanted me to be as happy as she is (very sweet) and felt it necessary to dole out unsolicited advice (very interesting.)  It cracks me up when people do this because it supposes that relationships and therefore humans are one-size-fits-all.  Pssst, I'm going to let you in on the secret of the magical formula, and if you follow these steps exactly - poof!  Married!  [Note not marital bliss, but married, kind of an important distinction.]  

Fairy tales end with "happily ever after," but what about all of the crazy/wonderful/hard/mundane/awesome stuff that happens after that?  I feel like some women seem to think simply being married equals happiness, or that what matters most is having the wedding of her dreams.  [Don't even get me started on that one.  Ahem, Kim Kardashian.]  What if I think the real story starts after "happily ever after?"

"He insists on wearing tights every day, and I wouldn't call burping the alphabet charming."

Some women want the fairy tale.  I think I'm too much of a realist to believe in fairy tales, and I've certainly never had the term "princess" used to describe me.  No, I'm not that horrifically cynical.  To me, a fairy tale implies that a) the wedding/act of being married is the pinnacle of the relationship (what about the next 50 years after that?) and b) that once you've found the right person, that's all it takes.  I want something real.  I believe in order for relationships to work it does take finding the right person.  It also takes a lot of love and a lot of dedication on both people's parts to make them work.  This is not "The Bachelor," people.  Dates are not all in Thailand and Fiji and other exotic locales.  Odds are more time is going to be spent at Target than at fancy restaurants.

Wait, so you're saying none of our dates will involve helicopters, famous singers, or fireworks?  Shit.

On my first road trip post-firing, I visited four sets of cousins ranging in ages from 25-35, who have been married anywhere between three and almost fifteen years.  [I was in two of their weddings, so it's interesting to see them go from dating to wedding day to 10 and 15 year anniversaries and multiple children.]  Day in and day out you have to make sure there's (soy) milk in the fridge, the bills are paid, figure out what's for dinner, what you're going to do that weekend, and whose family you're spending the holidays with this year.  You wake up next to the same face every day, see them in their glasses first thing in the morning before coffee with messy hair and puffy eyes, when they're sick and curled up on the floor of the bathroom...and if you're lucky like my cousins all seem to be, you love them and even though it's not always glitter and unicorns, you're genuinely happy to come home to that person. 

Damn you and your catchy tunes, Taylor Swift!

David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to Kenyon College is the best example I have found of someone being honest about what real life looks like, and why it's important to not simply be a mindless drone - another brick in the wall.  Milestone events in our lives, whether they are graduations, weddings, birthdays, they are not the end of something, rather the beginning.  Real life occurs in the minutiae of the day-to-day, or as he says, "being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

I ran into a guy I knew from college, and for the past four and a half months I have been so happy with him.  Not in a "isn't it great we both love Chinese food?" kind of way, but a "it's fine if you move to North Dakota, we'll make it work" kind of way.  Something real.  Something where when I flew to North Dakota (he sells oil drill bits) to see him, he took me out to work with him and we spent ten hours a day in his truck together talking, laughing, singing songs.  Grocery shopping.  Cooking together.  Laundry.  Decorating for Christmas.  Five days of virtually inseparable bliss.

Somewhere in there I got caught up in my own fairy tale.  He talked about wanting to go to Thailand with me before we turn 30.  He asked if I thought our kids would be tall like him or short like me.  He told me he thought I might be "the one."

I fell for it/him.

My fault.
  
I wish I could say I knew what exactly happened, but I don't know.  It's over now.

Maybe part of me wanted to be a fairy tale princess more than I realized after all.

Not this time.