it's all right if you don't
I started out Friday with my feet up in stirrups and finished in the audience of an outdoor opera starring my boyfriend’s ex-wife, so it’s hard to say if the day got better or worse.I used to think that I was good at challenging situations, that I handled them with grace. But in retrospect it appears that the situations I was calling “challenging” weren’t actually all that rough. Unemployment is trying. Breaking up is lonely. Buying a house is scary. And the sun sets and rises again.
But the part where I’m sitting next to Operaman and his kids, and the parents and friends of the woman he was married to for seven years, and I’m beating back a landslide of questions that just aren’t going to get answered right then, or maybe ever – questions about exactly how important or not important it has ever been to me to have kids of my own, and about how best to interpret O’s recent application to a med school in Illinois – that part has no grace at all.
That part looks more like me sabotaging a perfectly nice evening in the park, and then staying up half the night staring at my waterstained ceiling. That part looks more like me getting in a car the next morning and speeding to the gorge with three friends, drinking a lot of beer and screaming along with Tom Petty, generally acting eighteen. Eighteen wasn’t any easier but it’s been long enough now that I can pretend.
Wasn’t I just supposed to meet some cool guy with a spirit of adventure and a four season tent? Weren’t we supposed to have exciting late-night conversations about all the things we wanted to do with our lives? Things like overseas travel and meaningful work and some kind of big family, however that is defined? But instead here’s this man with his own life already – and here’s me, with mine. And I feel a little pissed that we’re meeting up with such mismatched pokey plans, each already well underway. Everyone at thirty has a life already. No one is sure how much of it is negotiable.
And I guess what I'm actually pissed about is that mine is feeling more negotiable than I would have expected, and his is feeling less negotiable than is called for. It doesn’t seem like a wise way to proceed. Wisdom, though, has never been my specialty. And I’ve now figured out it’s not grace. Optimism, perhaps? Naivety? Improvisation?
posted by tortaluga @ 10:42 AM
4 Comments:
Ouch! How could virtual strangers just ask you questions like that? That would bring out the worst in me and I'd think of the most shocking answer and give it. Or start to cry.
This part is, I think, no harder or worse than the other parts. The mind hides from you how trying the past times were, for your protection. You can only remember how bad it feels when you're in the moment... and thank god for that.
You've handled the difficult times with grace before and so too will you this time. It's you're nature. It's who you are.
hi kira! clarification: these questions were coming from my own head, not the crowd. i still almost cried, though.
hi dave! thanks. but are you sure this part isn't harder? it feels fuckin HARDER.
Heck if I know. I've never been there. I'm guessing, either way, that I'm right about the "you handling it with grace" bit.
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