Grown Up Love

e has been gone for nearly 3 months now. it's actually going beautifully, but it was quite the rough adjustment in the beginning and blogging was pretty far down n my list. somewhere after dishes, meals, laundry, diapers, baths, showers, groceries, doctors, post office, gas, vacuuming, medicine, diapers, cold and flu season, birthday, christmas..... you get the idea.

another one of our unit's lovely lady counterparts and i were talking this evening about that glorious time in your life called "youth".

i don't miss high school one bit. but e and i met when we were both essentially done with college, so we skipped a lot of those giddy phases that 15 year olds are so lucky to immerse themselves in daily. i joked about sending e a love note a la freshman year of high school.

and then i went ahead and did it. in a program on the iPad. via email. to myself. to post here. because if i sent this to him, he would stop talking to me. immediately. and i
am already hurting for adult conversation.

there are times when i feel like e and i were robbed of a lot of romance and the frivolity that comes with being young and poor and in love. our marriage is pretty much stellar and i wouldn't want to give up any part of who we are and how we came to be husband and wife.

but i'd be lying if i didn't say that i wish we had more stories to tell about getting drunk when we were 17 and nearly pissing ourselves because we thought our parents would notice the 2 missing cans of beer that it required for us to become totally wasted. (for the record, it still only takes me one can of beer.)

or memories of making out in the minivan after one of us got our licenses (yes, we both drove vans in high school. clearly we were made for each other).

or senior prom. oh how i wish i could have been his date so i could mock his gelled hair now. (there was nothing to mock about me. i was a glowing vision of elegance at my senior prom. just trust me, don't reference any pictures)

i wish i had 3-ring binders or folders full of notes scrawled during boring lectures about things that it turns out we actually did need in college AND in real life. i would like to sit on the floor of our bedroom during these lonely months and open a decoupage-d box full of origami fortune tellers, pressed flowers from the bush outside the school theater, pictures of us laughing in the stands in our band uniforms with braces and awkward physiology.

i would love to have those little momentos of a time when we were so unsure of who we were and where we would end up, when we were desperately clinging to every second, relishing in every hand held, every kiss shared, every hour alone together. i would love more memories of a time when we were careful with each other and passionate because we couldn't tell if the other would stay but we wanted them to so so so badly.

i would like more dried flowers hanging above my bed. more obviously staged photographs in more beaded evening gowns. more dates to dairy queen.

more metabolism.

instead i have all these silly tokens of love laying around here-- a washer and dryer, our first flat screen tv. a kitchenaid mixer, a couch with a chaise, a queen sized pillowtop mattress and sleigh bed frame. a minivan.

OH, two kids. we have two kids, forgot about them.

a house whose rent we can afford, as well as the utilities. student loans that have never gone into deferment or default. a savings account.

empty bottles of wine atop the refrigerator. a wine glass (or 2.... or 3....) full of corks. a few more glasses full of bottle caps from parties shared with friends that have remained such despite time and distance.

i wish we had a longer "crazy in love" stage in our relationship. don't get me wrong, we're crazy in love. and we were crazy, you can ask our families. but we weren't reckless and giddy for very long. we had jobs for heavens sake! careers even! and then babies! can't be frivolous and silly when babies come along! well, not with each other anyway. you can be frivolous and silly with babies all day long! they seem to enjoy it, as a matter of fact....

i'm not sure there's a point to this at all. i rarely have points, eh? simply put, it seems that already, in my mid 20s, i see the "grass is greener" pattern that all of the world seems to fall into. when you're 15 you just wish for permanent, grown up love--or at least your over-fantasized visions of it. when you're living out that grown up love, you yearn for the recklessness of your youthful escapades.

perhaps there's a happy medium somewhere. though, i sincerely doubt it involves neon crayola rainbows vomiting colored pencil hearts onto wide ruled paper.

but that's just a theory.