Wait, what?

Make sure you pay attention to what the judge says

Hey there! Thanks for reading this week’s post. Today I’m heading out of town for a week. I’m not sure I’ll have time to write a post next Tuesday, but I’ll get one out again as soon as I can. And yeah, I will get back to the coffee photos too! But now it’s time for the main event, so LET’S GO

I got married for the first time* when I was 27, and I didn’t realize it had happened until it was over. No, I wasn’t drunk in Vegas or abducted by aliens. It was 1997 and I was living in New York. Flushing, to be exact, because he was from Queens and I’d moved there from Oklahoma to be with him. We flew to California for the ceremony—my best friend from high school was clerking for a judge in San Diego and she arranged for us to be married at the courthouse. It all went swimmingly until the judge came in and after the introductions said, “Let’s just run through this, shall we?” Or something like that…

For some reason, both my husband-to-be and I thought this meant that it was a practice run before we did the real run-through. Right around the “I now pronounce you” part I started to suspect that uh, wait, maybe this was the real deal and omg I think we’re married now. It was really jarring, but we managed to have a laugh about it afterward.

I don’t have a photo handy from the courthouse, but here is me and X1, about 2000. We are still friends, which is pretty cool.

I realized this week that that marriage, or at least its “auspicious” beginning, is a pretty good metaphor for how life feels to me a lot of the time these days. It feels like I’m waking up and asking questions. Like, Wait, that’s it? And, Did I just miss something?

I guess it’s an age thing, but I do find myself looking back more often, even though I try not to. What is the point? It’s good to know where you’ve come from, sure, but to obsess over the past, or to have too many regrets, is pointless. You’re just keeping the same stories alive. Which makes it harder to create a new story. Lots of things about my childhood were kind of sh*tty and I don’t remember whole chunks of it. Which is just as well.

That said, I’ve started to think that I didn’t take enough agency in creating my own story, and now I’ve landed here by default. I just went with the flow, and here I am. But is this really where I want to be? I am not sure.

But now I have more pieces of the puzzle. Now some of my questions have been answered, or at least I have an explanation for why some things have never come easy. Maybe now I can have more say in how things go from here.

But the clock is ticking. I don’t want to rush anything, but great googly moogly, I feel my mortality.

Right now feels like a pause, like I should be very quiet and listen and watch for what to do next. I don’t know what’s coming, but something different is coming. It has to. It’s so uncomfortable to be in this liminal space though.

I’m trying to find comfort not in looking forward or backward, but in each moment. I don’t want to “make things happen,” but I don’t want to “let things happen to me” either. What I want is to learn to be quiet enough to hear what my heart is telling me, and to learn to be observant enough to discern my path from all the noise and bullsh*t that’s out there. I want to see my way forward with intuition, clarity, and compassion for myself.

I’m not sure I’ll get married again. But if I do, I’ll damn well know that it’s happening.

*There was one other marriage. It also ended in divorce.

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