Transition

So the wedding is over.

The honeymoon is over.

Real life is back.

And it's not 'normal.'

When I was little, I was the Queen of Homesick at slumber parties.  We'd get ready for bed, lay down, and I'd listen to all of the unfamiliar sounds and just panic.  Not much later, I would be on the phone with my mom or dad begging them to come pick me up.  It was the unfamiliar that set me on edge.  The sounds.  The smells.  The routine.  It wasn't like 'at home.'

I finally grew mostly out of my homesickness by middle school.  I was able to cope a little bit better with the unfamiliar.  Then, I moved to college.  I went through a whole new kind of homesickness: the kind where there is no calling home and getting picked up and escaping the unfamiliar.  I had a few breakdowns within the first month, but then school became the new normal.  The new familiar.  It was still hard for the next 3 years whenever I left my family and home, but it got better because school was my second home.  Then later, the house I rented at school was a second home.

In each of these stages in my life, though, I knew that eventually I would be going home.  Home to the house I grew up in.  Home to the people I grew up with.  Now I am in a new stage of life.  A new state of life transition.  In this stage, I am making a new permanent home.  My new permanent home is with my Husband.  This stage is so much harder than I ever imagined.  It's hard to grasp the gravity of the event when while you're dating and engaged, the only thought you have is that you're tired of saying goodbye and you simply want to spend all of your time with your loved one.  After that thought though, you return to the familiar and you're robbed of the impact.

Well, that impact has hit full force now.  It is compounded by the fact that we currently do not have our new permanent home.  My nesting impulse is completely confounded.  I want to clean and decorate and rearrange and make a space ours.  But today, we're still in limbo, waiting for some sense of stability.  We are in a holding pattern for the next 2 weeks (we decided together).  I feel lost as to how to make this work.  It is so unlike anything else I've experienced.  I find it hard not to withdraw.  So, I need to reach out.

I reached out to my mother for help, and this was her advice to me:  It's all about attitude.  Pray for help with your attitude.  When I was 14, I went on a mission trip to Ukraine as a spoiled American brat.  I came back different.  I went again 2 more times, the last during college.  Right before I went on that trip, my attitude about life was awful.  I was fighting with everyone and downright depressed and miserable.  After going on the trip, my perspective was changed again.  My mom's advice continued:

At this point, tell yourself I can withstand anything for 2 weeks. Then think of all you saw in the Ukraine . . . it might help put things in perspective. It is not what you envisioned for yourself, but maybe it is right where you should be . . .

Thank you, Mom.  I guess I need to just breathe, rearrange and clean what space I have left, and pray desperately for God's help to help me see past the discomfort, the unfamiliar and the unstable.  All the while, I need to enjoy every second I have with my husband.  Find the joy in the moment.

And make new peace with the new 'normal.'

Practice

11 days left, and life is crazier than ever!

At this point, everything is in a state of transition.  The very middle of transition.  My parents' house is getting new paint and floors on the main level before the wedding (!!!), so everything is in flux.  My fiance has packed up his stuff in his grandmother's basement so that his parents can start building a bathroom down there so they can move in. Eventually, we're supposed to move into their house.  This past week, my mom was gone a lot because my 103.5-year-old great grandmother was moved into hospice, and then passed away on Saturday.  Her funeral will be this coming Saturday.  All the while, the details of the wedding are rapidly starting to need my attention.

As you can see, my blog has suffered from the craziness I described above.  I haven't written in a long time.  I didn't want this blog to be purely 'journal' entries, but lately I haven't had time to put into writing much else!  Since I have been neglecting this blog, my fiance has started a blog of his own called I Am Engineer Mike.  He updates every Monday (do you see that, Molly? R-E-G-U-L-A-R-L-Y) and yesterday, he posted a blog about whether or not he is ready for our life together.

That got me thinking about whether or not I am ready.  Like Mike wrote, to think that I am ready would only expose a flaw in my own character.  How on earth could I be ready to start living with a non-relative closer than I have ever lived with anyone else before?  As a senior in college when I thought about marriage, it hit me how totally foreign that set up appears on the outside.  You take two completely different people, with different life experiences, different background, different habits, different ideas about things, and then merge their lives together.  What a scary undertaking that could be!

You'll never be closer (or you shouldn't ever be closer) to anyone else but your spouse.  Yet, as you enter marriage, there are still a lot of things left to be learned!  You've vowed to enter a relationship that up front says, 'We are going to be closer to each other than anyone else,' and yet there is a journey to actually get there.  I thought the other day about Michael's best friend.  He has known Mike since they were 11 years old.  He has so much history with Michael, built so much trust.  I haven't known Michael anywhere near that long and yet, I'm going to be closer to him than his best friend.

I think what it will come down to is practice.  You know, 'practice makes perfect' and all that jazz.  Life is like practice, and I imagine married life together is going to need a lot of practice.  I need to practice listening as well as practice looking past the 'meta-messages' I hear that aren't there (see chapter 2 in Happily Ever After by Toben and Joanne Heim).  We'll need practice communicating and practice resolving conflict, as well as practice doing practical things: chores, shower times, and just plain living together.  Everyday will be a new day to practice again.  Then, after 20 years maybe we'll have some aspects of married life down and we'll be practicing new ones. :) 

So the answer is no, I am not ready at all either.  I can't foresee what it will be like to wake up next to him everday, to make our lunches, to deal with misunderstandings.  I can say I am confident in who Mike is and I am not afraid to tackle this unknown with him, to practice everyday with him.

So, honey, here's to the years and years of practice we have ahead of us! I love you!
(and maybe in that time, I'll get practiced at blogging regularly, too!)