It's funny that life doesn't turn out to be what you expect. While it's true as far as what most of us do for a living, etc, what I'm really talking about is how the experience of living life isn't what you expect.
Somehow we grown up with some ideal in mind, this vague thing of getting to be grown up, and marrying the right person, and living happily ever after.
Nobody tells you that your husband might turn out to be a pothead who spends all your money on weed. Or that soon after you're married you'll spend time in the bathtub missing your old boyfriend. Or that something strange will happen inside you and you'll be incapable of enjoying sex. One person I read wrote stories like that - Madeleine L'Engle's adult fiction is that realistic. But pretty much nothing else is as you're growing up.
And nobody tells you that the flip side of those things - the good side - is that you'll grow in cool ways. Like, you'll learn to be poor together, that you're committed to your marriage and you'll decide that the pot isn't worth leaving him over.
You'll figure out that life is full of Plan A's. Meaning that some good things are mutually exclusive, so when you choose one, you necessarily exclude the other. And that's okay. There is no absolute right path - many paths are good, and all paths seem to have some kind of drawback. You'll learn that some people have sexless marriages - and they are still marraiges. That you can love somebody, and be loved, and not be capeable of that act without distress.
And while you see grown ups in life, and most of them put on weight - you're always sure it's not going to be you. When I was 20, I'd never have allowed my belly to be soft the way it is now. You know, somewhere in yourself when you're young, that they day is going to come when you're not 18 anymore, and your tits aren't 18 year old tits, and ass just isn't quite in the same spot it used to be. You know it, but it isn't real. Then you hit my age and men just don't look at you the same way. You become an attractive woman, rather than a young hottie.
I always said I'd grow old with a gracefully spirit toward aging - that I wouldn't die my hair, and I'd be happy for my crow's feet... I just never knew what it would be like to look in a mirror and have the image seem off in some way. Your eyes look older... You put on eyeshadow and the lids wrinkle softly away from the applicator.
I'm not sure it's that nobody tells you about it all, or that you simply don't have the context to get it. Some of both, I'm sure.
The religion of my youth just didn't leave room for GRAY things. One of the weirdest things about growing older is learning about the gray. Like, what I think about in the bathtub, and who I masturbate over and what I'm imagining are my business. Nobody told me there would be room inside me for those things - the private things.
Nobody told me I'd grow into a woman who finds my supervisory role at work largely one about humility.
Nobody told me that every day would would be a lesson in something.
I guess we can't tell our children about these things because their brains aren't fully formed. Because they can't have the perspective until LIVING these things creates the neurons in the our brains that lets us experience them.
Nobody told me I'd be full of guilt and insecurity, but that I'd be strong and independent and interdependent all at the same time.
Nobody told me I'd love my husband with all my heart, but that I'd have a sexual adventure talking with a 63 year old retired scientist in his living room - while taking no action and committing no sins.
This just isn't what I thought life would be.
I don't understand it. It gives me anxiety.
An old (insightful) lover once told me that I was ambivalent about men, and that I probably always would be. He was right. I'm constantly pulled toward and repelled from men. And I don't mean in turn - I mean at the same time.
I had a wonderful evening, full of laughter and thought, delving in and that repellant feeling I get when I share too much.
And I do mean repellant. Some kind of repugnance, some kind of something propelling me AWAY from Ted at the same time the gravity center in my chest seems to push out against my diaphragm and ribs from inside there someway - pushing me toward Ted with a physical thrust - all while I'm sitting there feeling distaste over our intimacy. Him in his rocking chair and my sprawled out on the sofa.
I know I'm not representative of all women - that I'm a little fucked up in my own special way - but that gravity field that pulls me towards his gravity field in a downright physical sensation is so at odds with the knot in my stomach and the repugnance I feel in my throat.
That's so weird. That's enough of hanging with him for at least a week or two.
Then I come home and masturbate to a literotica rape story and have my little pre-orgasmic moment that I've never gotten beyond.
Then I come on here and type some jumbled garbage about how odd life is...
I'm well and truly fucked - I'm sure of it.
There's another things that keeps happening here. By here, I mean in small-town USA where my husband and I moved back in May. I'm beginning to make friends, and I'm not comfortable with that. With friendship comes responsibility, and I don't like that. I'm prone to failure in that regard. I say that my father destroys all of his relationships, but I do it too - just in a different way.
Work friends are great, b/c I work with them every day - we have friendships based on what we do, the 40 hr work week, the way we talk and the things we think are funny. But mostly, it's because of the time together - and the fact that we are not choosing to be together. We don't need a BASIS for friendship other than work.
But these friends here are different. I feel more weight. There's the bright, funny, affectionate cook who took a joke about us being BFFs a bit too seriously, and now I have a BFF that I'm not sure I want b/c I don't want to be responsible for her. I enjoy her company. She's great. The only drawback is that I feel responsible to her - to her feelings and her wellbeing.
And Ted. We talked the way I used to talk to my friends in my late teens and early 20s - exhausting conversation with intense subject matter and self revelatory side notes... I'm too old for that shit. I haven't done that for a decade, maybe. He said he's never had a conversation like that before - and I told him that I have. He said people of his generation only talk like that to real friends. I told him that I cheapen his experience b/c the kids of my generation talked like that all the time (but that I hadn't done it in a decade). But it doesn't change the fact that he only talks like that to real friends.
Does that mean we have some kind of connection now? Am I responsible for him?
Is that TWO people that I'm responsible for? My arms physicallay tingle in fear over that. I'm not capeable of that kind of intimacy. I fail under that responsiblity.
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