HitchDied

Growing Up Isn’t Easy

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1. Collin reliably wakes up before I do, and regularly uses some of that time to brew coffee so he can bring up a fresh mugful for me before my alarm goes off.  I will admit freely this is one of the reasons that I fell in love with him.  This morning, Collin brought me a cup of coffee and jumped in the shower.  And then I fell back asleep with the mug still in my hand, spilling coffee all over the sheets and my body.  Ouch.

2.  I caught up with a friend over a phone call last night:

Him: So how’s being engaged?

Me: Awesome.

Him: You set a date or anything like that?

Me: We haven’t booked a place yet, but we’re shooting for May 2011.

Him:  That’s like a year away!  So you’re not just engaged, you’re getting married.

Me: [GULP!]

3. I still haven’t done my taxes.

Reviewing these points, I can’t get past the question, “Why do I think I can get MARRIED?

Because marriage is for grown-ups, and I am not a grown up.  I fall asleep with mugs full of hot coffee in my hand! I don’t start working on my taxes until the anniversary of the minute the Titanic hit the iceberg.  I am not “marriage material.”

Am I the only person out there with this sort of cold feet?  Pretty much once a week I watch a movie where two people who should not get married plan a wedding together, but it is usually because they don’t really know each other, are all wrong for each other, or because “the one” is someone else.  I don’t have any of that anxiety about Collin.  But I do worry that he’s the one making a terrible mistake.  I want to grab his shoulders, shake firmly, and say, “Have you gone mad?  I never get the mail!  I eat snack cakes for breakfast! Have you seen the backseat of my car recently? There are gas receipts from 2006 in there. Why are you marrying me? Run while you still can!”

I know that Collin is marrying me because he loves me and wants to commit to a life with me, and I should give him the respect of believing that he made that choice as freely as I am making it.  In the meantime, I will try rise above these nagging self-doubts.

But I think I should also use this period of engagement to try to improve some of my more adolescent habits, such as procrastination and laziness.  Some people use their wedding as a motivator to lose a little bit of weight, I’m using my marriage as a motivator to grow up a little.  Hopefully I can pull it off without permanent damage to my maturation metabolism.

3 Comments

  1. That’s what the engagement part is for. To slowly grow out of thinking “me” and grow into thinking “we.” Because once whatever you’re doing — taxes, saving money, baking a cake — starts to affect more than just you, it kind of shakes you out of your reverie naturally. It’s a built-in maturation process.

    And I don’t care what they say: grownups can eat snack cakes for breakfast.

  2. …and I am 55 and I have a teal feathery streak in my hair and my mother is 78 and she will look at her hand and say” Whos’ old hand is that?” and then she will look at me and say…are you MY daughter that is in her 50s?????…am I a grown up NOW???? when does that happen??????? and Tom and I like to take Journey for rides in the jeep and go hiking and I am behind him and I think “is he mine?” “Is this really my wonderful life?” Eat icecream sundaes for dinner and snack cakes for breakfast and fall asleep with your coffemug in your hand that my Mollie gave you and laugh and cry and grow old together!!!!!

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