Worth 1,000 Words

Adele's rolling in the deep played as I inadvertently stumbled across my old wedding album which I has been unable to throw away when I packed to move back to my home state. Adele croons about how he had my heart & soul in his hands as I wordlessly plucked photos of my family without him from the pages. I didn't cry. I didn't even feel like crying. I started wondering what his family is up to these days, how my former mother-in-law is faring (the big D-word cannot take my love for her away). Adele starts the verse that always made me sob in those dark, post-divorce days. I don't flinch but consider mailing a photo to Margaret of her boys. I opt not to because Jamie ransacked the photo album before turning it over to me, so he must not have wanted that one. I notice those empty spaces and try to remember which photo I had placed there originally, back when I was hopeful that marriage would change things for us. Adele crescendos, and I push the once-beautiful album to the discard pile, clinging to a few lovely photos with my sister, my parents, myself in an over-sized oyster shell meant for kids. The next song starts and I return to my task at hand, organizing my professional resources I'd stored in the closet of the room that was to be my bedroom when I moved here. It is now a guest room, and I share a bigger closet with a completely different soul, who won't wear a fake smile in our wedding photos, who doesn't insist on a guest list of 6. What a different experience this will be! What a great and different life I can look forward to, the life I live right now.

Another post about Sex and the City? What?

I swear I really don't believe that Sex and the city has ANYTHING to do with anyone's reality. I promise. But I have been on summer break and have had a SATC marathon afternoon at least twice since school's been out. As always, most of the episodes are purely entertainment and ridiculousness and vanity and overt consumerism...but once in a while an episode, a character's plot (hello, Charlotte's divorce and feelings about her second marriage), or a line of dialogue rings true.

In the season I'm watching, Carrie muses that "having it all" means that you've got (and are happy with) a relationship, a place to live, and a career, and that you feel out of balance when one of those isn't there or isn't right. True to the show's ridiculous nature, she didn't have it all because she didn't have a man. It's time, however, for me to have it all (whatever that really means). Personally, I'd expand Carrie's definition to include a social life, healthy hobbies, and a support system. Even with those added factors, I have it all.

I was offered an exciting job in my field that isn't temporary this time. I am getting married next year. I have just found, after weeks of frustrating fruitless searching, a place that will be a comfortable home until we're able to buy a house. I've got some great friends here in Madison and elsewhere, I am on the verge of belonging to a fabulous yoga studio in Madison, and I can't get over how supportive and helpful my friends are ALL THE TIME.

And I'm feeling pretty grateful.