This post has been building for a while. I finally decided to take a breather and commit it to (digital) paper.
I feel like I’ve – in just a few short days – touched the beginning, the middle and the end of the cycle of life. We all know that there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end but rarely do they all coalesce into just a few short days.
THE MIDDLE
I’m going to start this story in the middle because that is where it started. Two weeks ago I was preparing to head to Kansas City for the wedding of two dear friends. It was a lot of fun being there with them as they prepared, cooked, entertained friends, had fun, got nervous, and drank wine. I had to honor of officiating the wedding and – honestly – it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. Weddings are one of the rites of passage in the middle of people’s lives. They’re a celebration, a powerful proceeding, a h*ll of a lot of fun. They’re the beginning of the middle of our lives – the part where we build a new family with new people as well as the “old” familiar people. Being in KC we were surrounded by people planning for this rite of passage – people eloping, people planning a huge Indian wedding, and people (us) just starting to fumble our way through what we want from a wedding.
Pete and I are now starting to plan for our own wedding. The deal was that we would start thinking about it once the KC wedding was complete. I’ve been married before so I’ve done some of this thinking and planning. The interesting thing is that I’m finding that what I want and what’s important to me is so different this time around. I think it’s a reflection of the changes I’ve made in the past few years, as well as the vast difference between this relationship and the previous one. It’s exciting to start thinking about what we want (albeit a little less exciting to start thinking about paying for it! 
).
It was while we were in KC that I ran smack dab into…
THE BEGINNING
While we were there I got an email from a friend letting me know that he and his wife are pregnant. I’ve known him for <gasp> 10 years or so and first met her in 2002. They’re the kind of friends that I don’t talk with as much as I’d like but every time I do I have fun. It’s still kind of blowing my mind that they’re pregnant. Someone I know and have known for a while is having a baby! My friends are reproducing!! (Okay, one of my friends from high school has been a parent for a while so technically my friends have been reproducing for a while.) I don’t know why this is such a shock for me. Pregnancy and babies are a frequent topic of discussion in our house and among my friends. I work in adoption so I talk about family building all the time. In a way, becoming a parent is one of the rites of passage of mid-life too but I prefer to think about it as the beginning, after all it is the beginning of a life! In a way, it is a beginning of a whole new way of knowing oneself and ones’ partner too. While out in KC a friend of my was talking about May ‘08 and started a sentence saying, “Well, if I’m not very pregnant then…” Wow! Talk about making it real – that put a time frame to it!
It kind of amazes/interests me that I’m having this reaction because Pete and I have talked about having kids not too long after we get married. We have a concrete time line for that, which – by extension – means that we have a time line for children too. (I’ve worked with enough people touched by infertility that I know things may not happen quickly or at all for that matter but they could!) Maybe my reaction is more about the idea of parenthood moving from the “sometime in the future” realm to happening right now all around me realm. It’s kind of wild… and very exciting. I think it’s awesome that we’re getting to this stage of our lives. I look forward to playgroups for the kids in addition to Snackster parties for the grown ups.
After being home a few days I ran smack dab into…
THE END
I got an email from a high school friend saying that one of our classmates committed suicide or, as his family very sensitively wrote in his obituary, “lost a long and deep struggle within himself.” It’s always hard when you hear about people dying early. For those of you who have been reading this blog for a bit, you know that the impetus for its founding was the death of my dear friend, Heidi. It made me sad to hear about Craig’s death because it sounds like he was doing some good work in the world and was a good person. Admittedly, I barely talked with him in high school (he was a “cool kid”; I wasn’t) and haven’t talked with him since.
Actually, hearing about his death and the “long and deep struggle within himself” was a gentle reminder of the complexities of high school. During middle and high school, I always considered him one of the cool kids. He was athletic, trim, made friends easily, and had all the girls he could want… or at least that’s how it looked like from the outside. The interesting thing about high school perceptions is that they say more about us than they do about others. In HS I was timid, overweight, physically uncoordinated, and a music geek… or at least that’s what I thought at the time. I guess that hearing about this death is just another reminder that everything is not always what it seems from the outside looking in. Every day I have to remember that. I have my own perceptions, expectations, etc. that color the way that I see people. It’s hard – and critically important – to put that aside and try to see the person as their true self. (It’s even good to do that with people you’ve known for a while ’cause you never know when you may find a friend who is a car nut too! <Hi Heather!>)
Well, that’s the beginning, the middle, and the end. Just a strange confluence of the beginning of life, mid-life rites of passage, and the end of life all in the course of a few days. It was enough to get me thinking…
