Two Months

So, Thursday was our two-monthiversary.  We celebrated with a breakfast of Chick-fil-a chicken biscuits.  Yup, totally went all out.  Some observations:

1. I sometimes struggle with an impulse to push him away when I don't feel like a great me.  It's like I want him to go away for a while until I'm back to being acceptable enough.  But I just can't do that.

2. The impending fall semester is staring me in the face.  It's going to mean sequestering myself in a library carrel while I eke out the rest of my dissertation.  It's going to mean beginning a job search that feels overwhelming.  It's going to mean not spending as much time with my husband because while I'm writing, he's going to be taking classes/teaching/researching/writing.  I know that once classes start, things aren't going to be the way they have been this summer.

3. Conversations with my mom have taken on a new layer that I'm trying to get accustomed to.  I can't explain what it is.  It's not awkwardness, necessarily.  It's a hesitation, an unsure dance that consists of trying to figure out the boundary between supportive and intrusive, between honesty and oversharing.  It's her trying to exercise restraint when her heart is spilling over with all the advice and experience that 34 years of marriage has to offer, wanting to say the right thing.  It's me wanting to talk to my mom like I always have, but trying to figure out how to do so with the awareness that someone else is intimately connected to me.

4. One of the things I'm trying not to allow to take residence in my brain is the fear that we will never gain the stability I'll need to feel comfortable enough to have a baby.  It's ridiculous, I know.  A perfect time or perfect amount of "stability" necessary to undergo any kind of life change simply doesn't exist.  And I have no idea what the future holds, so I'm trying to tell my brain to cut it out.  That kind of thinking doesn't do anyone any favors.

5. Sometimes when I look at my husband unnoticed (while he's asleep, working, or doing something that allows me to observe without being observed), I ponder what it is that made him decide that I was it.  What made him so sure?  We're different.  We were raised differently.  Our families and backgrounds are different.  How did he decide that he definitively wanted me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me?  When I ask him things like this, he laughs and says something sweet and generic, like because I'm a beautiful person or something like that.  But the fact is that there's not some specific reason or specific moment he can recall that he can point to as the reason or the moment, and that's how life is a lot of times.  There are a series of little reasons and little moments that add up to a life-defining whole.