Come and Gone

As I child, I had many fantasies about what my life would be as a "grown up". I would pretend that my baby dolls were real, and that I had rescued them from orphanages. I was married to Lance Bass from N'Sync (before we all found out he was really gay) and we were madly in love.

When I was in kindergarten, we had to draw pictures of what we wanted to be when we grew up. While other children drew pictures of firefighters, veterinarians, and doctors, I drew a picture of myself holding a sponge and said I wanted to clean houses. I was really dreaming big. Although it is comical now, it really attests to what I thought I could make of my life. There is a little bit of truth to it though, because how many of us really fulfill the professions we dreamed of as children? Many women become stay at home mothers who end up changing diapers, cooking dinner, and scrubbing the toilet. I never thought I would be talking to hundreds of people a day about sex, but here I am! In hindsight, I was just being realistic. I always felt like I was ahead of my peers with how I looked and felt about these things. I believe I was a pretty serious child, always doing well in school and wanting to please. That never changed.

I met my husband my sophomore year of high school, his junior year. I noticed him working in the school store and in my photography class. I asked a mutual friend to introduce us, because I was pretty sure he didn't even know I exsisted. Once we started spending time together, we became extremely infatuated with one another. I don't want to say we fell in love, because I don't think you can really learn to love someone until you've been with them long enough to learn their qualities as well as their faults. The other relationships I had established up until that point fell to the wayside as I devoted 110% of my attention to Alex. This proved to be, well, not so good. When Alex graduated and was heading off to college, I still had another year to go. Needless to say, my senior year I was miserable. I kept to myself for the most part, just trying to get through each day as quickly as possible. The following year I followed him to Indiana where he was attending school at Notre Dame and enrolled in Saint Mary's College (SMC and college in general is a whole new can of worms I will discuss in another blog). It was very difficult to get out of old habits, and not surprisingly, I fell into the same rut my senior year of college. I was without Alex, and therefore, didn't know what to do myself. It's as if my ability to have fun and socialize was completely taken away. Again, not good, but in my defense, Indiana sucks. In December 2010 when I was home for Christmas break, Alex propsed to me on the top of Lookout Mountain. FRIGGIN' FINALLY!! What I had always wanted finally came true.

Once I graduated from SMC, Alex and I lived temporarily at my mother's house before we moved into our own home. It was one of the most miserable summers of my life. Once you leave home, you can never go back and expect things to be kosher. In August 2011, we moved into the Highlands neighborhood which was once considered dangerous but now is the new, hip place to be. Our wedding was on April 14, 2012. It's hard to imagine being a little girl all those years ago, dreaming about homeless babies and N'Sync, and being where I am today. Married, graduated, full-time job, a grown up.