All the Things You Were Born to Be

My best friend, Megan, got engaged a week before my wedding. We've walked (trudged on occasion) the road of singleness together so to be able to share the joy of this season with her has been one of life's perfect gifts. As she plans and stresses and daydreams about her wedding, I'm happily on the other side of that Great Big Day, happily cheering her on with the hindsight of someone who is still waiting for her wedding photos to be edited.

On a recent phone call we were talking about houses.  She owns a small home about the same size as mine. It's not an absurdly small home, we've both been lucky in finding homes that fit our lives and budgets.  But they are each a wee bit on the tiny side for incorporating another human.  Another grown human.  With clothes. There are things to be thrown away. Things to be boxed and stored. Things to be stared at and then shoved under a bed.

For me, there was a terror and a joy in all that sorting and boxing and shuffling. Joy in knowing what I was making room for, a life together, my love. And terror in that it felt like the story I'd thus far written of myself had to be redrafted. It wasn't just the physical stuff I needed to get rid of, not just the books (so many books) and clothes and nobody-needs-this-many-pairs-of-shoes. It felt like I needed to discard some portions of myself, too, or if not discard, at least tuck them somewhere else so they wouldn't get in the way.  This love, this promise, this idea that for so long felt like it wasn't for me was suddenly (it seemed) holding my hand and vowing to love me forever.  And my concern was that I didn't quite have my shit together for that kind of thing. Still a bit of tidying up to do, babe, give me a second while I shove a few things under the bed...

When we got home after the wedding and began unwrapping presents, sorting clothes, digging up stones in the backyard, the home that felt impossibly small suddenly felt right-sized. All the shuffling and sorting and worrying about shuffling and sorting felt silly. Tidying up, literally and figuratively, had been lost in the hubbub of wedding planning, and that is as it should be. The little house, very clearly, was the perfect place to begin. Likewise, we were at the perfect place to begin. 37. 42. It's the perfect place, tidy or not.

I only know a month's worth of marriage. But a month's worth has provided one particular insight I wish I'd recognized as a singleton. You will never know all the things you were born to be. We're not promised loving parents, siblings, romantic love, adventure, travel, marriage, parenthood, career fulfillment, friendship. If we're lucky, we find ourselves as the recipient of some or all of those gifts in bits and pieces, an accumulation of heartaches and surprises and boredom and exuberant joys. And it is so easy to feel like Life only has enough room for so much Life. We try our best to shift and store and box away all of the things we feel need to be managed in order to ready ourselves for what comes next, but What Comes Next is so often perfectly sized for the life we already have. Because the heart stretches. Life expands. There is no "getting ready" for this kind of love.

We were born ready. And we will learn what else we were born to be, together.