I think sometimes we, as people, get a little over ambitious about things. Big things. Especially big things we know are coming. “I’m going to get married and it’s going to be great!” “I’m going to have a baby and it will be adorable and perfect!” “I’m going to buy my dream house and I will never hate anything again!”
But nothing ever works in quite the right way.
Marriage might start out as more of the same, especially if you’ve been living together already. But eventually you hit on some subject–kids, careers, moving–where you and your partner are not on the same page and are having a hard time getting on one. Babies don’t sleep in any sort of reasonable pattern and spit up on everything and everything faintly smells and you hope other people–when you get the chance to interact with other people–don’t notice. And house moving–even to the most perfect house–involves packing and transporting and unpacking, and invariably something important, usually in an emotional sense, is either broken or missing.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do these sorts of things–they are usually for the best in the end–but I just think we get a little caught up in everything. We plan house parties for a week after we move in, or we think we’re going to walk out of the hospital back in our old shapes with a little bundle of joy to show for the whole thing.
And the fact is, life changes change us. They change our priorities, our goals, our plans for the future. In time, some things will go back to how they used to be, but some things never will. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what will be which going into something. So it’s okay to give yourself some time to readjust, to get back into the swing of things, to establish a new routine.
Any big life changes lately? How goes the adjustment period?
I’ve blogged about it before, but the major life change I’m going through right now is with my eye. Having excruciating pain and not being able to write (and not knowing if I ever would be able to again) really, really changed everything, and not for the better. 🙁 But I have gotten to a point where I’m writing again, I’m doing things, and things are mostly okay (although the pain is still very much there). It just took a few years. 😉
I don’t know how you two do it. Washing my sheets messed up my life for days. (I kept forgetting to put them back on my bed, so I was sleeping on the quilt, and just…ugh.)
KD — Sheer force of will for me. 😉
I’ve given up sleep.