If someone sat you down when you were 17 and showed you a day in your life today, would you have liked the older you or would you have turned up your walkman, laid down on your bed and died, inconsolable? When life was still somewhere in the future and you could still dream of crushing love, world fame and revolutions, when OF COURSE it ALL could happen to you, and when hope was unconditional, would you have liked the person that you are today?
Sometimes I think about it and I think that, had someone shown me a crystal ball of me at 31, I probably would have closed my eyes and waited for sweet death. I mean, really?... Nothing, and I mean not one thing, turned out the way I dreamed it would.
At 17, I fell asleep at night dreaming of my days as a famous -and I mean !famous!- writer, professor, philosopher, inventor, supermodel, and adored bride of Bryan Adams.
+ 
=babies
I went to sleep at night feeling wonderful about my future life of yacht parties, chairing Board meetings and brushing my long, shiny hair. Ahhhh, the life of ME!.... It would be hard to choose what I should grow to be most famous for, and which continent to save in my future life. At the least, I knew I would have a PhD by the time I was 28, see Asia by 30, and in general just have a great wardrobe.
What happened between then and now is not important. But some mornings -like today, when the thing I woke up to was my dog WALKING ON ME and my to-do list is to sweep the basement and meet the washing machine repairman- I think about my 17-year old plans and feel very aware of how utterly different life turned out.
Here I am, 31. I never did meet Bryan Adams and we never fell in love next to my personal plane. I've never written a book and am sure that I'll never be a professor at Cambridge. My legs never did grow long and my nose never got any smaller. Instead of yachting about the Mediterranean, I spend my mornings in the muddy dirt of my little backyard, trying to figure out the weeds from the flowers. I can't wait for Friday nights to take a bath and sit quietly, in threadbare T-shirts and wool socks, next to Kim on the couch, drinking ice tea and reading books. My cat puts on accidental shows and I watch her roll around waving her paws for minutes, laughing dimwittedly with tears in my eyes. I have a room in my house where I bang things together and play every day. Simple things are grander than I could have pictured with my teenage imagination, and it is great.
At 17, I imagined love crushing and damned and ending (hopefully) tragically, with resentment and an emotional handicap. Instead, love has been happy and quiet and certain. No pauses, no awkward silences. Even though I've seen her every day for the last 4 years, I get giggly when I look over in the morning and she's still here. It's hard to explain how I never want to be without her, but I don't, ever, even now. I still smile every time when we meet after work. The other day, we were watching a fashion show on TV and I looked at a blazer and burst out, "Is that SHRIMP?!!!" Clearly, it was NOT shrimp; it was a blazer. And she just looked at me with a sparkle in her eye and said, "That's not shrimp, honey, but I do love you."
That's better than I could have dreamed, wouldn't you say?...
And then, there's this:
In October, Kim and I are going to have a baby.
< our actual baby
The thing is, all these things that I have now would have seemed like so very little at 17, and yet they seem like more than I can even hold at 31. My spouse, my child, my home, my work, and endless hope that things will keep shifting.
Nothing is the way I thought it would be, but I guess somewhere along the way, I got lucky.
