Administrative: Oh my goodness WordPress!! I turn my back for a week and come back and the whole thing is different!!! Yay new blogging/dashboard interface… wow. This is pretty swanky. Sweet.
In other news. As much as I feel like pouring my heart out into this little text-box, I know I’d regret it later. I’m not usually one to buckle under pressure but I guess that’s what’s going on, more than anything else, right now.
I think I posted a while ago about advice - how everyone gives it because they think they know the answer to all your problems - and how much I hate it. Especially free, unsolicited advice. You know, there’s an Alix Olson quote I always feel is relevant:
sometimes i feel like a warrior
just for making it through the day
you know sometimes you feel like a fighter
because you fight
just to keep the fighting away
And that’s so true. And I don’t think that the people who so freely and forcefully give their opinions on how badly my partner and I are living our lives appreciate just how hard we are fighting to keep everything afloat. And I don’t think they remember, when they yell at us, about what they were like when they were our age. I mean, the mistakes they made, and how they had to make them to learn.
I think that one thing I’ve learned, more than anything else, is that this is all just a big fucking work in progress. I mean every now and then we have to tear it all down and start again and it hurts and it sucks and it’s a failure but it’s also a new start, and that’s the way it goes, when you’re 22 and 24 and just starting to carve your way in this loud, terrifying, violent, difficult world.
And, you know, when you look back, I think the truth is Liz and I have done a damn fine job. We’ve fought our way through a lot, and we’re still standing, and our life is still afloat, we’re still holding it all together, and you know, I think that’s pretty fucking amazing. So no, things are not perfect, but tell me where they are - I really don’t think things are perfect for anyone, anywhere. But we have something, and we’re making it good, we’re making it work, and if that isn’t the most adult, mature thing any two human beings can do then I don’t know what is.
So tell me we don’t pass the litmus test for adulthood. Nobody told us how to do this. Nobody gave us an instruction manual, nobody read us the rules, nobody taught us what we’ve had to learn ourselves. So tell me that after 2 years of living on our own in this ridiculous city and not sinking once, after knowing when to fight and knowing when to ask for help, after making mistakes and learning from them and not making the same ones again, after working to build something, tearing it down, and building it up again, after fighting tooth and nail to build a family and a relationship and a household that works - tell me, tell us, that we’re not doing just fine on our own, or that anyone could have done it any better. I just can’t buy that.
I just wanted to write this, because, in case anyone has any doubts about our choices, or our ability to survive, I want them to know that I don’t regret any decisions we’ve made. Even if they’ve led to hardship, you know what, we’ve learned from it, and that’s fine by me. At our age, that’s okay. And the most important thing is that we’re happy. We’ve built our own life - our own life as a couple, a new family that we have built, and we like what we’ve made, no matter what. So to our critics - don’t take the bumps in the road as anything more than what they are, and don’t underestimate our incredible strength and power and our ability to overcome any obstacle, no matter what kind, as two individual adults and as a family.
