Life these days

I've been a newlywed for five months now. Does that still classify me as a newlywed? Husband and I seemed to mold into our roles as married folk easily enough; I naturally love to do homey housewife things that I swore I'd never do, i.e. spend my free time cooking and cleaning. There is something oddly magical about being domestic, something familiar and beautiful that I didn't expect. I love my home. Perhaps it's the enormity of change from our prior living situation (sharing a house with five other people. None of whom were relateable or particularly likable to us). Now, I'm just so grateful for what we have. I love our studio apartment with its eclectic, miss-matching furnishings. I love our patio that gets pine needles dumped on it the second Husband sweeps it. I even love the mossy, sun-slurping tree that dumps.

My life has so dramatically, unrelentingly changed this past year. It's unbelievable. Last night, I was getting ready for bed when Husband stopped me and held me by the shoulders at arms length, studying me like a scientist. Finally, he voiced it, "You're so grown up..." He almost got a little teary-eyed, as if I were heading off to kindergarten all by myself.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, think about where you were this time last year."

I did. In fact, I do, all the time. This time last year, I was couch surfing in Southern California, oblivious to what I know now, living from moment to moment as if there would be no tomorrow. If I had kept it up, perhaps there wouldn't have been. It can be a little hard to think about. When I look back on myself just a short year ago, I see a lost, scared girl. A desperate human. There is nothing scarier than a desperate human. Wars are started by desperate humans.

That's not to say I've got it all together now, my growing is done, and I'm ready for my graduate certificate. That won't happen until I'm on my death bed. As for being a newlywed, I'll admit, though I was expecting a period of adjustment, I was still wholly unprepared. It doesn't matter how long you've known your partner or lived together, married life is different than dating life, even engagement life. Perhaps it doesn't help that Husband and I moved at warp speed. We lived on opposite ends of the state. I quit my job and moved in with him, a few months later we were engaged, and minute after that, we were married. All within less than a year.

That seems so unspeakably strange to me, as we both come from families of divorce, and marriage for me wasn't even a question. I had resigned myself to a life of bachelorettehood years ago. I even wrote a college paper about how marriage was an "outdated social institution" that should be forgotten. My professor laughed and said, "I had a student just like you who wrote the same thing. A few months later, she was engaged."

I scoffed at that poor, misguided student. She couldn't stick by her beliefs! That would never happen to me...