Tonight is my Ten Year High School Reunion. I'm making it sound proper to show you the depths of confusion to which this statement brings me. I mean...what the Hell happened? A few years ago my biggest concern was getting to Best Buy on time (And I rarely did. Alafaya traffic was a fickle mistress.) or even what movie to go see that weekend. Now my wife decides such things. No need for decisions here!
But then I started in teaching and I started in coaching and I went to bed one night and woke up here. Ten years out of high school and not sure where the time went. I don't know what to say to my old friends about where life has taken me. Just as I'm sure they'll have trouble telling me...because I'll be talking more and it's difficult to get a word in edgewise.
A few short years ago, I was an over qualified salesman working at a Best Buy. Then I was an under-qualified teacher working with kids with disabilities. Now I'm a perfectly qualified Real Estate Agent...I'm a husband. I'm a homeowner. I mean I blinked...like maybe one time.
As an aside--many, many years ago, I was sitting in the backseat of my father's car. Him, my brother and I were going to the grocery store. My mother was pregnant with Erin and we had to pick up something for her. Not sure what, I was nine years old at the time. It's been awhile. My father was tired and it was late, he was keeping the air conditioner at a little past iceberg, but before zero degrees Kelvin--he said it was to keep him awake. I was strewn across the backseat futilely trying to use my shirt as a blanket, stretching it out past my legs and loudly complaining to my father about how cold I was. To say that I regretted my decision to accompany them was an understatement. I was positive I was going to die with a cute icicle mustache and ironic frost goatee. As I lay in that back seat, slowly dying, a thought suddenly blindsided me...one day I too would have a wife. I would have a wife and I would need to go to the bank late at night to cash a check for my job (Nine year old me did not foresee direct deposit, or the internet...) or I would need to go to the grocery store to get her something she wanted or my children needed...and because I was nine years old and far too young to handle the complexities of that concept, I sat paralyzed and freezing the entire way home. What a scary idea! It was gut-wrenching! Me! A dad! A husband! I was nine! I wasn't even in the Majors at my Little League yet...I mean we were still in Coach-Pitch! This was too much.
Fifteen years later and it was still too much. Sure, I had learned how to manage what little money I had. I had learned how to go to the grocery store and ignore the healthy stuff and get Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and feel proud of myself as I cleaned the kitchen. I dated, I had fun, but that same stomach churning fear was still there. Responsibility was coming straight for me, brights on and honking and I was wide eyed and stuck in the middle of the road.
Then I met Amanda and I just...wasn't. They tell me that's how it happens. It's like a switch in our heads--the male mind, one day you want to stay up late drinking with your friends and the next day you want to stay up late drinking with your friends and go home to your beautiful wife. It's a subtle shift.
Now my wife has a lot of more...adult friends. Somehow, through the entire course of my life I've managed to keep the same ten or so friends. I added two new friends right out of high school and one right out of college and I've sort of...plateaued. Now, I've made a lot of really great acquaintances, people who I consider "friends" but they all know the adult me. The guy who showed up for work everyday, the guy who posts on facebook about his wife and going to trivia on Wednesdays. The teacher, the coach or the salesman. But my best friends--they know me as the guy who plays World of Warcraft and talks about writing novels (a new novel idea each week, of course...) They know me as the guy who used to get them into movies and whose mom was a bit too scary to make fun of--she's always listening. And--not to belittle those friends, my closest friends...but only one of them is married, and while yes, he does have five children, it's easy to ignore him as an outlier, the exception to the Childless-Friend-of-Dave Rule.
Not so with my wife's friends. No siree, Bob. Her friends are all married and have been since college. Her friends are all having children. All of them. Like on rotation--like it's a damn job. Like they planned it and my wife is next.
Naturally they all have baby showers, as is custom. (We have one tomorrow in Jacksonville.) And as is custom my wife goes to Babies and Stuff (she's on her way there now) or wherever it is women go when baby shower invites go out and she proceeds to purchase baby products and says things like, "We'll need that when we have children." Or "Oh, we're definitely going to have ours off the boob by a year, ha ha!" "White noise machines are integral to getting your children to be able to sleep easily the rest of their lives!"
Of course she ignores my stricken looks and confused faces. I mean, how does she even know all this stuff? Why is she even thinking about it. In my head you just kind of live life until you're pregnant then you figure it out from there. Not my wife...no. She is prepared. Like...she could teach a class on how to prepare for preparing to be a mom. We could call it Pre-Pregnancy Motherhood and How to be Ready for Pregnancy, Motherhood, Pregnant Friends, and the "You should be a Mother Already Pressure" of Mothers, Mothers-in-Law and Grandmother 101. We'd have to shorten the name to fit it into the course catalog.
So I've been informed that my wife most likely (definitely) has Baby Fever. By "been informed" I really mean "been informed by my wife and every woman who talks to me or my wife up to and including people who don't know me that well through facebook." I've always heard jokes about Biological Clocks and been told by men with sorrow in their eyes to keep your bright, young, pretty wife away from jaded old mothers because misery loves company and women will convince other women to join them in their suffering and ha ha what a laugh!
Then it happened! Much like my High School Reunion being tonight sneaking up on me, so too has this. Yesterday I was on a couch with a girl I barely knew watching a Knight's Tale thinking about how kick-ass it was that a chick liked this super sweet movie and mourning over the recent death of my darling Heath Ledger, and then "blink." I'm a married man sitting in front of a computer thinking about cashing checks and selling houses and going to the grocery store in a needlessly freezing car just to try and stay awake.
