Is it the hormones? Or is all that crazy just me? (Part 1)

Let me tell you a little secret. I'm a little crazy sometimes. I think this, and I think sometimes it may be true, but really what it must be is that I'm neurotic, a little weird. And maybe once in a while, I think I'm kind of brilliant. (Those moments are a little rare, but they happen.)

So, I'm just going to lay it bare right now. Sometimes I have to do this on paper, to see the black on the white, to know that the words exist and can be sorted. On a blog, this means I can label and hashtag the heck out of this post so I can figure out what's the deal.

Why I Think I'm (a little) Crazy

I've lived with myself a long while now, and I've grown really accustomed to doing and saying things that make a lot of people look at me with their head cocked to one side and a face that reads: do you know what you're saying? So, when I was single, and so focused on trying to ensure that the things I wanted out of life -- always the same three things I've stated since I was 16: be a wife, be a mom, be a writer -- would actually happen to me, I put myself under a lot of unnecessary pressure. I have never really learned to turn that off (people tell me I should--that I need to, for my own sanity, but I haven't). I figured out that being a writer mostly, like say 90% depends on me, 10% on the market/industry/etc. After all, I have to do the damn work. Being a wife and mom were tandem goals, tied together. In my head, you couldn't have one without the other, and it was all dependent on finding a suitable partner. Talk about pressure. The absolute focus I had on finding someone to marry was... I'd say, consuming for me and frustrating for many of my poor friends who had to put up with my endless diatribes on the horrors of my dating life (or sad lack thereof). The year I turned 27, I started to examine this plan. It hadn't worked out the way I expected it to. Had things gone the way I had planned, I would've found someone in college and gotten married at 26, then started popping out kids between the ages of 28-32.

You know what they say about the plans we make, right? That God laughs at them? Yeah, I'm sure He did.

I had to re-examine these plans when I was 27. And like some magic lightbulb went off in my head, I thought, what if I separated the two things? If I can't be a wife, can I still be a mom?

...why, yes. yes, I can.

It wouldn't be the way I intended for it all to happen, but I know I want that for my life. So, I made a Plan B (and not the pill kind). I decided I was going to try to let the marriage thing go. I hadn't had too much luck in the love department, and things were only getting increasingly discouraging, so I tried to let that part go for a while. In the event I didn't find someone special by the time I hit 30, I was going to go with Plan B--my flying solo flightpath. Here's what that looked like:

PLAN B: Adopt a child from of the county child services, on my own, by age 35. Begin the adoption paperwork processing at age 33. (I was never one of those women who was so tied to the idea of birthing as an essential experience of motherhood--it'd be nice, but I'm not doing that by myself! And I've always wanted to adopt.)

How was I going to manage this? Well, I'd need more money. So I decided that I needed to go to graduate school again. I had tried and failed once before, and I didn't want to have to tell my future kid(s) that I quit something I had once set my mind to do. Plus, I didn't want to have to study too much longer, and if I could pursue graduate school now, I'd be done at age 30. So I applied, I enrolled, and I'm on that path even now--and I'm still on track to graduate at age 30 (on my way to 31).

This plan released some of that pressure to find someone to marry. And by age 28, I was giving dating a wild run. I decided everything I had tried before hadn't worked, so I kind of decided to just try new things. That meant I did some dumb stuff, but I did some smart stuff--like date enough to the point where I became somewhat comfortable with first dates--where there wasn't too much pressure to impress. That pressure dissipated and instead, I found myself just wanting to be sure I even got on with another person well enough. I admit: my attitude towards dating at this stage was in the mindset of "fuck it, I don't care anymore." Turns out, that's kind of the perfect state to be in.

Not that I needed to get into all this backstory, but the point is, when I was in that place--the "Whatever, I don't care anymore" stage, that's when I came across Captain.

In 2 months, it will have been a whole year since I first got in touch with Captain and started conversing with him. In 3 months, it will have been a year since we met. In 5 more months, it will be a whole year we've "officially" been together. (Technically, we never ever dated other people in the 6 week span of time from when we first met to when we made things "official" -- but this is arbitrary anyway.)

There is still enough of that intense planner in me, enough of that girl that was SO FOCUSED on finding someone to marry, to make me think about the possibilities this relationship has to lead to ... well, everything I wanted in the first place. I've thought about this for a while--and there's that saying, when you know, you know. Well, I don't. I don't know when that moment comes, or if it's one of those long-time-coming things. I just know that I found myself amazed at the things I was willing to do, the lengths I was willing to go, the amount of risk I was willing to invest into Captain, into us. And each time I do those things, I find myself going a little wild inside. What am I doing? Why? and with the questions comes the dawning realization that I've never done these things for anyone else in my life, ever.

Do I think I could marry this guy? Do I think I could commit to spending the rest of my life with him? The good, the bad, the ugly, the rich, poor, happy, sad, sickness, health, and Stanley Cup Finals?

I don't even think I have to answer that question, because you probably can tell what my answer would be based on this neurotic novel I'm trying to pass off as a blog post.

And so this conversation has occupied my mind for weeks now. Maybe months. I don't know. I just know that the slow freak out was getting worse, because instead of just thinking about it, I found myself trying to figure out how to find a way to protect myself. How do you fall in love and stop yourself from being too vulnerable? How do you find a way to recover the pieces of you that you've been giving away so readily? How do you bring up a loaded firecracker of a topic and not risk exposing yourself, or your fears, or your desires?

Then, I knew there was a problem. I was trying to think of ways to pull back, retreat. This was not the way I should've been thinking about our relationship and I knew it. But how could I talk about it with him and not send him running for the hills? I already know, in my bones, that the whole marriage and kids thing is more important to me than it is to him. He's one of those easygoing guys--so easygoing, I get the sense he'd be perfectly content to date until some unspecified time "if the situation is right."

And not that he's wrong--he's totally right. But he doesn't live by defined schedules and plans, not like me. That kind of flexibility and spontaneity is what even brought him to me--because I don't know if I could've moved internationally, not once, but twice, just for a work opportunity, but he is that guy. I'm the girl that plans her whole life out, to the point where she already knows just which county she'd be applying for adoption services from and the kind of girl who's already researched that option for her Plan B.

The only logical conclusion I came to was to gently ease into it when the conversation allowed for it.

An opportunity to wade into that pool came this weekend; I took it.

Details to follow, as this post is already longer than I intended it to be. :/ Remember, I'm just trying to sort out my crazy right now. (It's that "week" of the month, and so my emotions are kind of... smeared all over a map at this point. This is why I need to write stuff like this down to figure it out...SIGH.)