Continuing in my everlong quest for growth and maturity, I now am being greeted with the adult delights of Complicated Income Tax Returns served with healthy side portions of Car Repairs and Professional Dues, to be finished off with a refreshing dish of Dude I Need A Good Haircut And Maybe I Should Visit The Dentist Sometime.
The people I sit with at lunch are almost all young married couples. Our topics of conversation, while often humorous and enjoyable, frequently return to the abundant issues of being a homeowner.
We're redoing the bathroom.
Window treatments. How 'bout 'em.
We had to replace the flooring in this one room.
We need a new dryer.
Can you believe these property taxes?
Mortgage blah blah blah.
Of course, there isn't anything bad about what they're talking about at all. That's just life. That's just what happens when you get married and buy a house. You think about it. It's your home, your castle, your project. I guess if I had invested in a house, I'd be thinking about it a lot, too.
But man. I eat off of a card table, and I'm happy. I don't want a kitchen table; I want a weekend trip to New York City.
Thing is, I'm willing to bet the others felt this way when they were in my position in life. I'm sure there was a time where they said to themselves, "screw the lawn. let's take a bartending class." And then something happened. Maturity? Reality? Inevitability? I don't know. Obviously I don't know, because it hasn't happened to me. Yet.
What IS that thing that happens? Is it a good thing or a bad thing-- or neither? Can it be escaped? SHOULD it be escaped? Is the alternative being a sad sack of a fortysomething who spends Sunday morning alone with a crossword puzzle and a martini in her cat-riddled Manhattan apartment?
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2 comments:
As an alternative (to the 1 martini Sunday morning crossword that slowly seeps into the rest of your week and eventually finds you trying to feed your cats with vodka soaked olives) I invite you to consider the possibility that you could find a suitable male counterpoint who might also cotton to card tables, trips to NYC, and bartending classes instead of draperies, weed killer and a $300,000 leash.
Some might call it bohemian, but I'd just call it authentic.
In Italy, they call the routine settling down, buying a house, finding a mate "sistemizzata." Parents there LIVE for their children to become sistemizzati. Literally: systematized.
My synonym for that is SCARY.
March to your own beat my friend.
I for one plan to live (with my family) out of a camper and a sail boat at unidentified points in the future, homeschool my chillen as we traipse around the world and otherwise flout convention.
Rock on.
Girl, you're living the dream. Don't waste your precious, limited, single-no-dependents 20s wondering if you ought to be doing something else. Do what you want to while you can!
Love, almost-40-with-kids-and-never-backpacked-across-Europe
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