I made a mistake.

I always thought I would grow up, fall in love, finish school, get married in the temple, and have a million kids. I thought I'd seen enough of my parents' struggles to know there was no easy happily ever after, but it never occurred to me, as shy and socially awkward as I was, that the rest of it wouldn't somehow just fall into place. I didn't have a lot of friends and I rarely dated--but, hey, there's someone out there for everyone. Right?? Except there isn't.

I recently read through a journal I kept when I was 23. I'd never even kissed a guy. I was painfully shy, incredibly lonely, and jealous of everyone who had what I wanted. I know myself well enough to know that every day wasn't terrible, to know that I was writing when I was at my lowest. But even in those dark moments, lamenting that my little sisters were finishing school and kissing boys and moving on with life ahead of me--even when I felt sorriest for myself, it never occurred to me that I might never find "the one," that I might never fall in love and get married and live in a crazy house with a million kids. My journal is littered with comments about "when I get married." It never occurred to me that I'd be 38 someday and still alone, that I'd compromise everything else for the chance to be even just a part-time mom and share a kid with someone who apparently hates me.

The trouble is, even though I can say I've given up, even though I know absolutely that it will never happen, in my heart I still want that dream and I can try to make peace with my reality, but it hurts too. 

what do dreams mean?

I woke up from the strangest dream this morning.

We were evacuating--my entire family and I. We were packing as much as we could fit in our cars as quickly as we could and we were leaving. I don't know where we were going, but we were running from something and we were running out of time. In my dream, we were all younger than we are now. I was an adult, but I wasn't thirty-eight. I lived at my parents' house, but I'd already started packing for something (was I going away to school?). When my parents told me we were evacuating, I was upset. I'd only packed for a couple of months, not for forever, and now I had to hurry to catch up and to get the stuff I needed before it was too late.  I think we were in our old house from Tempe, but my closet was a lot like my closet at the Saddle Club Apartments. Derek wasn't there, but I packed his baby clothes--making sure he and I would have warm clothes because, apparently, wherever we were going, I was expecting snow. I still had my Jetta. I miss that car! I'd traded my parents the Jetta for an old army Jeep in the dream--but they were using the Jeep and it was already full of their stuff when I ran outside with my arms full of clothes. The Jetta's trunk was full of baby tortoises. I packed around them and yelled at Graham or Steven, both little kids, to pick some weeds and throw them in the back. Just before my alarm rang, I saw Justin sitting in the backseat of the Jeep with my parents in the front and my blonde little brothers cuddled into the clothes in the far back.

I woke up praying to know it was all about.

It was so real....but everyone was younger and so much hadn't happened yet and everything was changing.

What would I take if I had to evacuate right now?

I'm looking around my house and I suddenly want to get rid of all the superfluous junk.

I want to clean out and clear out or something.

I want to be ten or fifteen years younger and to still think I can go somewhere or something.

Or maybe this is all BS. It was just such a weird dream.

a lovely night

Derek and I are sitting on the couch watching Lion King. Derek is tucked against me, his feet in my lap and his butt against my side. Yang is curled up on the ottoman in front of us. The house is warm and dark and this feels nice. 

I don't know what I was thinking about earlier today, but I was driving to Last Chance, singing the ABC's with Derek and I suddenly realized (or decided) that my life is a million times better than it was three years ago and it's better because of Derek. Who'd have thought a crazy toddler could make such a difference? I don't particularly like my job, my car gets crappy mileage and I feel like I never have any extra money (I probably shouldn't be going to Last Chance, should I?) ... but in spite of all of that and anything else I could complain about, I'm happier than I've ever been.

I left Last Chance without buying new shoes and I don't wear a lot of designer jeans anymore--instead, I browse the racks for a perfect pair of Kut jeans--only $10!, but no luck tonight. I settled for a t-shirt for Derek for $2.97. We picked up a banana on the way out and we sang songs and looked for fire trucks and police cars all the way home.

Little things, like his singing face in the backseat or his enthusiasm for car washes and police car, have made such a huge, huge difference in my life.

I was going to write more, but he's begging for chicken and begging for bed at the same time right now -- so I'd better put down the computer for a while.

Bon nuit

Megan

still mundane and simply me

I felt like starting over.

So I have.

My old blog is gone and this is Simply Me now. 

Who am I? 

I'm Megan. I have a son and a computer and a car. I kind of have a cat sometimes too, but he isn't mine. I paint my nails and then I chew off the paint. Plain colors or intricate designs, it's always the same. I paint my nails, they look great for a few hours or even a day or two, and then I start chipping, peeling, and chewing it all away. I complain about being sleepy almost every day. I hate living in Mesa, but I'm comfortable in my house.

That's who I am. It's what I do.

I've been thinking a lot about memory--not specific memories so much as memory in general. What do we remember and why and how does that shape our lives? 

My mom wrote a letter when she was living in Panama nearly forty years ago. I found it when I cleaned out my grandma's apartment last year. In it, my mom wrote about driving from Provo to Panama when I was just a baby. Somewhere on a road in Guatemala, they stopped to change a flat tire and the van started to tip over. My dad and another man barely caught it. The trip could have been ruined. Someone could have been smashed. In the letter, my mom wrote that I was in a hammock in the van at the time. Reading the letter so many years later, though, she told me she clearly remembered holding me in her arms and watching the van descend. 

I was (and am!) fascinated by the differences between the letter and her memory. Why were there differences? Which version was true? And does it really matter?

Last weekend, in Memphis, my brother told his friends that when Ari and I became vegetarians in high school, my mom announced she wouldn't be cooking separate meals for us and, so, my siblings were forced to be vegetarian too. I was surprised. I don't remember things that way at all. It's true that my mom cooked with tofu sometimes, but I always suspected her of sneaking meat into my food, mixing the tofu with chicken and putting beef bullion in my beans. I don't remember support and vegetarian meals. I remember lectures from my dad for being disrespectful and wasting their food whenever my mom "forgot" I was a vegetarian and put meat in front of me. My brother and I lived in the same house and ate the same meals and we remembered things so differently. When I stopped to think about it, though, I realized that it made sense in an odd way. He wasn't on the receiving end of the lectures and he wasn't worried about bullion in the beans. He was inconvenienced by the tofu. Everything else was mundane and every day and easily forgotten. The tofu stood out and, because of that, those vegetarian meals, forced on him by my choice to stop eating meat, are what he remembers. Meanwhile, over the years, I've often credited my parents' opposition for cementing that teenage phase into a lifestyle choice that still affects the way I eat today.

So, memory ... blah, blah, blah.

I'm fascinated by it. It's unreliable. On some emotional and subconscious level, we decide what to remember and what to forget. I feel like memory is our way of telling our own stories (even if we're only telling those stories to ourselves) and sorting out our feelings. Because of that, I want to start writing more often again, to help me remember and to help me explore my memories, to tell my version of events.

With my old blog, I felt like I'd lost sight of any reason for writing so I'm starting over.

I'm not plain jane anymore, I'm simply me.

Megan