Still No Knock-Knock Jokes

When I was in college, I dated a guy. Let's call him Eric, because that was his name. He was actually a really good guy, but a really lousy boyfriend. He was only my second boyfriend ever, and I was caught up in a typical sheltered-girl-who-read-too-many-YA-fiction-novels' ideas about love. When Eric said he was falling in love with me, it never occurred to me to think about things like, um, how little we actually knew each other. I was the lamest of those cliches, in love with the idea of being in love.

So I dated him for three years (in which he broke up with me three times, by basically ignoring me until I forced a conversation where he mumbled monosyllables in answer to my desperate questions about what he wanted). I wish I could say that when we were together, it was wonderful, passion-filled, worth all the awful weeks that followed each break-up, but it wasn't. It was...comfortable. It was nice to be part of a couple, a couple that was part of a crowd. And, in my inexperience, I didn't know what I was missing. Well, I might have imagined it, but to question what else I could have, to take the risk of confounding the status quo...it just didn't occur to me, as stupid as that seems in retrospect.

The last time he broke up with me, I was just as devastated as the times before, but some good, honest, and gentle friends helped me finally, finally realize that I wasn't missing much. So when he came around with the roses and the sad eyes again, I didn't take him back. He claimed to be devastated, but as the weeks went on, I realized, the hell? We hardly had a relationship at all. He didn't miss me--he didn't even know me. As the months and then years passed, I kept wishing I could go back in time and cuff myself soundly in the back of the head. I wasted so much time with this schmuck. I could have been having adventures, stupid college romances, making the mistakes you make when you're 19.

Strangely, at no time was that feeling of regret stronger than in the beginning of my relationship with the man who I eventually married. I think seeing how good it could be just threw into sharper relief how terribly, stupidly LAME it had been with Eric. And now that I'm in my mid-30s, with a kid, I look back at my early 20s and sigh, wishing I'd had more...well, experiences, I guess. Good and bad, just something other than the stupid complacency.

I was thinking about this the other day in relation to having a baby. Before I had Tankbaby, I was so complacent about that precious commodity, time. I look back now and could just smack myself, thinking about all that time and independence I wasted on lazing about. I could have been traveling, could have been writing, could have been making clothes...a thousand "could have been"s. If only I'd been brave enough to risk upsetting the status quo. To risk failure. To break out of my cocoon of comfortable enough to try new, scary, or different things. Because now there's a baby. And while I don't buy into the "have kids and your life is over" idea, I am also realistic: kids come first. My time to be indulgent is past.

And just like I don't regret getting married when I did, I don't regret having a baby now. But I do look back and want to grab that girl by the scruff and shake her, because she's wasting so much...on so little.