You may think talking trash in the marriage blog is not a good fit, but whether you’re talking about garbage duty, discarding detritus from our households in a general clear out or having an emotional clear out – trash exists.
The Discarded Aspects of Our Lives
Who you were when you were a teenager is not who you are in your twenties. Who you were in your twenties is not who you are in your thirties and who you were when you were single is not who you are when you are married and so forth and so on. This is natural, this is the evolution of who you are as a person.
Consider for a moment the couple you were when you first got married, that’s not who you are now. I can track the stages my own marriage has gone through and don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing who were then to who we are now. For one, we’re older and part of those changes we have gone through are in large part due to the fact that we are together.
Changes
As a part of those changes we’ve gone through, we’ve left behind aspects that we didn’t want or didn’t need. For example, the people we were as a young married couple were the kind that went out frequently and we ate out all the time. We used to order in and grocery shopping consisted of gathering staples. We cooked, but cooking was an event not a nightly thing.
We also didn’t keep a steady supply of snacks on hand in the house. If we wanted to do something, spontaneity wasn’t a problem. Want to go to a movie at midnight? No problem. Want to go on a ski trip this weekend? Who needs to plan ahead?
Becoming parents, having pets and settling into our responsibilities has left our spontaneity discarded. It’s not that we don’t want to be spontaneous and sometimes we are, but our lives require more planning now. Even more so when you consider that our daughter is now in school so we have to take into account her responsibilities as a student along with our responsibilities to our careers.
Missing You
Sometimes, I miss the person I was. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being a wife and a mother, I enjoy being an adult and I enjoy being me. But once in a while, I think back to the more laid back attitudes I had and the freedom that came with only having the responsibility of myself. The funny thing is about the discarded aspects of our lives – they really are trash.
They are old and that feeling of nostalgia exists only because we don’t have it anymore. It’s like that drawer in your kitchen, it’s stuffed with all this junk that you think you should throw out. Yet, you know the minute you throw it out you’re going to want or need some of that junk. You’ll give it a sense of nostalgia that you certainly wouldn’t cling to as long as it’s in your junk drawer.
Does this make sense to you?
What discarded aspects of your life do you miss from time to time?
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