What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

I did want to have a family someday … it was just that “someday” never seemed to feel like “today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul.

I love to do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it. That means always getting the specialty of the house. That means smoking cigarettes I don’t smoke at the perfect corner café for hours at a time in Paris, and stripping naked for group hot-tubbing with people you don’t want to see naked in Big Sur. It means riding short, fuzzy horses that will throw me onto the arctic tundra in Iceland, or getting beaten with hot, wet branches by old naked women in stifling banyas in Moscow. When these moments happen, I get absurdly happy, like the kind of happy other people report experiencing during the birth of their children.

After that, one scary moment became something I was always willing to have in exchange for the possible payoff. I became a girl who knew how to take a deep breath, suck it up, and walk into any room by herself.

She wanted him to have a life about more than us, he wanted her to have a life that was more about us.

But nothing new or good can come in without a void to fill. Voids are necessary and wonderful.

You set your expectations too high for a particular version of perfect and then you get so crazily sad when it isn’t,”

You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.

life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally.

Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.

Do we want the same things out of life? Do we bring out the best in each other? Do we find each other attractive?

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”

“The deep feeling of oneness you have with someone when you’ve done all of the work on yourself you have to do to make a marriage work doesn’t take away your independence. It frees you to be the person you actually are. It wipes away all that nasty ego stuff, and lets your soul shine through.”