Musings

I think we're all guilty of it...musing that is. We feel the butterflies when we watch romantic movies as young girls and teenagers, hoping we find a boyfriend as great as Leo DiCaprio in Titanic or Ryan Gosling in The Notebook. We get giddy with excitement and anticipation watching Whose Wedding is it Anyway? and Say Yes to the Dress as young women, yearning for a sparkling diamond ring and itching to plan our own fairytale wedding. We don't hold back the tears, both nervous and ecstatic, when we watch A Baby Story as young wives, longing for a baby and imagining exactly how we'll tell our husbands the happy news we do finally conceive.

I didn't realize my own musings until recently, when I went to dinner with a good friend of mine the other night. She was telling me about her struggle between focusing on her career or on finding a boyfriend and settling down. She told me that she can't help but cry every time she hears someone say "I do" on some wedding reality show or romantic chick-flick. I realized that it wasn't very long ago, when I was also glued to Wedding Week on TLC, comparing notes, gleaning ideas, and vowing that I'd never become a bridezilla (although now I'm pretty sure we all have a few not-so-graceful moments during those long months of planning). After all, it was a little less than three years ago that I was getting engaged, and scouring any wedding magazine or book or TV show I could get my hands on. I had checklists and notebooks, scrapbooks and shoe boxes filled with dreams for making my wedding day perfect.

Now, however, I find myself bypassing the wedding shows, barely glancing at the magazines in the grocery, skipping right past the registry sections in department stores. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise, a way to protect myself from the shoulda-woulda-coulda syndrome, wishing I'd done this differently or included that aspect. Of course I'm still excited when I hear about a girlfriend getting engaged and offer to help her plan in any way I can, but instead of butterflies, I view each new engagement with a little bit of wisdom and fond memories of an exciting time in my life.

That's not to say I flip right past TLC altogether when I'm channel surfing, however. Quite the contrary. But instead of waiting for the wedding shows at dinner time, I find myself waiting for the baby and pregnancy shows during the lunch hours and early afternoons. I cry at every ultrasound or proclamation of "It's a boy!". I laugh while reading blogs of new mothers marveling at the antics of their babies and toddlers, cheering them along as they journey through mommyhood for the first time. When I helped a friend deliver her first baby last year (because her husband was out to sea) I was totally in awe when she went from a crying, groaning, in-the-worst-pain-of-her-life mess to an absolutely, completely, in love mother of a new baby girl. I couldn't imagine how in the world a person, who'd declared early in her marriage that she wanted a big family, could be in so much pain and suffering through her labor pains, crying through the contractions that she couldn't possibly go through this again, yet, mere minutes later become a mother and forget all that pain in a nano-second, smiling and laughing and oozing with her happiness at finally having her baby in her arms. I didn't understand the instant anxiety on my friend's face when the doctors took the baby away to get cleaned up. The instant maternal instinct was foreign to me, yet I could feel that longing boiling inside of me. I yearned to experience the mystery and miracle of pregnancy and childbirth.

Even now, as I dutifully take my birth control pills every day, I count the days until my husband is home from deployment and I'm far enough along in nursing school that we're in a place that is both practical, convenient, and right for us to bring a baby into our family. I absolutely cannot wait until I can share funny toddler stories on my blog, instead of just reading about my friend's kids. I'm excited to compare pregnancy notes with my mom and find my own motherhood methods. I dream of what my husband's face will look like when I tell him we're expecting, when we meet our first child for the first time. I wonder what that baby will look like.

We're all guilty of it....of wandering in our musings. And reveling in them.