Currently:The Honeymoon
When I first got the offer from DAG I told my mom: This is better than getting engaged; this is better than getting married. She smiled, especially as I did, very broadly, but she was confused: “What do you mean?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t like my current job. There were good people. The mission as sound. The long term impact of the organization that already had almost 40 years under its belt were undenyable. But where I was in the picture wasn’t an expression of the leader I wanted to be and there was no obvious route there to be her. But, I did what I could made myself useful in addition to my usual tasks and looked to the wisdom of those who could make me even beter if I studied them.
But I loved them too. The boys of DAG: One who was so astounded that I knew the best place to get free boxes was at 2AM in a 24 hour Walmart that he said, “I love you” in front of 4 interns over lunch. The other that had befriended me a year before and told me “don’t worry.” Well understood, those words would never fall on deaf ears, not even tired ones.
But as we walked along together all of the pieces of the grand puzzle have shifted. As I saw them moving about and was warned about one such move, I looked back to the kind eyes that I don’t see so often anymore and said with a shrug and a smile, “It’s ok, Joe, the good things always change.”
All that’s come to pass in these 10 months has been astounding. What a marriage like this teaches is that what things are said early on, are sand castles left to the elements a few days later. They are what they are- neither fortified nor meaningless.
The Honeymoon is over. Plenty of friends warned that it would happen several remarked that it was lucky I’d made it this long. They were right and it’s been a slow slide but one I’ve seen before and fear. As one pre-consoled, “You learn what it is and what it isn’t.” I still stake faith in him. All of the hims.
So the honeymoon is over and I have to break away from the isolation of being so devoutly married to this position, this potential, and happily dreampt reality to acknowledge the more confusing dreams that have led me to doubt my first visions of happiness here (yes, I dreampt about my job before this was even my job). All of them are relevant and none of them are at the same time.
New vision- art, voice, brilliance, homeownership, my child. I’ve been thinking on my future adopted child and how we will find oneanother and start a new chapter of her life and mine. It’s exciting. I’ve been talking to the Indian friends who will likely be helping me when we are in Darjeeling for those 2 years. It won’t be easy, but I feel such a true meaningfulness for me and for her- two souls thrown on to this planet with no better plan that to get going through life hand in hand. Yes, there is still hope and love in this plan. Even after the honeymoon is over.
