Well, 2022 was definitely a life-changing year for me! Sure, my life was already moving in exciting new directions when the year began, but there’s a big difference between “moving” and “moved.” On January 1st, whatever my hopes and dreams may have been, the future remained uncertain, and even my present reality was relatively unchanged, in many ways, from the status quo of recent years. But within a couple of months, it started to become clear that those hopes and dreams would probably be realized. The whole middle section of the year kind of became about figuring out (some of) the details. Then, in September, came the big transition: Emily moved in, we made a wedding happen, and the rest of our lives commenced! After that, we spent the remainder of the year beginning to invent that life together, and working on adjusting to it all (which is still, for sure, a work in progress).
In the latter months of 2021, I had already begun to feel (for the first time) like my present life was no longer defined merely by being the “post-divorce era.” I remember reflecting that, with someone new in my life, I—or my life—suddenly felt somehow…larger than that. Now, though, the shape of my whole life feels irrevocably altered, in a way that I dimly envisioned years ago but that never felt real at the time. Once upon a time, the course of my life resembled an orderly progression: I had grown up, gone off to college, met someone, fallen in love, gotten married, and established a life, and that was the story, which was going to continue fairly predictably for many more years, until old age and the specter of death intervened. Then, of course, my marriage unexpectedly unraveled, and the course that I had thought I was on suddenly changed. I’ve written (a bit) before about how, in the years that followed, I tried to grapple mentally with redefining my marriage to Jen as one part of my life, with a beginning and and ending, rather than as a central pillar of my life as a whole. By 2020, being post-Jen had begun to feel “normal” to me (as I wrote about in a post on this blog in January of 2021), but “post-Jen” was still very much how I conceptualized my current life. Now, though, that paradigm no longer fits. The essential facts on which it rested remain true, but the addition of new elements has rearranged the pieces. At a minimum, I now look at my (adult) life and see a couple decades (call it “youngish adulthood”) of being married to Jen, followed by a six- or seven-year interim/transitional period, followed by what promises to be the rest of my life (with Emily). But even that paradigm may not fully capture the meaning of the changes that 2022 has wrought. Perhaps, in time, I will come to see everything prior to 2022 (the whole of my first marriage included) more like one lengthy prelude that prepared me for the eventual rest-of-my-life with Emily.
Right now, that’s all still kind of in flux. My life with Emily still feels new and largely undefined. It’s wonderful and exciting, and I’m giddy and full of joy about it, but I’m also still trying to feel my way into it, and imagining what it might feel like after five or ten or thirty years is utterly beyond my capabilities for now. I do look forward to a time when our life has become a bit more…settled—but I’m also surprising myself, daily, within how I seem to be handling all the changes and (hopefully temporary) chaos. For instance, currently, there is a 19-year-old living in “my” (our) upstairs! How weird is that? Well, pretty weird, except…I dunno. It’s just a piece of my new life, and I’m becoming the person whose life it is, and that’s that. And then, of course, Emily is a whole person with a whole set of preferences and habits and expectations and ways of doing things, some of which are different from mine—and now “my” house is our house, and a million things about how I am accustomed to structuring my life are subject to change, and we have to work out new routines and make new decisions that take each other into account, and even though we’re very much on the same page about wanting to do all of this in ways that meet both of our needs, it’s not always easy. But I would a million times rather be working my way through all of this than still be alone and not have her in my life…and anyway, even if I’m kind of particular and set in my ways in many respects, I also feel strongly that building a life with another person is what I was “born to do.” There’s an intimacy in some amount of “yielding of sovereignty,” if you will, over my living space and my daily routines, and in the forging of new ones together, that doesn’t (to me, anyway) otherwise seem fully achievable. And so, even when it’s stressful, right now I’m just happy to be where I am.
My experience of this Christmas has kind of represented a microcosm of everything about where my life is at right now. For one thing, I’ve kind of been in love with our very “full” Christmas tree, upon which all of my cherished ornaments are intermingled with all of hers (to a degree that is not yet matched, in regard to our respective possessions, in enough other areas of the house). The merging-lives symbolism here is obvious enough, but there’s something else to this, too. I can still look at various ornaments of mine and fondly remember their histories, and the meanings that I’ve attached to them, just like I’ve always done…but now, I can also look at ornaments that, though new to me, obviously have whole histories of their own, and have been imbued with meaning by someone else. Those histories and meanings aren’t mine, per se—but neither do they feel alien or strange; they’re parts of this amazing, lovable person who is now a huge part of my life, and thus they, too, are now part of my life. And all of this jibes with a thing that I have always powerfully felt about Christmas in general, and maybe my annual Christmas tree in particular. When I partake of a Christmas tradition that I cherish, like listening to Christmas music, baking (and eating) Christmas cookies, playing in NECB’s annual holiday concert, or just staring into the branches of my decorated tree, I experience a timeless moment, in which I feel connected to corresponding moments from every past Christmas—and therefore, in a way, to the whole of my own past. And yet, at the same time, every year (and every Christmas) is unique, and the essence of the nostalgia that I seek to recapture through Christmas traditions in each successive year evolves over time, and arises out of individual experiences that, when they happen, are new and different from any previous ones. So Christmas (and, I suppose, the new year that commences seven days after each Christmas) very powerfully represents both constancy and change—the universal and the particular—to me. And I guess that’s a pretty good metaphor for the present moment in my life, in which I’m redefining my existing self in the context of a new relationship. It involves growth and change, but it also leaves plenty room for me to be who I already am…and it even provides opportunities for rediscovery, or perhaps for a new flourishing, of parts of me that (perhaps) have been lost or neglected.
And then, on a much simpler and less philosophical level, this Christmas has just been much happier for me than any other in recent years. Again, I’ve written before about how I kind of had a string of challenging holiday seasons from 2015 through 2020, in part because of divorce and loneliness, but also owing to a succession of flukish circumstances. Christmas 2021 was a radical departure from that streak in some ways, but the things that were new and different about it—such as spending the weekend of Christmas with Emily, Cal, and Sophie at a cabin in Wisconsin—felt like something “outside of” my regular life, at the time. And afterwards, during my annual end-of-year “pause” (the week away from work that I customarily take), things reverted to something that felt pretty familiar: I mostly spent that week alone at home. (And, to be clear, I was pretty happy doing so.) This year, though, I (we) spent Christmas with my new in-laws (something that I expect will eventually come to seem very normal and familiar) for the first time, and my whole end-of-year “pause” has played out in this new life situation in which other people share my home (even if Emily wasn’t able to take as much time off from work as I did). Every other recent Christmas season entailed, for me, at least some melancholy moments; this one has been completely different. Of course, the perversity of human nature is such that there is some part of me that kind of misses spending the week vegging out alone in front of the TV while gorging myself on cookies, even though I clearly remember most of the end-of-year breaks that I did spend that way being rather less than satisfactory. But, whatever; humans (and penguins), methinks, are not really wired to ever be fully content with what we have. Life will never be magically perfect in every way—but as I embark on this particular new year, I’m awfully damn happy with the overall state, and direction, of mine.