Most of my life can be categorized by the decade. The seventies were my childhood, the eighties, high school and college and the nineties were the married/fat years. I’m still not sure how to describe the aughts though, or if I should even be calling this decade the aughts at all. I do think it sounds better than the zeroes or the 00s and since no one’s come up with anything better I guess that’s what I’ll use. I’m leaning towards the hermit/born-again virgin years but we’ll probably be into the teens before I’ll have enough distance to really know for sure.
The first 3 ½ years of my life were actually in the sixties, I got married in 89, and my divorce wasn’t final until early 2002 but for the most part the ten year cycle holds true. I became a woman in the Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret kind of way in the summer of 79 so I guess that was the official end of childhood for me. December of 88 was the terminus for the eighties. I graduated from college a semester late because I went temporarily insane one spring and dropped out to become a farmer’s wife in Mississippi. I was devastated at the time because the day we were planning on telling my parents he went to a friend’s house to take a shower and never came back, but in retrospect I can only think, Jesus Christ, I really dodged a bullet on that one.
Unfortunately I did drink the Kool-Aid in 89 and it was 12 ½ long years before I was able to extricate myself from that mess. I consider the end of the married/fat years to be a few weeks after September 11, 2001. Brent knew I was contemplating divorce because WWBD (What Would Brent Do) had always been the motto for our marriage and that early fall evening was supposed to be his attempt to prove to me that he could think about someone other than himself. We went to a bar down the street to hear a couple of my favorite bands but we never made it past the first set. He got shit-faced drunk, acted like a complete jerk in front of his boss and I ended up dragging his 275 pound ass all the way home. He fell when we got to the front porch and I totally lost it. My body ached all over and my hair was wringing wet so I threw open the door and screamed, “Crawl!” And he did.
That’s when I knew my marriage was really over. I didn’t want to be that person any more. I guess the Aughts were when I finally went back to being myself. The whole cancer scare makes me think that 2009 is the end of this phase of my life. It’s kind of like when I was on a family vacation at the beach and got stung by a jellyfish. I still had a day or two left at the ocean but my swimming time was over. Most people want to go back to their younger days but I’m actually happier now than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know what the next ten years holds in store for me but I'm hoping that my life continues like a fine wine. The more I age, the better I get to be.
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