As you maybe already know, I'm quickly approaching my 10 yr high school reunion. Everyone I've kept in touch with is thinking about it - whether or not they are going. It's funny how it has consumed some people. One person had a countdown from 100 days out, one person keeps changing her mind about going (it's not just you, Manda) and all of us are obsessing about how we will present ourselves.
It's made me try to look at this from a bird's eye view, although I am also a victim of all of the worries. Let's step back to our high school years. This is a time in our lives where we were trying to figure out who the hell we were....what we were going to do with our lives...and also deal with the pressure of being cool. And now, fast forward to 10 yrs later. We are going back to visit with people we havent seen in 10 yrs, yet we all expect ourselves to be [enter your favorite word here: skinnier, smarter, cooler, married, engaged, or have a child...etc]. All because we want to seem better than we were before, thus better than the people we are trying to impress. The truth is, we're mostly different than we were before. And why is it so hard to accept that that's the difference?
I guess what started this all was the questionnaire we had to fill out for our reunion. The first questions was Are You Married? And the second question was Are you Married to Someone from AHS? And the next two questions were asking if we had kids. COME ON! There are a lot of important things in life and to be faced with marriage and kids being the most important is tough. What if they had asked....what career are you in? Are you fulfilling your passion in life? Ok, so they'd never ask that because all the nerds (me included) would love those questions and the married pregnant girls wouldnt (and those are the ones organizing our reunion, although I volunteerd to help).
Anyway....I end this blogging moment with the lyrics from a song that will help me get through this reunion.
"Girl Next Door" by Saving Jane
She is the prom queen
I'm in the marching band
She is a cheerleader
I'm sitting in the stands
She gets the top bunk
I'm sleeping on the floor
She's Miss America
And I'm just the girl next door
3 Comments:
That's a very perceptive commentary on change. I skipped my 10-year reunion simply because I didn't want to see a bunch of people who were a-holes during high school. It wasn't until a few years after the reunion that I ran into a bunch of them at another school alumni function--only to discover that, over the course of ten years, they had changed into really nice people that I've since started to hang out with.
As usual, I am impressed with your insight. Yes, being married and having kids is important, but it is not (nor is anything else) the end all and be all of life. The better question to me would be - do you like where you are and are you happy?
I know your answer to those questions! A resounding YES!
Hugs and love
Couldn't agree more on your perceptions about reunions and the idea that if you're not a parent, your life is off track.
And my money's on the girl next door over the prom queen any day!
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