Kind of Blue

Today is the first day since I got married that I have been sad for longer than three or four minutes. It has only been a few hours, but in comparison, I totally feel like I have the blues.
Life is still wonderful, blessed and exciting; that has not changed. But I am coming down off of my happy honeymoon cloud and addressing the things that I chose not to address so I could enjoy the bliss of wedding and honeymoon time. The things that I decided to wait on also waited on me.

I am sad because two of my close friends are not friends anymore and I feel as though I watched it happen and I wish I could have said or done more. I have learned a very valuable lesson: if someone is doing something that is upsetting someone, including yourself, it is important to say something so that they know they are doing something not okay. They may or may not change their ways, but at least you can feel good about the fact that you said something and you tried to be a part of the solution. I am vowing to be a better friend by telling someone, in the moment, that I am unhappy with their actions/words/decisions and I will from now on encourage my friends to do the same. I cannot change the past, but I can learn from it and carry this lesson into the future with me.

I am also sad because I miss my Mommy. This is a normal, generalized feeling for me. If it is not one of the two or three times a year that my Mom is in the same time zone as me chances are I am missing her. Fairly recently I was pretty convinced that I wanted to move back to the West Coast so that I didn't have to have that feeling anymore. I could not imagine my life without my Mom when Matty and I began to have children and the only way I saw to ensure this would not be the case was to move closer to my Mom. San Francisco was the closest I could get myself, since any closer seemed too much like moving back to Reno and at least SF is a city that I have wanted to live in. I was pretty sure I was going to tell my friends and family this month that Matty and I would be packing up and moving out west. We looked at jobs and apartments and talked to my family about it but we did not tell anyone else. We didn't want to take the attention away from our wedding or upset anyone yet. We wanted to put it off until we were ready to take their sadness and criticism and well wishes. We never made it that far.
I wanted to tell my Mom in person that we were having second thoughts, that it no longer seemed like the best idea for us, but I didn't get the chance. She caught me off guard today when I was rushing home from work to get dinner eaten to get to Arise to get home to get ready for work tomorrow. I told her and it hurt. It hurt me and it hurt her and it hurt to know that I had gotten everyone so excited and then taken it back. I wish I could take back the idea to move and telling my Mom and getting her excited for us to be closer to her, but I cannot. I can however make very good points as to why that is no longer the best plan for us, and how it probably never was.

I am blessed, like, beyond blessed and my life here is a direct reflection of that. We have dozens of friends from all sorts of parts of our lives: my HONO friends, our HONO friends, Matty's Rat friends, my Starbucks friends, Matty's Genzyme friends, our Church friends, my work friends, Matty's Boston Latin friends, my Suffolk friends, our Boston Cares friends - there are just so many quality, wonderful people that we get to call our friends, and we both keep adding to our roster! Matty is thoroughly enjoying his new position at work: the work, the hours, the challenge and I am loving and growing in my position and finally feel respected and my skills utilized. We are very involved with our Church and have made some incredible friends there who we have done two seasons of Arise and organized a young adult's group with. We have our favorite stores, our favorite restaurants, our favorite beach and our memory spots: our first kiss, where Matty proposed, our first date spot. We are happily, healthily married and committed to one another and we are both looking forward to moving out of Allston and into a bigger place that will allow us to entertain large groups of people, to have a dog and to start a family.
To walk away from all of this and start all over again feels like I am slapping God right in his face and saying "hey man, thanks for the awesome life, but I am going to go ahead and bounce". I just cannot do it. I love my Mom more than she even knows, and it is because of this that I cannot just walk away from everything that I (and we) have built just to take a chance and start all over again. I would love nothing more to be in driving distance of my Mom, to have her there to help me with our babies and be a hands-on grandmother, but I am going to have to commit to ensuring that all those things happen, even if we are 6 hours apart.
I am going to fly out to visit her after the holidays; it will be my first time going without Matty since we started dating but this is how I will show her that I am dedicated to closing the physical distance between us. I will visit more, I will make sure our time together is quality, and if there ever comes a time when we can be in the same time zone that is good for both of us, I will make sure that happens. I will not let the miles affect her presence in my life, in Matty's life or in our babies lives. I have always been capable of juggling different lives, different friends and different experiences, but now I am going to allow them to all be in sync, to stand firm in my right to enjoy this blessed life, with no restrictions on my love for my Mom, my husband and my life.

These are my decisions, and these are the values I will move forward with in order to be a better friend, daughter, wife and, someday, mother.

XoXo,
Mrs. O'Shea, decision maker extraordinaire