Catholic BrideAs I near the date to when we will finally become man and wife, I am increasingly becoming more and more aware of a ticking inside of my head. Most times I can ignore it, even forget about it entirely, but there are just some days where this ticking just gets louder and louder.

 Yes, it’s an alarm clock.

 Growing up, I myself was brought up to believe that it was the man who felt the “suffocations” of marriage (that’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of anything else at the moment). I guess that’s why I was so surprised at how much I’ve begun to enjoy my nights alone the one night a week or so that I just sit at home and “veg.” Does this make me a bad person?

 It’s not that I’m falling out of love with Matt (because actually the opposite is happening nearly every day), nor is it that what I’ve discovered about him as our relationship progressed has disappointed me (again, the opposite of that statement is the truth). The fact is, for the first time in my life I’m starting to come close to being tied to a person I’ve loved nearly all my life (although I never knew it until I met him), and I’m starting to understand exactly what that means.

 My life is about to change. For the better, sometimes for the worse, but definitely change is coming. Now comes a whole new part of my life that I’ve never had to even think about before: buying a house, having a child, shopping for groceries (I hate shopping for groceries), putting money into the joint account each month not for fun things but practical things…the longer my day goes, so does that list.

This must be why I’ve got hives…either that or I accidentally touched fish.

Every once in a while I will look back to comments from my mother when I was younger, and increasingly it will become clearer to me why she said them. She would tell me how much she missed living with her siblings or her parents, visiting her aunts on lazy summer days, or driving in the family car on vacations. When I was younger, it didn’t make sense because she was my mother, I was her daughter, and this was our home. You are home, I remember thinking but never saying out loud.

Now I understand those comments. I’m going through the same thing right now.

I asked Matt the other day if he was ever homesick for his childhood. He told me no, because apparently his mother didn’t give him a lot of privacy. Oh well. I’m homesick for mine.

-Amy

Music playing while writing this: “Thieves” by She and Him