Past

12-9-08

I am a person who although doesn’t live in the past, does look back at it with fond memories. You see, the past is how you got where you are today. Good and bad, those are events and memories that have formed who you are and where you are going. My past has taught me to mistrust all people. My past has taught me that too often friends are not there through thick and thin. My past has taught me that you should always be yourself despite what others think of you. There are many more lessons that have created the person I look at in the mirror every morning. Despite my weight gain and cynical look at the world, I am very happy at what I am. Sure, there are things that need to change. I need to get out of the house more to do things for me, not just for the boys. I should have more hobbies. I may need to rethink the plaid skirt since I am no longer 20. And of course, there is the gut that gets in my way. There are plenty of ways to change these things, and sometimes, I look to my past to figure out how to do them.

I used to be thin. How did I do that? Well, in high school, not only did I play soccer, but at one time I used to run 3 miles a day. A year or so ago, I managed to drop 65 pounds because I watched what I ate, and I worked out. Don’t you think I should look at how I did these things in order to see what to do now? Perhaps I can remember how I used to wear some really cute things back in the day all because I was thin. Sometimes, the motivation to fix myself is to see how I felt before. The past is the way to do this.

I don’t see friends like I used to. In high school, and even right out of school, I used to go out with people all the time. I saw movies, I went to concerts, I just hung out at restaurants. Sure, I will never have the same existence as I did then. I am not devastated by this. I love spending time with my kids. I am happy that a good chunk of my time is now spent with family. Of course, it would be not just fun to go out more, but it would be good for me to have some people that I talk to that don’t just speak in toddler. I have that. I keep up with friends via email a lot. It seems to be the easiest medium these days with hectic schedules and responsibilities. It also takes me back to when I was grounded all the time and my primary source of communication was in the form of hand written letters. Yes, the response time wasn’t always as fast, but it still worked. Now, I can write back and forth with someone all day, despite being at work or maybe cleaning up kid stuff. Super handy. I also look back on my past, when I was out with friends, having fun, and I look to see why I was having fun. Well, a good chunk of it was that I was getting to know people. I was having lots of fun chats with people about their likes and dislikes. A lot of the talk surrounded boys. My conversations now have this topic, but a totally different connotation. My past shows me how I was when I was a social butterfly. Was I happy? Most of the time. Would being that way again make me happier than I am now? I don’t know. I use that version of me as a good gauge to see if I am going in a correct direction, or if I am missing out on something I could possibly still have.

One of the biggest disappointments that I actually have now is some of my past that isn’t find of it. Sure, I understand not thinking back fondly of the breakup pains or death or abuse or some other horrific past that may haunt you. But these are people that don’t even appreciate a fun day with good friends. They see pictures, hear stories, and you can actually see them cringe as these memories are drudged up in their mind. I can speculate all day long as to why they react as if I just punched them in the gut when I present them with a photo of them mugging for the camera 20 years ago. But the bottom line is, when they shun the pictures or the tales, they are telling me that their past that involved me was something they wish they never had, and that hurts.

There are people I hung out with that were horrible. They drove me crazy, they were annoying, they were obnoxious, they were not even good friends. But I am ok with that now. If anything, I am even more happy to of had those kind of characters in my life so that I could have some diversity. We were misfits in high school. We were never even close to being the cool kids, and I am so relieved this was the case. Sure, as a little kid, I hoped to be homecoming queen or the most popular girl in the school. It was never meant to be. Not to say those people were not good folks. But I think that I was meant to be something else. The girl in the background that people vaguely remember because I used to hang out with some other vaguely memorable people.

My senior year I should have known that the friends I had would turn out like this. We had a couple of kids that hung out with us that were not seniors. One of my friends decided this was unacceptable. He, and a couple others opted to go sit somewhere else for a while at lunch. They told me that I was more than welcome, as was this one guy that was younger, but not the others. Apparently the other guys were cramping their style. I was appalled. In fact, for a couple days I didn’t even go near any of them. I just felt so lost. Mind you, we were all freshman at one point when we hung out with a senior and a couple of guys already graduated. We were never the kids who would run for student counsel or even have the one obligatory pic in the year book. And maybe they wanted this. Maybe this is what they always yearned for and come the time we were in the 12th grade, they felt like we had missed out on our chance. I on the other hand just didn’t know how they could be so arrogant. Now, 15 years later, they are once again shunning things that they feel are beneath them.

These last few months, I have seen old friends show their true colors. People I love with all my heart, despite the fact that we don’t talk but once every few years or even if we talked every day and had differences. These were people that were my foundation. My base of what kind of people I hoped to have in my life for years and years to come. People that would be surrogate aunts and uncles to my children, and the ones that I would hopefully speak fondly of forever. The latter will always be true, since I will try to always think of the good times. I will keep as much in touch with the less jaded ones and stay up to date on their whereabouts and lives. I chatted with one of my old friends on Sunday for about an hour, and it was awesome. We told stories, we talked about our kids and different things we had been up to. It was so wonderful to know that we would probably always have a place in each other’s lives, even if it was but once or twice a year.

I look at this picture on my desk of a group of us at Disneyland a few years back. I realize when I look at it how many of these folks that I don’t actually talk to that often, if at all. I look at with this naïve sense of warmth. If someone saw this picture who didn’t know us might say, oh, what a nice group of friends. But in reality, the closeness of everyone pictures is as much of a façade as the fake mountain we are posing in front of.

Will these revelations sully my image of these people? I am hoping to answer that with a no. Of course, this can’t possibly be true, but my existence now, the foundation I stand by, despite the changed house that sits atop of it, needs to always be respected. Although some of the people that make up that base can’t face it, I need to believe that they will always still be there. Yes, I may replace some of the pillars with other people as the years pass. I may even move, but this was my very first existence, and I will always hold tight onto the memories.

My future holds so much. Friends that I have only known a short time or even ones I don’t know yet will be who I turn to in times of need. I will have my children’s lives to help mold and structure as they navigate adolescence and build their own foundations of friends. I will grow crazy old with my husband at my side, and he and I can know that we came from the same group of friends and still love each other despite growing up and moving on from high school. I will still have the pictures and the memories near by, though. You have to, since when your life is over, you will have those precious moments ease you into the dark. I refuse to go feeling sad. I want to feel like my life was filled with happy times, no matter when the time was.