Admiring Grace

Everyone I talk to who is over the age of thirty says no way they would trade places with me. Not because my life is so rampant with complications, but because of this stage of life. Right now I am deciding how far I want my education to go. Where I want to live. What I want to do. Who I want to do coffee  with and who I’d prefer to avoid. Then that coffee thing turns into something and then what? Or it doesn’t and there I am with the exact same set of questions. My roommate’s father once asked me what I wanted to do in life and where - pretty basic before-college-graduation questions. So I thought. I didn’t realize I was being vague until he said that it was good I didn’t have specifics because I couldn’t really decide anything without knowing who I was going to marry. Gee thanks. He didn’t mean to be annoying or rude. But he had a valid point. A lot of my decisions now (ahem, all of them) will have their effects on the rest of my life. Throwing myself into my e...

My second semester of college I took a sociology class which the professor simply called “The Family.” It was a study of relationships, of marriage, of love, of families. The prof didn’t give us much homework beyond reading the text so maybe that’s why this assignment has stayed with me in the years since – or it could be possible that I was chewed out by this particular prof for not starting the paper until the night before it was due over dinner. I had the rare opportunity to learn about something so important from my father in a public setting. His big assignment was for the students to write a paper describing our family of origin followed by how we wanted our future families to be. My plan was to be ordinary. I wanted my future life to be utterly boring to onlookers. I wanted us to live our lives and go to soccer or ballet or school or church or wherever we happened to be headed without concern for much more. Part of me still likes a lot of what I wrote, but my direction was...