Twentieth Reunion

Reunion Revisited

kanniduba2 Comments

So, it’s been almost a week since my twentieth reunion, and I’ve had time to process the evening.  Date Man and I had a very enjoyable evening.  Our nervousness melted away the second we met up with the first group of alumni in the parking lot.  We shared more laughs in that first ten minutes, and it eased all our nerves as we entered the building to meet up with the rest.  I think I spoke more with some classmates that evening than I did in the entire four years we shared classes together. 

It was fascinating!  There were very few surprises. 

We had the soldier recently returned from Baghdad…the token baldy who once had long hair!  (He said one of our teachers once joked with him that he’d show up at the 20th reunion bald, so he thought he’d make her prediction come true.) 

We had the super competitive athlete, who has lived in a hundred different places over the last twenty years…she married four years ago and is busy trying to squeeze child number four in (or should I say out?) before she’s forty.  With three children under the age of three and a half she escapes the madness by working out at the gym.  She looks fantastic and could probably bench press her husband, who is tall, handsome, and accomplished.

Then we had the unlikely couple who married after dating on and off for years after high school.  He’s quiet, she’s not, and they have a wonderful life together.  So funny to see two people who never seemed to notice each other in high school, gaze adoringly at each other across the room.  🙂  Very sweet.

We had the girl whose list of accomplishments was so impressive as to sound fictional. 

We had the token sloppy drunk.  Sad really as she looked gorgeous when she was still standing. 

We had the recently divorced with his pretty new fiance on his arm. 

We had the Forty Year Old Bachelor (Definitely not a Virgin) who didn’t recognize a soul.  He needed the yearbook as a cheat sheet to figure out who everyone was.  *laugh*

We had the working Moms, the stay-at-home Moms, the happily childless, and the not-so-happily childless. 

Twenty years erased so much of the old “stuff.”

And yet……the photos posted on the website of the reunion are as representative of the entire group of attendees as the casual photos posted in the senior yearbook are of the entire class…not at all.  Ah, well.  Some things never change.

But I have, and I guess that’s enough.

Back to the 80’s yet again…1988 to be exact.

kanniduba7 Comments

So, I graduated from high school twenty years ago, which naturally means that my Twentieth High School Reunion is being planned for this summer.  Twenty years.  It hardly seems possible, and yet it seems a lifetime ago.  I am not the person I was then. 

The news of my reunion has brought out the truth however.  What truth, you ask?  Well, the truth of my “adjustment problem.”  The very first thought that came to my mind when I heard about the reunion, and contemplated actually attending, was not, “Oh, my! What will I wear?”  It was, “Gee, I really wish I was still teaching so I’d have something worth talking about.”  The second the thought popped into my head I was both ashamed, and enlightened.  “That’s it!!!”  The “it” being, why I feel so lost at times now that I’m a stay-at-home Mom.  I have always payed lip service to the whole “working at home raising a family is just as important and meaningful as working at a paying job,” but maybe I haven’t believed it as wholeheartedly as I always thought I did.  Thus my “adjustment problem.”  I guess at times I feel a bit useless.  When I was teaching, it was easy to believe I was doing something meaningful.  At home folding towels and cleaning floors, doing dishes and vacuuming, it’s harder to feel like you’re a contributing member of society.  Yes, of course there’s the whole “I’m raising decent people and if that’s not contributing I don’t know what is,” but there’s always that little niggling pest of a thought that I could be, or should be doing more.  So there’s the truth of it.  I know in my soul I’m doing the right thing for our family, and I LOVE watching my boy grow and learn daily…so many things I missed while working when the girls were this age.  I mourn a little too, when I watch him, wishing I could have done this then.  I get so excited to see the girls off the bus, you’d think I was welcoming home David Cook.  *tee*hee*  All the little things I get to do and be for them make everyday a blessing. 

So I will work on believing myself worthy. 

And in the meantime, I will think about what the heck I’m going to wear…and should I grow my hair back out?  And maybe I had better start yoga again…And maybe it is time to color my hair.

It’s also amazing to me how many old feelings and animosities come rushing back when contemplating this reunion.  I looked at the list of “Reunion Committee Members” and that list was the same list I would have guessed twenty years ago…these same girls (now women) who were ultra involved in clubs, and in social life.  The pretty girls who had the boyfriends, played sports, and threw the parties.  You guessed it…I was not one of them.  I used to be jealous of those girls that seemed to have it all.  And then I grew up and wiser and realized I was luckier than most because I didn’t have the burden of popularity.   I have one friend left from high school and we didn’t become close until college.  He admitted to me that I was “the type of girl you married, not the type of girl you dated.”  I really wish he had told me that in high school…I might have had a bit more hope for my future.  As it turns out, my future is exactly what I had hoped it would be…a husband who is my missing piece, three beautiful kids who fill my life with joy, family and friends to fill any little cracks in between, and a past and future career that I am proud of. 

Not bad for twenty years.  I guess I have something worth talking about after all.