Just after I posted that meal plan post, I hopped on facebook and noted that my very first boyfriend (now a FB friend) had his first baby last night. Well, his wife did. Beab is a sweet little girl, thick head of hair, almost 9 pounds, and named after my old boyfriend’s mother who died of cancer a few years ago.
Anyhow, it got me to thinking – every boyfriend I ever had is now a dad, except one. Kinda cute, I think. I’m FB friends with almost all of them, too. I have a lot of affection for these guys’ babies. The relationships (and in some cases, I’d say “relationships” in quotes) we had are long dead and gone, and we’ve all moved on and married and are getting older and fatter and more set in our ways, as people do. Before the social media days, they would have remained 15 or 18 or 20 in my mind forever – they would not have aged for me, since I move so much and left them all behind long ago (one lives in Atlanta, one in San Francisco, one in Australia, one in Italy, one in Santa Cruz, one in Louisville – these dudes are all over). But instead of losing them entirely, today through the filter of facebook I get to see them get older like me – have children like me – move on with life like me. It’s hard to explain why I like that . . . but I do.
It puts a context on early relationships, and on break-up pain, doesn’t it? We were once together and now we’re not – the break-up once made us sad and now that sadness is so far in the rearview mirror that I can barely remember what it was like. We’ve each found long-term love elsewhere. I sift through all of that history and context, and my hands come up holding onto just the affection – we sort of made each other adults, in a way, learned from each other how to behave around other people and how NOT to behave around other people. I made them better husbands, I think, and they made me a better wife. And now we are all parents, and are five years or fifteen years or however many years away from launching our own children off to fumble their way through their own early relationships. Circle of life, etc. etc.
Anyway, it struck me that even if some/many of these guys were not the best boyfriends to me, they for the most part ended up being good men. They appear (through the rosy lens of facebook) to be good dads. They landed on their feet, as did I. I’m glad for that. Hooray for babies. 🙂