I was exclusively dating the only man I would marry at 18, and I married him at 19. I gave birth to my first baby at 21. Am I glad my own children didn't choose a similar path? Yes. Am I sorry that I did? Yes and no.
We met in college. He was two years ahead of me and had graduated by the time we married; we thought this mattered. I'd just completed my undergraduate sophomore year. My parents were against it, but they didn't have much of a leg to stand on. My mother also married at age 19, after her sophomore year. The difference was she dropped out of college, and I didn't.
I lost much of my youth by making this decision. And that included doing fun things, going on fun outings, hanging out with fun people, holding fun memories of my 20s. Instead, I was trying to be a full-time student and still be the kind of wife my parents would be proud of. I made my husband breakfast every morning before he went to work and before I headed out on my long commute to the college town (I always meticulously set the table for breakfast the night before, after I had cleaned up the dinner dishes). I was driven to do wifey well.
I am happy, at this age, to have wound up with the husband I did. But what was the hurry?
For my16th birthday, just two years before I met my future husband, I had asked for money to redecorate my bedroom, which my parents accommodated. That was when I learned I had an artistic flair for decor and interior design. I was still 17 when I started college, and my mother decided she and my father needed extra money for my younger brother's orthodontia. So when I went away to college, she rented out my room to a local schoolteacher. The teacher, whose academic vacations mirrored mine, would not physically be in my room when I came home for the holidays. But all of her stuff was (mine was packed away in boxes, except for the items I carried back and forth in my suitcase).
The room I had labored over had become the most charming bedroom in the house, and someone else -- for money that did not come to me -- received the gift of using it. To my young mind, and because that room meant so much to me, I felt displaced. I felt like I had been traded in. I felt homeless.
It sounds pretty whiny when I read back over this. Many young people have gone through much, much worse (I've gone through much worse). Still, at that time it was a life-changing set of circumstances for me. I decided to get married so I could have, and keep, the rooms I wanted. But of course that hasn't been perfectly executed either. Nothing ever is. And that's where growing up comes in.
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