Don’t tell anyone I said this…

Here is a confession… To myself. About myself.

I was dared recently, to give all the things I seem to preach against, a chance. I’m still busy doing that… It’s all part of finding me. What has blown me away, though, is that I’m slowly discovering that the real me doesn’t lie at the end of a road less travelled or in the next big thing. It’s been inside of me all along.

I’m a simple farm boy.

“Not always easy to understand but easy to love,” according to my sister. I grew up in a very normal, very loving family. It has always been my place of comfort. I am not a gypsy. I am not a street-smart crusader on a mission to get my hands covered in the blood of other people’s difficult lives. I am not on a mission to save the world one blog entry at a time and I am not the free-love hippie I have tried to convince the world I am.

I’m a simple, normal man.

For the past eight years I have lived an incredible adventure. I have chosen paths less travelled and have soap-boxed against the Norm. Not because I am brave enough to live the things most people are scared to deal with but because I thought I had no other choice.

I blew a good thing… My marriage. At the back of my mind I know that it may not have been perfect or that it was unlikely to have survived the until-death-us-do-part, but I have always thought that we all only ever get one shot at it. And I blew mine. To justify the journey I’ve been on ever since I’ve denounced all the good things about it… I’ve preached a dislike of children and raising them. I have rallied against the institution of marriage calling it a show of possession, a shelter from treating each other with respect, an out-dated declaration of commitment and destined to failure. I have turned a nose up against the pedestrian, raw routines of family life and household chores and I have blogged pages full of excuses.

I’m not that man, though.

I miss it. I miss being married. I miss all the good, loving times but I also miss the other things… I miss the little husband-wife squabbles. I miss having to run around after children. I miss trying to balance work and family. I miss lying on a pillow with a wife in my arms and chatting for hours about our children, our eccentric parents and what we can do this next holiday together. I miss the wise-ass good morning and good night greetings from teenagers. I even miss looking at monthly budgets and wondering how the hell we are going to survive.

So… I have dared to give it a chance. I have dared to challenge my belief that being the single guy in a room full of married people makes me better then them. I have dared to look at what is the most important to me. At what I’m missing. At my fears and my excuses.

And I am daring to admit that the journeys on countless less-travelled paths I have tried to justify the past eight years have been great. But they’re not for me.

I am choosing to be the simple me again. And to deal with the heartbreaks that choice will have.

I am choosing to give myself another chance. At maybe, one day, having a normal, married life again. Of surrounding myself with a wife and children and chores and the noise of people that love each other. The normalness of doing things like braais with parents and in-laws and nephews, nieces and grand children.

I am choosing to admit that I may have been wrong.

About who and what I really am at heart…

A simple farm boy.

~ by Norm on August 23, 2011.