Being on the outside

I think there are two ways to be on the outside, at least in the way that I'm thinking. You have either been on the inside and then all of a sudden find yourself on the outside, or you have always been on the outside wanting (or not) to be on the inside. Either way, I feel like my life has been full of the feeling and while it is usually a familiar place, it's not very comfortable.

I'd mentioned in a previous post that my beloved cat companion of 12 years passed away in late November. It's so strange now to realize how much my cat helped define me. She was like my kid, and I her cat-mom. It took me a long time to realize that vacations were as much about the sense of coming home to her, our renewed bond, as they were about getting away. The last few days of my honeymoon were the most fun of the whole trip, but also the most heightened because I missed Kitty so much and was desperate to see and hold her again.

When I went to visit friends and my parents for Christmas this past year, I "hit the wall going 90" (as Bethenny Frankel would say). I was faced with many couples, all of whom had a pet or pets that they call family, much in the way Honey Bunny and I called ourselves, including Kitty, a family. That feeling of being on the outside, when I was once very much on the inside, was intensely painful. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I wanted to come home and hold Kitty while Honey Bunny wrapped his arms around both of us, but Kitty was no longer here.

Since then it's gotten a bit easier, as time has passed and I've gotten used to Kitty's absence and have had to redefine my family to include only Honey Bunny and I for now. But there are occasional glimpses into what it used to feel like being on the inside, such as this photo, and this one, of two of my favorite (married) Flickr folks having arrived back from a long trip to New Zealand to the delight of their doggies and themselves.

In a strange twist of events, I found myself on the outside, where I always have been on this particular matter, looking in and confronting a different, very unfamiliar, demon. Honey Bunny and I stopped using contraception in January as we felt it was time to let fate take it's course. Those of you who know me, go ahead and start laughing. I don't really do "fate taking it's course", and that's exactly how its played out.

Instead of just letting whatever happen whenever, I get a bit obsessed each month, about a week before my Aunt Dot arrives, with wondering if I'm prego. And so far, I'm not yet and it's... disappointing? Logically it's a good thing because I want to party in Vegas for my friend Hilary's 40th birthday in May, and I would like to enjoy being married to HB sans child for longer, and so on and so forth. But logic does not necessarily quell my nutty, emotional, one-track mind.

Enter a close female coworker who very recently found herself pregnant and not wanting to be. She has had her children already and this pregnancy was merely a mistake. I hate to be a Sex and the City cliche but I admit I felt a bit like Charlotte after finding out Miranda is pregnant. Why in the hell did my coworker get pregnant when she wasn't even trying and yet Honey Bunny and I are, so far, without child? It made me unexpectedly peevish.

My coworker ended up having an abortion and, for the first time in my life, the idea of abortion seemed so... unpleasant. I have always been dogmatic about my pro-choice stance, and to find myself confronted with a strangely different perspective on abortion is very disconcerting. I will always be pro-choice (and pro-adoption) as long as the world is overpopulated, as long as children are abused and removed from their homes into foster care, as long as we have to compensate for irresponsible people such as Nadya Suleman and her fertility doctor, and so forth. But, in my own little microcosm, the actual act of abortion is now more real than it has ever been.

Somehow, the idea of being on the outside manages to relate back to being fat as well! I've been wondering lately if I spent years of obsessing about becoming thin - strong emphasis on grade and high school - mostly because I hated being on the outside of the thin girl world (and, consequently, the Jordache jeans world, the Contempo Casuals world, etc). I don't deny that I wanted to see myself as thin in a mirror... but why? Because I wanted to look that way, or because I wanted to belong?

Now that I'm in my 30's, it's vastly different, thankfully. Health is the most important thing, whatever that looks like. I don't have that sense of needing to belong to the thin world, just for the sake of being on the inside, anymore. It seems priorities and perspectives change as we celebrate more birthdays, which is a "no duh" if there ever was one. But, you'll have to excuse me, people, I'm still getting accustomed to being an adult...