How I Threw Away My Life in My 20s

            I recently read a piece on how to make the most of your 20s. Being 26 I thought I should probably read it because I still have 4 years to make the most of it, and turn things around if I really had to. Upon reading it I realized I did everything wrong. Apparently your 20s should be spent focusing on yourself, not having a serious relationship and essentially being Miss Independent. Since I haven’t in fact been living under a rock, I get this sentiment. I do. I even wrote a poignant poem in Junior High entitled “I’m an Independent Eighth Grade Girl” – it is as riveting as you would imagine and basically expressed everything this article did.

            But alas, I fell in love and we decided to get married right out of college when I was 21 and rather than spend the first 5 years focusing on us and establishing my career we had a baby 11 months after our wedding day… and then we had another! So here I am 26 years old, married for nearly 5 years, with 2 kids. And according to most articles I have read and movies and TV shows I watch I am not experiencing the true joys, sorrows and thrills of my youthful 20s that I should. The world sometimes makes me feel like I should be sad about the decisions I made, that I am missing out on unlimited freedom, crazy nights and the joy of youthful independence, but I don’t feel sad- I feel full.

            I posit this to the world: I would take the joy of a dance party with a 3 year old and a giggling baby all in pajamas to the joy of dancing with strangers in a club, and although there truly is no pain like child birth au natural or the sensation of an unexpected Lego in the small of your foot or seeing your child sincerely sad to say goodbye to you, I am grateful to experience these things in my 20s because I think it has made me a less self-centered person than I would be otherwise.

            I am not a proponent of getting married young per se. I just feel that sometimes the message we get in our 20s is so one-sided and makes little room for the possibility that there just might be other ways to find happiness. I simply grow weary of hearing the same recycled platitudes about how to be an awesome twenty-something year old: Be single! Be irresponsible! Career is everything! My goodness, there are other ways to live it up! Here I was just hoping to suggest another way- how very Generation Y of me.  

Losing Interest in Religion?

Someone close to me, who left the Catholic Church a long time ago, recently said something along the lines of: “I just got to a point where I felt like I was saying the words but they didn’t mean anything to me, I wasn’t feeling it anymore”. I can identify with this statement.

We’ve all sat in the pew, knelt on those kneelers and felt nothing except our own aching knees- moments where we pray and go to mass and don’t feel anything extraordinary, or really anything at all. Does this mean our faith is in vain or that the church is useless? When a woman stops getting butterflies every time her husband walks in the door, does that mean her marriage has lost value? Should she cut her losses and run? We encounter boredom and a lack of feeling in our relationships and commitments, big and small, because that’s a necessary component of what it is to be human. We are lazy and can’t feel the newness of every moment. I don’t think this indicates a lack of depth in the other or in the relationship, but in ourselves. The fact of the matter is that when it comes to faith, even though it is easy to focus on ourselves and what we are getting out of it, it isn’t about us- it is about Him. When we lose sight of Christ, we end up beholding our own ugliness and disparity and our ‘faith’ falls flat.

The word religion is a hard one to trace exactly where the meaning was derived from. Some say it comes from the Latin re meaning again and ligare, which means to bind or connect. The etymology points to a reconnecting between man and God, essentially, a relationship. For most of us, our relationship with God will have low moments, so the question remains- how do we respond to this?

Mother Teresa has left us a beautiful example; she also experienced a dry faith.  She confided in a letter to her close friend “as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear” in reference to the Lord. We know how Mother Teresa responded; she didn’t leave the church but pushed into it. She served the poor and worked for the church and we are all the better for it.

Sometimes people say that religion gets in the way of their relationship with God, but when it’s done right our religion should be our relationship with God. The mass, confession, our community, these make up our relationship with Christ and when we find it lacking we should be willing to persevere- I think it worked out pretty well for Blessed Mother Teresa. 

Marriage: Government Tested, God Approved

              I find it very intriguing that so many people today are having kids with their significant other or living with them but seem deathly afraid of the commitment of marriage. I say this because for me the decision to get married, even though it was a lifelong commitment, was much less daunting than when I first became a mother. In both our engagement and marriage and the natural steps that followed of living together and parenthood, I always felt I was freely moving towards Steve and the ‘next step’, so to speak. I appreciated the ease and security of that.

            I was in the grocery store the other day and being a rapidly expanding pregnant woman, with a 2 year old, I was getting many comments on motherhood. Two different women in separate instances mentioned that they are also expecting a baby with their boyfriends. These comments really made me wonder. Will my daughter be in the minority growing up as a child with two married parents? I was struck by this and left the store mulling over a question: Is there value in living our lives according to the norms the church lays out? I know people do things in all sorts of different ways but is there one way that is truly better than another?

            Like any modern day philosopher I turned to Google for some wisdom and found some relevant answers. To my shock I found the best resource from the Federal Government (I always hoped my tax dollars would actually come back to help me someday). There was an incredibly expansive and costly research effort funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called the Healthy Marriage Initiative, in place to strengthen marriages and explore the benefits of marriage. Now why would the National Government bother spending millions of dollars to strengthen marriages?

            Science and research give us a pretty extensive answer. Strong, healthy marriages are good both for the children and the spouses involved and produce more productive and happier citizens, which while boosting civic moral, also saves money in the long run in would be criminals, etc. After much time, money and research the findings were a resounding “yes” that healthy marriages are the best for the husband, the wife and the kids. Children benefit from healthy marriages in a number of ways: they are less likely to grow up in poverty, they are emotionally and physically stronger, they are less likely to become sexually active as teenagers and contract STDs and so on¹.

            Of course nothing in life is perfect or clear cut, but don’t we want to put our best foot forward to succeed at arguably our most important relationships and roles in this life? That of being a spouse and a parent. What I am not saying is that there is no hope for those who are participating in or products of other lifestyle decisions. But clearly and truly there is a better and best way to succeed as a spouse and parent. I know what it’s like to be at the brunt of statistics, being the product of a broken home myself. Do I love and respect my parents? Of course. By the grace of God I in many ways overcame the sobering statistics of my situation, but can I say having married parents is better? Yes! I can say yes because it is good and true and it doesn't diminish my value or my parents’ value as people. The church affirms chastity before marriage and the permanence of marriage because they are the best for our happiness and science and reason back these assertions.

            We are living in a world where more and more there is a fear and a refusal to acknowledge that marriage is good and kids are great. Like all truly good and beautiful things sacrifice is necessary for a strong marriage, especially in today’s culture of marriage being so often the very last step rather than the first, but we shouldn’t underestimate the benefits of a solid marriage which are absolutely joyful and certifiably good.

1.       http://archive.acf.hhs.gov/healthymarriage/about/mission.html#background