I keep getting asked what married life is like or how married life is going as if I underwent some magical transformation at 5pm on October 23 and I woke up as a new species, a new life form, on October 24: Wife.
My response is always: it's exactly the same, nothing has changed.
And in a way, that's true. But really I only respond that way because I don't know how else to answer and I don't think people are really expecting an answer beyond "fantastic" or "wonderful." So I answer the same way every time I'm asked.
It's exactly the same. Nothing's changed.
And really, the day to day stuff has not changed at all. That comes with territory though and has nothing to do with marriage or our marriage. When you date someone for 6.5 years and live with them for 3.5, there's not much that changes once you put a title on the relationship.
However I'm still lying when I say nothing has changed. I have changed. Nick has changed. My name has changed.
My name has changed. I didn't think this would be such a big deal to me and I still don't feel it is that much of a big to-do but I do feel the change intimately. I never was really in the feminist/non-name changing camp as I always felt that changing your name was a part of the marriage just like middle school follows elementary school. It is what you do. So I did it because that's what you do. And despite changing my name on Facebook almost immediately (peer pressure is a thing, children) I procrastinated and didn't process the legal name change until January. And now this is who I am. I am not a Greggs, I am a Hazen. My voicemail still says Greggs, at work I am still Greggs but in the eyes of the government of the United States of America and the state of Michigan, I am a Hazen. Who I am as a person and who I identify myself as has changed.
I always thought names were strange. Nick's name isn't Nick, it's Nicholas but to everyone and to himself, he is Nick. Oliver and I were talking about this the other day in relation to celebrities. He was wondering if celebrities' spouses call them their birth name or their stage name. He used Fergie as an example. Is she Fergie at home? To her husband? To her friends? Is she Fergie to her parents?
Now I'm not the person I was for 23 years of my life. I'm someone new, someone different, someone married. I have to learn to respond to a new name, a new title. I'm a wife, I'm married, I'm a Hazen, I'm a Mrs. It's all so very strange that I don't know how I'll get used to it. I'm sure that 23 years from now, I won't be able to imagine it being any different.
I always knew that Nick and I were together for the long haul and we were in this forever, even before we got married. We were good kids and we talked about marriage for quite some time. We talked about getting married like it was some great accomplishment far off and far away from us. Being married was something that happened to other people. We would get there someday but it wasn't today and it wasn't tomorrow. Then suddenly it was tomorrow and then just as suddenly it was today. And then just as quickly it was yesterday and a month ago and two months ago and yesterday it was three months ago and I didn't even notice. We passed this great threshold, this life defining moment, this milestone, this sacrament and it was just a day. Now we're here and it's exactly the same.
But it's not.
I don't know how to describe this feeling to people who aren't married and that's why I haven't been trying. I'm married. I have someone who will always have my back. I have someone who is always on my mind, who is the most important person in my life and someone who is my best friend. All these things were true even before we signed a piece of paper and said those vows but now it's different. Now I have someone with me for the rest of my life. I have someone who will always be there and someone I know I can always turn to for help. I have someone who I can call my husband. I have someone I'm legally bound to and who is bound to me. I have someone who loved me enough to spend all that money on one day to celebrate being us. Together. Finally.
I am married to a wonderful man and someday I will be married to and will have been with Nick for longer than I've been without him (June 13, 2021 to be exact). We will be with each other for the rest of our lives. It's an amazing feeling that didn't really hit me until our "staycation" honeymoon when I cried that afternoon in our hotel room, holding on to my new life. I was a wife celebrating her marriage to her husband and the overwhelming non-change change just threw me. It still hits me hard sometimes and it always surprises me the most when people ask me how married life is. It's not exactly the same but I can't very well tell this story can I?
I also am now deeply affected by any sad/happy stories about married couples. Whether reading a story about the death of a spouse or a child or just thinking about how hard it must have been for immigrants to leave their families behind, I get upset. Thinking about how my great-great great granduncle (or whatever he was) left his wife and traveled on the world's largest unsinkable ship to America, I get teary. I know how Fahim Leeni must have felt when he left his wife of four month for something better. I know how people feel when they are separated from their spouses. I know this because I know this feeling, I know how people feel when they are together.
It's fine to have one.
It's fine to be proud of it.
But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around.
And please don't try to shove it down my children's throats.
If you listen to nothing else I say, remember this: choose a man with a large penis. People who say size doesnt matter are generally the folks who dont have much to brag about in the crotch department. Then she said, Your grandfather, God rest his soul, had a nice eight-incher. Lord I miss that man.
"Step-by-step, we have realized that this issue of homosexuality has the same adverse and progressive elements as when we dealt with the race issue 50 years ago, or 40 years ago. So I would say that the country is getting acclimated to a president who might be female, who might, obviously, now, be Black, and who might be as well a gay person." - Former President Jimmy Carter
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2010 30 November :: 12.45pm
:: Music: Rufus Wainwright- Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
Take a lot of sentimental valiums...
Cigarettes and chocolate milk
These are just a couple of my cravings
Everything it seems I like's a little bit stronger
A little bit thicker, a little bit harmful for me
If I should buy jellybeans
Have to eat them all in just one sitting
Everything it seems I like's a little bit sweeter
A little bit fatter, a little bit harmful for me
And then there's those other things
Which for several reasons we won't mention
Everything about 'em is a little bit stranger, a little bit harder
A little bit deadly
It isn't very smart
Tends to make one part
So brokenhearted
Sitting here remembering me
Always been a shoe made for the city
Go ahead accuse me of just singing about places
With scrappy boys faces have general run of the town
Playing with prodigal sons
Take a lot of sentimental valiums
Can't expect the world to be your Raggedy Andy
While running on empty you little old doll with a frown
You got to keep in the game
Retaining mystique while facing forward
I suggest a reading of Lessoon in Tightropes
Or surfing your high hopes or adios Kansas
It isn't very smart
Tends to make one part
So brokenhearted
Still there's not a show on my back
Holes or a friendly intervention
I'm just a little bit heiress, a little bit Irish
A little bit Tower of Pisa
Whenever I see ya
So please be kind if I'm a mess
Cigarettes and chocolate milk
Cigarettes and chocolate milk
In the light of the sun
Is there anyone?
Oh, it has begun
Oh dear, you look so lost
Eyes are red and tears are shed
Some world you must have crossed .
You said, You don't know me
You don't even care
She said, you don't know me
You don't wear my chains
The essential yet appealed
Carry all your thoughts cross an open field
When flowers gaze at you
They're not the only ones
Who cry when they see you
You said, You don't know me
You don't even care
She said, you don't know me
You don't wear my chains
She said, I think I'm going to Boston
I think I'll start a new life
I think I'll start it over
No one knows my name
I'll get out of California
I'm tired of the weather
I think I'll get a lover
I'll fly 'em out to Spain
I think I'm going to Boston
I think that I'm just tired
I think I need a new town
To leave this all behind
I think I need a sunrise
I'm tired of the sunset
Here it's nice in the summer
Some snow would be nice
There's a reason I haven't been writing. I cannot talk about it here. But I realized this gave me the opportunity to do what I knew would have to be done someday. Say goodbye.
But first, thank you. Thank you for listening to my words through your pixels. Thank you for coming along, whatever your reason, whoever you are. Thank you for watching my mystery unravel.
It's hard for me. To let this go. Seven years of my life are in these pages. A documented path from student to scientist. I'm not leaving because there's nothing to say, rather the opposite is true. There's so much that got left out from this summer, all those months I wasn't writing. A huge chunk of this is missing because of it, but that's the way it goes.
It wasn't always this way. Woohu was a community once. I thought of it more of a message board for my dorm and the group of friends I congealed with freshman year. One by one they left here, but I made a conscious decision to stay. Not for any particular reason, other than this became home. And I began to realize that all along, this journal, the memories buried in these pages, had been for me. To see growth flowing through words, representing actions, representing faith in myself.
And this became my memoir. My memoir of everything I lost and all that I gained. My winding road from those terrifying early moments in chemistry freshman year to a full-fledged forensic scientist in the NYPD. From being horrified to speak in front of room of classmates to testifying in courts of law to a jury of strangers. From bemoaning biochemical pathways and stoichiometry to analyzing mass spectral evidence.
When this journal began I was 18 years old. I was a wide-eyed freshman in college surrounded by strangers who would eventually become friends. I was dating a British boy back home, saw my parents every month or so, and thought I was going to become a biochemist. My first entry was made in playful angst as I fidgeted with my new life.
As this journal ends, I am 25 years old. A girl standing on her own two feet looking back and knowing how she got here, in large part to this very place where she could watch it unfold. This place took my experiences, often too close for me to see clearly, and let me take a step back and examine them to see them for what they were. Seven years later, I have a domestic partnership, a new group of friends, and a career in forensics. And my last entry is not in angst, but rather in wonder. This is to have succeeded. To end better than I began.
I didn't write everything here. There are a lot of things that happened to me, or I happened to them, that will never grace these pages. But what's here is my truth nonetheless. What's here was for me, and that makes it real.
I am not done writing forever. This has become ingrained in me and I had to make a conscious effort not to do it. Not because I have some sort of fantastic life that the internet needs to know about, but because life is something worth documenting even if just for myself. I will be found elsewhere, when I'm ready.
I am going to open back up a few of my last entries to give a sense of where I left off. These last two years had more loss, in the sense of people, than I have dealt with in the rest of my life combined. My life has undoubtedly changed because of it.
But in the end, thank you to the friends in Michigan, friends in New York, Jason, family members, a few coworkers, and a handful of strangers who read this. Thank you for finding this interesting enough to even have read it just once. Thank you for embracing yet another cell floating in the endless sea.
MichelleStar
October 18th 2003 - October 18th 2010
