A Little Advice from Mema!

Soundtrack Selection: Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson (it's an inside joke)

 I am very excited to welcome our second guest blogger, Carrie Heath Whittle. I've known Carrie for thirteen years now. My earliest memory of her is standing in front of the office in high school and her saying to me, "You wanna be my roommate at JMU. My mom and I think if you were my roommate I'd be more likely to do my homework." My thoughts: Great, not only do I think I'm a total nerd but so does the rest of the entire student body, apparently.

But it ranks up there in the greatest decisions of my life. Over the last 13 years, we've been through some great highs and some really low lows. The only consistent, predictable part of our life together has been that we were always there for each other to mostly laugh together but also to cry, but only when it was absolutely necessary.

I hope you enjoy her remarks. She is a truly experienced, and in turn, wise woman! (And PS I was at that wedding she so speaks of and appropriately a bee flew up my dress and stung me twice.)

I’m not sure I’m qualified to contribute to this most excellent blog because – I’ll just come out and say it – I don’t drink alone.  I do drink Newcastle though, and red wine, and pretty much any liquor – but I do not drink whiskey after oyster stew with a crème base.  (Just take my word for it).

And as a married girl with two children I wasn’t sure what I could offer to all the single ladies crowd.  I was instructed to keep it light-hearted, so I won’t bore you with my opinion of marriage pros and cons or advice on how to know if the next guy is “the one”.  Because the truth is, as my late grandmother, “Mema”, would say, marriage is a shot in the dark. 

Mema said that because she had met my grandfather, “Bebop” through the mail, as pen pals set up by friends. They met and she got married at 21 years old.   She claimed, “I knew nothin’ before our honeymoon, but I did just fine!”  TMI Mema.  They were married for 54 years until Bebop died.

All I know is from what I’ve seen, whether you have the perfectly nauseating, 2 year minimum courting experience or a shot gun wedding in a backyard in Pungo (where you tell the photographer to hurry the hell up before you puke on him from your morning sickness) you do not know that person you are entrusting much of your future happiness to until sometime after the damn rings are on and the shit (or puke, in my case) hits the fan. 

You may be saying, “That’s great but I’m 30 something and single!”  Well, buttercup, my point is marriage isn’t much different from the rest of life in that what happens next is always the unknown and how you choose to deal with it. 

And so I offer as a toast, to our wonderful host and author of this blog, an expansion of Mema’s wisdom: life is a shot in the dark.  We don’t know what is going to happen, in singlehood or marriage, but most of us do just fine.  (Just heed the previous bolded user warning).