Marriage, Bellies, and Babies

This picture makes me feel awkward.

I have discovered that there are four types of students at BYU: single, married, pregnant married, and married with children. They all have distinct views on life, school, and the other groups. I fall into the second, and happiest group—married. We have all the benefits of cheaper housing (just barely), government grants, sex, and we don’t have a child so we can do whatever we want whenever we want. So when someone gets married, they are banished from the sect of single people and forever become the weird married friend. And every time the single friends do see you all they can think about is the fact that you are married. You get the question, “So… how’s married life?” and you know what they’re really asking: "How's that forbidden fruit?" One of these times I’m just going to call them out on it and say that it’s great, but kind of messy and more work than you’d think.

Married people get along well with married people with children. It quells the baby hunger to play with a baby that isn’t yours. It’s always been my favorite thing to make faces at babies behind peoples’ backs in church. I love the myriad of reactions I get. There’s the happy, trusting baby who smiles and hides in their mom’s shoulder, then there’s the intellectual baby who just stares, unimpressed. I feel like those ones are studying me, saying in their head, “What a blooming fool, does he think I like to be patronized?” And then there’s the horrified baby who thinks I’m going to eat him. That’s when I pretend I’m asleep so the parents don’t turn around and see that I am the reason their baby hates church.

Pregnant married people are much stranger than married with children people. I don’t think they realize that people who aren’t familiar with the female gestation period have no idea what “33 weeks along” really means. I know that it takes about 9 months for a human to make a baby, and 2 years if you are an elephant, but I don’t want to divide the weeks by 4. When my wife gets pregnant, I am sure I will understand the nuances of the different stages and in what week certain junk happens, but right now, I have no idea. We don’t measure things in tiny quantities in other facets of life, why in pregnancy? When people ask me how much longer I will be in school, I say a little less than 2 years, not 98 weeks, or a little under 60 million seconds.

Well since this is my first post. I will make it interactive. You should leave a comment about your favorite interaction with somebody who belongs to a different one of these groups that was really awkward or foreign to you. My buddy Trevor came over to give me something one morning and while he was there Diana came out of the bedroom and said hi to us. Trevor and I have known each other forever, but I think it was hammered home that morning that I was married now, because he looked extremely uncomfortable. We just laughed about it. Well I will try to post something once every 168 hours, so be prepared for some awesomeness.