Today is the anniversary of my marriage. I haven't been able to officially end it yet, so by the time I do in January, I will have been legally married for twenty years.
It is also the the date that Marty McFly arrives from the future, according to the movie Back to the Future II, released in 1989.
In 1989 I was in my first year of high school. With the benefit of hindsight, I was crushing on a girl while at the same time discussing the boy she liked with her. I probably wrote in my diary about dreams I harboured of weddings and white picket fences. I loved trashy pre-teen romance novels.
I never would have imagined that by the year 2015 I would have committed adultery, left the marriage I aspired to as a teenager, and have outed myself as the queer I denied being without saying a word, but by making it clear the woman I live with is my partner.
My view of my future was myopic. Shaped by the narrow circumstances of my life and the lives of those around me.
If I could go back to 1989, what would I tell thirteen year old me? How would I have liked the past to look like for me so that my future wasn't a gigantic roundabout where I feel like I am in the same place at nearly forty as I was when I was eighteen?
I would tell thirteen year old me that marriage and babies aren't everything. That I am smart and resourceful enough to build a future for myself before sharing it with anyone else. That in a neo-liberal economy, looking after babies at home might be honourable, and probably in children's best interests, but it leaves you financially bereft - nobody cares because its not 'productive' work. That I need time to work out what my values are. That I need exposure to different people, cultures, beliefs and lifestyles in order to figure out what will work for me. That I need to go to university, not just for the learning from study, but the learning from people. That I need to read widely. That actually I'm in love with a girl, and its ok.
But then of course the world would have had to look very different, too. In a sea of white, Anglo-Christian, heteronormative nuclear families, where would I have gotten the idea that my life could have looked different?
Part of me struggles with the concept of being married. My belief systems shifted, and so the value I placed on marriage also changed. I still carry my married name around on official documents like a kind of shackle that I can't loosen until January. I doubt I will ever marry again.
But on the other hand, the journeys we go on make up our stories. My marriage was not unhappy. My children are a blessing. But like those knarled trees that grow through the fences that contain them, my growth outstripped my surroundings and I needed a new place to grow.
We look with amusement and derision now at what the citizens of 1989 thought 2015 would look like.
My daughter's parents live apart and her mother's partner is a woman. At school she does most of her work on a computer. She asked the other day what we meant when we made a reference to Moses. She doesn't know who 'God' is. She listens to music on You Tube. She and her friend still know about fairytale princesses and happy ever afters. They might even hope for them. But they know that they are pretend.
As I head towards the end of my marriage, I feel like I'm starting over. I gained a lot over the last twenty years, but I lost so very much as well.
In another twenty years, I hope that I am settled in the authentic me.
And that my daughter is enjoying ambling down the myriad of paths that will be available to her, finding her own way.
Her own future.
