The Great Plate Debate

I'm moving. Have I mentioned that? I'm moving to Rochester to live with my husband. For the past month and a half, I've been living part-time in Minneapolis in an apartment I leased when Geo was in Alabama and I was trying to figure out how to live by myself. But now the lease is ending and I've gotta get out or I'm pretty sure they'll be pretty mad and like poop on my doorstep, or whatever it is property managers do when they want you to leave.

I can't verbalize how ecstatic I am to finally live full-time with Geo. I want to finally eat breakfast AND dinner with him more than a couple nights in a row and stop packing up bags to go back-and-forth. I want to share closets with him and buy toilet paper together and do everything we used to do when we first lived together. (PharonSquare amateurs: I met Geo because he was my roommate. We lived together for a year before dating, and it worked out better than perfectly, but then he had to move away for grad school.)

But I can't lie to you guys: It's been kind of an emotional journey for me to pack everything up and say goodbye to my one-bedroom apartments and hand-me-down kitchen appliances. I've packed and unpacked MY things like 100 times since high school. But I keep getting really hung up on my dishes.

My dishes were actually my sister Prinna's. I think she got them from my parents, but then they came to me. I unpacked those dishes when I moved in with Kim in college, when I moved into my first solo apartment, my second solo apartment, my first apartment with guys, my second apartment with guys (and Geo), and then again when I moved in to my current place. They are pretty much the only things I've ever had and not broken.

So tonight when I tossed bags and bags of "single girl" stuff into the garbage, I stopped when I got to those dishes. I'm married now, and my bomb loved ones have given Geo and I all the brand new gorgeous dishes that we handpicked as our Everyday Dishes. I LOVE the new ones. I don't NEED the old ones.

But I feel like a total abandoner (it's a word) tossing out the old dishes. I never LOVED them (the bowls are a weird shape and the dinner plates are always too big for dishwashers), but I NEEDED them. And I've somehow gotten extremely attached to them. It's like the ugliest sweatpants ever that every person has in their closet. They don't look good, and sometimes you just wanna throw them out, but you never do. You keep washing them and putting them right back where they belong. And you pack and unpack them 1 billion times. But then you get married and you feel like you need to pretend like those sweatpants never existed.

But you can't. Because it's hard.

Anyway, I made a bagel and put it on my single-girl plate and then gave it a little high five as I smeared the cream cheese off of it with my tongue.

Then I tossed it in a garbage bag with the rest of my dishes. (Yay! No more dish-washing!) I hauled the bag out to the garbage and heaved it into the bin with unimaginable guilt. (No, not because I was throwing away perfectly good dishes. I know I could have recycled them or donated them, but I'm not a hippie, and also I didn't know how to do that since I've never gotten rid of dishes.) But I stood there, kissed two fingers and saluted my dishes with a peace sign before turning back into my apartment to open some wine and mourn.

Am I insane? Am I? Does anyone else have something that they had trouble letting go of when they got married or turned into a grown-up??