Starting Over...Again
Chapter 15
I.
When you’re a kid, you have quite a few preconceived notions about adulthood. These are built from the examples set by your parents to what you see from movies and television. As a child of the 80’s, a hearty part of the (non-animated) entertainment I watched showed successful people in successful relationships. The 80’s had the iconic Cosby Show, a must-watch comedy in my household (being one of the few things a child under 10 with two teenage siblings and parents that went to high school in the sixties could agree on) while, on the drama front, there was Little House on the Prairie. When my siblings went off to college in successive years (they were ‘Irish twins’ born eleven months apart), shows like The Wonder Years, Family Matters, and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air provided even more examples of positive relationships—and the requisite hilarity befitting a good sit-com, canned laughter be damned*. Others like Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, and Seinfeld that, while not necessarily capturing the model nuclear family, were still littered with positive adult role models (though it could be argued that the latter of that bunch was an examination of what NOT to do as an adult). Adding all of this together with the examples set by my parents and my older relatives, I imagined that by 30 I’d be married with children (and hopefully not in the dire vortex of disdain Al Bundy had for his brood).