And, You are Drunk on Viognier

First comes love.
Then comes marriage.
Then comes baby in a baby carriage.
Then comes a drunk gay man with a bottle of red wine.

Let me preface this post by saying that I am ¾ of the way into a bottle of delicious Cono Sur Viognier.

Okay, so here is the 411. I am sitting at my desk in the Fox Den with a glass of wine and dinner on the stove. I just finished the latest episode of This is Us (Kevin – no!!) and now I am pleading myself to write. These days I keep coming up with an endless list of reasons not to: “I didn’t drink enough wine to write,” “I drank too much wine to write,” “I should probably cut my nails.” Tonight there is no backing out. It is me, you, and a keyboard.

Real talk, I am living on my own right now, which don’t get me wrong, I love till death do us part. However, like a genie in a bottle, this life comes with everything that I could ever dream of (hardwood floors! gentleman callers! heat and water!) but it also comes with a major catch. And that is, that I must live … with myself. I have a smirk on my face while writing this only because the rumours are true, my brain and I have not always got along. Like fourteen-year-old girls in a Catholic school, one minute we are best pals and the next we are plotting ways to shorten our plaid skirts and sabotage each other.

Now that I am in my thirties, I can no longer blame my twenties for all my terrible life decisions.  These days I must continually find ways to be more hot and less mess. That said, if there has been one curveball that life has tossed these past few years, it has come in the form of babies.

After nearly surviving my best friend Claire’s labour (I don’t want to talk about it) I have moved past the wedding stage in life and relocated to Babytown. I should have saw this day coming, given the fact I am best friends with so many breeders, but even still it caught me by surprise. While the year 2017 brought with it fear, uncertainty and Edgar Wright’s fantastic film Baby Driver – it also delivered nine of my best friend’s and family’s children into this world. Within weeks, my Instagram feed scrolled from an issue of Playgirl into an Anne Geddes calendar.

When I was 26, I once dated a small-town guy who refused to be gay on the grounds that he could not detach from his dream of getting married (to a woman) and having children. I remember one morning, in bed, after coitus he said to me, “It doesn’t matter, there is no point in living if I cannot bring life into this world.” I remember in that moment that part of me could understand where he was coming from, and another part was just happy to be getting laid. “The opportunities for creation in life are endless,” I told him, before getting up to put my underwear back on.

Weeks later he left and I never saw him again. Who knows? Maybe now he’s married with children. Or sipping on double neat whiskies closing down a bar each night. Or both.

It is intriguing, but also frustrating, how our emotional brains and rational minds can be at such odds with each other. Like how marrying off my best friends was one thing; but not that new life is in the picture and family units are formed, I cannot help but feel sometimes like I am a stranger on the outside looking in. Coupled with that is this unshakable emotion that I missed the train pulling out of the station, and now I am standing on the platform looking for anyone else who was left behind.

But I know at the end of the day these feelings are hogwash! Because (a) I am surrounded by love and one of the luckiest gingers for it and (b) even if that was the worst-case scenario, I’m sure there is still a place near the train station that sells red wine.

What I guess I am trying to say out of all this, is that sometimes emotions can be as fun as Mariah Carey’s Grammy-award-winning-number-one-hit single, and other times you just have to drink Viognier and be grateful for every single sip.

On that note, back to the wine.