The Road Not Taken

I  recently read somewhere of a woman who deferred marriage at age 34 because she felt she had not found her "inner self,"  I thought back to age 34 half a century ago when I was the father of four children, and working on getting tenure.  I had the same feeling of bewilderment that overcame me reading of Karl Ove Knausgaard's twenty and twenty first years while living in Bergen and attending school aimlessly missing all his classes, getting blind drunk night after night with chums (to say that they drink a lot in Norway way understates the case!). When I was twenty one I graduated college, got married, and planned on going to Harvard for graduate school.  My undergraduate years had been spent studying the morning and working a job in the afternoon.  Fun was drinks with friends on weekends and finding some guy to go to bed with.  Then I got married, sort of a bizarre move, and I moved into middle class family mode.  The point of all this is I never stopped to take a step back and think about it all, even when my first wife died, and at twenty five I started dating again and then marrying almost immediately the woman who was the mother of the four kids.  Do I have an inner self?  I must be pretty conflicted, gay guy two wives, family man, went with the flow, although it ran in a funny canal, into marriage and domesticity, and then suddenly out the other end, married to a guy, with whom I have been together twenty  five plus years.  A couple of days ago while reading about Karl Ove's drunken years I felt myself to be so different and thought back to taking on heterosexuality, almost as a caprice, and then parenthood.  I got out two wonderful albums of photographs, and there were those wonderful children, as babies and little tots in New Haven,  Palo Alto and Rome, as junior high schoolers in Brookline  and Rome again, as high school kids, looking damn bad ass and assured sitting in my garden down in Hull, then  marriage for some,, one holding a baby up, ohers getting a college degree, one proudly standing in a restaurant kitchen, all going in different directions and the other book was a remembrance of a weekend visit on my eightieth birthday, there they were slightly plump, grey in their hair, middle aged, the grandchildren playing frisbee on the beach, and me the old codger.  I had a lump in my throat all the way through these viewing sessions.  But I don't think I have yet to discover my inner self, and I am convinced my generation were too busy just following the rules.  I had to get a college degree, I had to get a part time job, I wanted to hook up with this woman,, if i were goint to do that, I had to get married, I had to become a professional, I had to go to graduate school, I had to start teaching, get married another time, be a father because my wife became pregnant, and so on and forth.  I can remember friends over the years when I described the details of my life calling out "Charlie, what were you thinking?"  I guess that's the point.  I really wasn't, just following the path, the rules, the road, whatever.