Holiday Drama

I wasn't in the Christmas mood this year. Sure, I am always annoyed by the money I am expected to spend, the knowledge that I don't need anything yet have to come up with something to tell people to buy me... but this year it didn't feel like the holidays at all. I don't know if that means anything about growing up or moving on or changing. But I just didn't get it this year.
So Christmas night I got into a fight with my mother about some stupid stuff that I don't have time for. It's not a secret that I think her husband is an ignorant, pompous ass (and that is edited for your reading pleasure) but somehow they both assumed they would invite HIS family to MY wedding.
Yep.
Tell me if I'm nuts. But I didn't grow up with him or his family. By the time my mom remarried, I had been on my own for at least 6 months. I have met his kids once or twice each. We don't know one another. We aren't "family." My mom knows we are planning a small wedding. David and I are paying for it. I am not paying for the children of a man I don't like to eat. If I passed any of them on the street I wouldn't know them. If I have to meet people at my wedding, they probably shouldn't be there. We are inviting 100, expecting about 75. They don't make the cut.
Do you understand that? Or are David and I hateful and crazy?
So somehow, instead of just deferring to the people who are hosting the wedding, who are paying the wedding, who are planning the wedding, who are GETTING MARRIED, a confrontation had to result. Long story short, I am tired of dealing with the drama. So I left town with David that night and went home. He had to go home that night anyway because of his work schedule, and I decided to go along. Most of my friends I planned to see understood. When I'm upset I want to be with David and I want to be home. That's where I went.
And today my friend that I moved up here with moved back to Indy. I am so excited for her. She is starting her career, buying a home... but I can't help but feel that a chapter is gone, an era has ended. She started this adventure with me. Today she came by my place to drop off some stuff I had left at our old apartment. One of these things was our grocery cart. I remembered the first time we went grocery shopping together... we were so used to shopping in Indy where you buy everything and load up for trunk and back seats. Well, we forgot that we had no car and had to carry all of our stuff about ten blocks home. So we bought this old lady push cart that a lot of people use up here to haul stuff around. It was red and we named it Ruby. I have so many memories of us dragging that thing down State Street and then down Cullom Ave. In our busy lives sometimes the only times we had good conversation was while pushing that cart around. We struggled to lift up the steps of our first apartment building, struggled to keep the cat inside as we rolled into our second apartment, and today, it is sitting in my storage unit in the basement.
I know it's silly. But today the cart, and the fact that she didn't need it anymore, was sad. A definite shift has occurred, life has changed, and now Ruby is but shoved into our hall closet or teetering down Chicago streets, us laughing or discussing or complaining or comforting around it. And I guess I just realize that life is changing. I am here with David in our very own home and she is moving with her love to Indy to their very own home. My other friends are growing up too. And it's eery.