The Mother of (Re)invention

Over the last several years, I have had a number of email conversations with a couple of former boyfriends in which I explained a number of truths that I think perhaps did not sit well.

-I am not who I was in high school and college. Generally speaking, this is a good thing as I was a confused and emotionally kind of messed up person. I'm better now. Yes, there's a back story, and it's a pretty juicy one. But it's not blog fodder.
-I do not have conversations with my friends to which my husband is not privy. Well, maybe if I were planning a surprise party or a really great gift. There are confidential church things that I don't tell him, but everything else is fair game. Mostly he doesn't want to know, which is great, and he's not the least bit controlling or intrusive. I have all the privacy I want--but I don't keep secrets from him either. And he doesn't often (ever) ask, but I don't keep my email secret from him. If he ever wanted to read it, I'd let him.
-I am not particularly nostalgic for the past, at least not my childhood and young adulthood. I don't maintain any friendships from before college, and I really only regularly keep up with one person (Tonya, the aforementioned BFF), apart from family. And I'm happy that way. I use Facebook to touch base with some people from college, and that's fun, but I am content to keep things very light and frivolous.
-I am not interested in any ongoing relationship, via email or any other means, which Ben is not comfortable with. I turned down a phone conversation with a former friend whom I had considered as close as a brother (before we dated, not a good thing) who wanted to talk to me about some trouble in his life, because Ben didn't want me to do it. This is okay with me. We could have continued to converse via email but I never heard from him again. Part of me regrets that. Part of me suspects that my insistence on maintaining the integrity of my marriage didn't sit well. So be it.
-I don't want to be a part of conversations someone else is keeping from their spouse, except in certain narrowly defined and otherwise confidential work-type situations. I once asked, "does your wife know you're in touch with me?" No reply. Ever. This would seem to suggest my suspicions had some justification.

So what's the point?
After years of keeping my online presence very small, in the last year and a half I have put myself out there. At one point I was authoring or co-authoring five blogs. I've cut back now. And I'm happy being out in cyberspace, to some extent. But it's my own little world, and I make the rules. I moderate all my blog comments to avoid spam. Yes, I IM, but only with a couple of people, and that's the way I like it. I only "friend" people I know and want to be in touch with on Facebook; I'm not out to have the biggest network, I just want to keep in contact with a few people. And this week I have ignored 3 friend requests. A couple were from people I don't know, with whom I have a friend in common or shared interest. And one was from one of those ex-boyfriends.
I didn't turn him down to be rude, or because I'm bitter, or because I hate him. I'm not, and I don't. I turned him down because he doesn't know me anymore. I'm not who I once was. God and I have reinvented me, and I like who I am now much better. And I don't much want to spend time with someone who doesn't know who I am. Truth be told, I don't know him anymore either. He's married, and has a whole different life than what he thought he'd have when we were younger. So have I, and that's okay with me.
If necessity is the mother of invention, maybe growing up is the mother of reinvention. I don't know. All I know is I like who I am now, which more than I could say then. And I plan to keep it that way.