This week was a mini-break from allthethings.
Sports seasons are in practice mode, a new school
quarter has settled in, and the screaming in of the New Year has vanished. Everything seems calmer and in the groove.
Last night I whipped out my phone and snapped
some pictures of my son as he emptied the trash. “For the internet,” I warned him. I was having yet another moment of Mama-ness that reminded me he will be leaving
this home in nanoseconds, and I was enjoying the agreeable-kid-doing-chores vibe he
had going on. He mock-posed for me, and
my daughter got into the scene. What I
captured in the terrible yellowed lighting was the essence of my kids doing
what they do best – be kids.
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Guys. Be cool. |
I write about them too much. My life is so small right now, just as theirs
is about to explode. I am grabbing moments
that I should have when they were babies, when women in the grocery store would
tell me to enjoy them at this age, and I nodded numbly, because at the end of most
days all I wanted was a glass of wine, the TV, and for nobody to touch me or talk
to me or breathe.
Despite the OMG
I just love my kids fixation currently holding me captive, I still wonder
what my life would look like without them, if I had cultivated a set of
different goals in my formative years and used my intellect and ambition to veer
away from this life into another one.
What would it look like? What
kind of career would I have? Would I be
married to someone else, or would I have still met my husband? Would I have different children or none at
all? Would I even live here? Alternative
storylines are endless, and the irony that I still take the time to daydream
about my deeply rooted life as a blank slate is not lost on me. Do other people
take time to wonder?
Conscience kicks me back into the present and scolds:
This is what you’re doing. This is life;
this is now. Those other things are just
that – other. Your life is charmed. Other people don’t have what you have.
#Blessed
This life is good, and the people that surround
me within it are, too. I love what we
have built together. If I didn’t take time
to think about the other I might not appreciate this so much. If-then scenarios are fun to think about, but
they serve no purpose, except maybe to give perspective and to stretch the
imagination.
I hate when people complain about something and
then qualify it. As if a person doesn’t
have the right to complain, as if we are allowing the universe to take
something we hold dear away if we don’t quickly put it out there how much we
care. So nobody can say, when it ends
forever, “she never appreciated what she had, which was everything.”
I don’t have everything. Never have.
Never will. I guess being okay
with that is a sign of wisdom. Maybe
just age. Perhaps complacency. Would I have been this complacent in another
life? And there I go again.
I do have two goobers who break my heart and
make me laugh, and a husband whom I love so much that I find him utterly
annoying at least once a day.
Those three things stop the wondering in its tracks.
*******