Today I am struggling with the everyday living thing. You know the thing. It’s the part where you look around you and, although seeing beautiful areas of tremendous value (children, house to live in, car, ability to earn an income, extended family, fantastic friends) you still wonder how you ended up in this place, this particular reality. And now, after listing all of my wonderful things above ^, I realized that there is one specific area that I must be pondering and wrestling with. Funny how writing pulls the truth out from behind the curtain.
I remember being 22 years old and thinking, “This is ridiculous. I want to have babies and I’m not even married. I am running out of time. I have got to get the ball rolling here.” Now what’s ridiculous? I’ll tell you what. Ridiculous thing number one is that I thought I was running out of time when I was 22. I had a plan. I wanted to have all of my children (2-3) by the time I was 30 and be a young, fun mom. Notice that no mention of career is made. I do enjoy the work I have chosen and I believe God led me to my profession for a reason but I also know that, given the choice, I would have remained a stay-at-home-mom and been on every PTA, coached soccer every year, volunteered at every school and read stories in classrooms all while baking fresh cookies and fun, kid-oriented dinners. The only job I ever remember growing up wanting to have was being a mommy. Now, there are those of you who will understand this and, most definitely, those of you who think they would go crazy with that. I respect both.
Ridiculous thing number two is that I am now pushing 40 (oh, how it hurts to type that), still want another baby and still feel my time slipping away. And am unmarried again. Another baby may never be an option for me and I come to terms with that (and then lose perspective again) on a regular basis. I do struggle with what raising a child in your 40’s-60’s would mean versus what it has meant in my 20’s to 40’s. I do not mean any disrespect to anyone reading this who is or has had their children at this time of their lives; it’s just a different concept for me and I’m sure would change my parenting to some degree. Please do not take offense.
So this all leads to the realization that, although my heart still wants to carry another child underneath and my arms still want to hold another sweet, nursing baby, that may not be in the “cards” for me. It may just be a yearning I carry forever. Oddly enough, even as difficult as my pregnancies were (a 7 week hospital stay with one for placenta previa, a premature rupture of membranes with one at only 34 weeks and an emergency C-Section for a cord emergency with the last), I loved being pregnant, loved nursing my babies and loved every minute raising them up to even this moment. There have been hard times and frustrations, sure. I joke about how “boys are gross” or how they’re driving me crazy, like I think many people do, but I wouldn’t trade one second of any time I’ve ever had with them for all the money in the world. They own my heart and carry it around with them wherever they go. And I would do it all over again with a new one…crazy as some may think that would seem at my age.
All of that being said, I will not rush into the fray of scouting out relationship possibilities, in all of it’s danger, pitfalls, vicious weaponry, dragon-filled moats and flaming arrows and warning flares, to scurry irresponsibly and headlong into the possibly misleading comfort of a newfound castle. I am a spontaneous girl and love the fun of an unplanned adventure but have also learned to be a wary one as it comes to potential love relationships. I have three incredible boys to whom I owe my responsibility and my ultimate level of caution and protection. I won’t thrust them into something that I, myself, am not doubly sure of…well, as sure as one can be of anything at all in this life. And I also won’t commit myself, in front of God and everyone, to a relationship that I don’t feel like I know has an abiding, perpetual capability to succeed. I did truly think that my first marriage had that quality and tried for a long time to turn it around but there are some life cycles that just don’t turn at the same speed of rotation, thus allowing two to be in the same stratum for a time but then cycling in such a way that they never reach the same point at the same time again. You also cannot change other people. They have to find that themselves, no matter how hard you pray or how much you want to make it happen. If it ever happens, it will be on their terms and in their time, not in your own.
So where am I? At 22, I envisioned where my life should go and what I would do with it. I have my three beautiful boys, although I was 31 when the last came along. 🙂 Where did this new longing come from that was not in the original plan? Who replaced my first intentions with this new proposal? If I was born to be a Mommy and being a nurse is just my secondary assignment as an answer to the need for income, what will I be when these babies are gone? Who will be with me or will I then walk this path alone, still searching for some unreachable solitary “goal”? I have friends and family who love me. I have people who would give the roof over their head to cover the heads of myself and my boys. I have people to turn to when I am sad, lonely, lost or broken. And I am still an absurd distinction of broken, giving yet another reason that a male-female relationship would only flounder and fail until I figure myself out. So, why do I feel the need to have that? I have my people. What is this level of altered reality in which I live that assumes I must have someone else in order to be a whole me? Why must I feel like half when there is no missing piece to fill in the other side?
And so I struggle. A very close friend, whom I dearly love, said to me, ” A sense of purpose is a big deal for us humans. But I wonder if sometimes we put too much pressure on ourselves to ‘figure that out’. Maybe it isn’t actually that clear. Or even something tangible that you will be able to know about. Maybe we just have to have faith. Faith that we are here for a reason, even if we never know it for ourselves. Having too rigid a purpose (i.e. I’m here to be a mom, I’m here to help people) doesn’t allow for a whole lot of flexibility or for you to have different sides to yourself.” Oh, my dear T, you are a wise woman. Maybe we’re not supposed to “fix” ourselves but wait for the days of our lives to fix us…and, of course, I don’t mean the soap opera. Clearly, if one is standing on a pinpoint of a flat map, our overall position in the grand cartograph is invisible to ourselves, and even those standing close to us, due to it’s magnitude. The “big picture” is an elusive Dumbo’s feather being whisked away by the wind each time we think we are just about to grab hold of it’s confidence-infusing magic.
Oh, to be an eye in the sky so I would know…where am I?
God is in the Outcome 