“To me, the most powerful sentence in your post was this: “Because this was exactly what I wanted.” So often, when overwhelmed by chaos and crying and so much touching, I forget that this is the life that I always wanted.”
It’s funny how easy it is for us to forget that sometimes.
When I’m balancing the teeter totter that is life with kids I can get bogged down in the details: buying groceries, cooking thankless meals; doing another load of laundry; driving to umpteen practices; attending school book fairs and conferences and PTO meetings; sorting stacks of mail; staring at unread magazines; fitting in blogging, twittering and writing; losing myself; finding myself; and figuring out how to get up and do it all over again tomorrow.
When I get lost in the details it’s easy for me to glamorize the other path, the people who live where I thought I’d live, or do what I thought I’d do, or are who I thought I’d be.
But then I stop.
I stop because I understand that I have the power to change these things—where I live and what I do and who I am. And I choose not to. Trivialities are not what comprise a life.
The fabric of my life is rich and woven from colorful strands of family, friends, and community. Yes, my children can be exhausting and yes, there are days I dream of coconuts and palm trees. But if I decide it’s palm trees that I really want, well, then, I can move to where the palm trees grow.
That’s the thing, isn’t it? We stay where we are until we decide to move elsewhere—and I mean this both figuratively and literally. Our pantries get organized when we organize them. Our careers progress when we take actions steps. Often, we’re only trapped by ideas of our own construct. In her book, Steering by Starlight, Martha Beck describes this notion with her favorite cartoon. She says:
“It shows two haggard captives staring through the bars of a prison window. The odd thing is that there are no walls on the prison; the two men are simply standing in the open, holding bars to their faces with their own hands.”
I know what she means. A few years into this Midwest gig, when I still longed to move back east with my preppy little tribe, I used to think, “We’re stuck here. We can’t move because my husband started a business,” but that’s wasn’t exactly true. We weren’t stuck. That vision was my own cartoon prison. We could’ve left the business. I could’ve moved east ahead of him. These weren’t ideal solutions, to be sure. But they existed—there were options—and I was painting myself into a jail that wasn’t there. Examining those options meant examining what I really wanted, which is an entirely different deal than feeling stuck. When I finally sat down with my list of pros and cons (because ya’ll know that’s how I roll), the grass wasn’t much greener back east after all. But getting out of prison? That was fantastic.
How about you? Are there times you’ve felt stuck? Were there options you weren’t seeing?
