Live in the Now, Man

I married a very intelligent man who also happens to be quite level-headed and good with seeing what is really important. I’m grateful for these gifts of his, but that doesn’t mean I sometimes don’t wish he were a little more irrational. I’ll explain.

I have been a stay-at-home mom since my son was born almost 14 months ago. Prior to that, David and I both alternated staying at home with our daughter while the other one went to school. This way, we were both able to complete our MS degrees in Zoology in less than 2 1/2 years. Leaving Noodle was hard many days, and I often wished I could stay home and enjoy the day with the two of them. The days when I was home, I was pretty good at balancing trying to get a little schoolwork done and just enjoying being the “mom”. And I enjoyed my days at school, too. I think part of what made the whole situation work was that you knew tomorrow you’d be doing “the other thing,” so it felt like you only had to get through today. It was nice to have the feeling of “missing home”.

Now, however, I am in full time SAHM mode, meaning I am home EVERY day, ALL day with the kids. I don’t get a chance to miss them, because I am always with them. Getting through each day seems a bit more difficult because I know that tomorrow is going to be just like today, which was just like yesterday, and so on ad infinitum. It can be a challenge to keep up my spirits.

As we are still living in our 2 bedroom apartment, and have been thinking that moving out was just around the corner for the past year or more, I have had a hard time enjoying being here, and too frequently find myself wishing away the time until we are able to move into a house. A couple of nights ago David and I were “pillow talking” and he said, essentially, that it’s important to enjoy life NOW, because it is the only life we have. And we can wish that things had taken a different turn, but they haven’t, so it’s just a waste of time and energy. He pointed out that if our lives had gone the way we’d originally hoped (meaning he’d gone to Washington University in St. Louis) we’d be even poorer than we are now, and we’d be at least half a dozen years away from buying a house. AND he’d be gone even more than he is presently with his job. I’ll confess that I was annoyed to have him point all these things, but even with my annoyance I knew he was right. (That’s probably why I was annoyed.) So, I’m happy to report that for the past couple of days I’ve done a much better job at enjoying NOW. And I did pretty good last week. I think Life really is about the details, and the small things. The big things happen too infrequently, so if we wait for those, we’ll miss out on a lot of joy.