Sometimes life becomes less of a journey and more of a maze. I’ve been navigating the maze for the past few years and in my predictable and usual fashion, I have worn through perfectly good shoe leather trodding down the same pathways over and over again without actually advancing. Like a proverbial mouse in the wheel, lots of motion, no progress. C’est moi. I stopped blogging and really even reading (audiobooks don’t count). I stopped writing anywhere except inside my head. Which one could argue is still writing, but one would be wrong, because writing is writing and writing inside my head is thinking. So, I’ve been thinking for the past few years and as with the other areas of my life, I’ve been thinking myself in circles, spiralling down into depths that accomplish little more than to make me feel less and less significant and more and more despair. Hmmm. This all sounds a bit dark, doesn’t it? #Accurate.
Perspective and balance insist that I mention that all has not been all been a giant dumpster fire on top of a cesspool of misery. There have also been times of great happiness, love and celebration over the past three years. For instance, your girl here became a grandmother (although I go by ‘Lola’, because, well, it’s adorable, easy for babies to say and it sounds good when said with “Pops,” which is my husband’s moniker of choice. Our first grandbaby (“GB”) is turning ONE this weekend and I’m in puddles of tears over this. I cannot believe this precious, beautiful little soul has already been out here, in the world with us for a whole year. In addition to our first grandbaby, we also became Pops and Lola to his wonderful older brother, who is such a funny, quirky, loving little dude. He’s quick and clever and just the sweetest big brother. Both GB’s have both contributed to our family’s happiness quotient exponentially.
As for my o.g. five, they’ve all grown bigger, older, and into their own people. There have been and are girlfriends and boyfriends, driving lessons and graduations. When I started this blog, my baby girl was barely a year old. This year, she turned sixteen. My sons are (still) all older than she, so you can imagine that my “smalls” are no longer so small. In fact, they are all now taller than I am and the only one in the house who is smaller than me is our puppy dog, Ella (or Ella Bella, El Bell, Belly, Eleanor, Lenora, Trixie or Madam Frufru š¤·š¼āāļø). How times have changed so quickly and throughly. In my arrogance, I never heeded all the warnings from others around me about how time would fly and the days being long but the years being short, and I’m annoyed by how foolish I was. If only my present decision making self was privy to the brilliance of the hindsight revelations that smack me in the head almost daily now. I suspect that I am not alone with this feeling.
I have all but stopped posting pictures of my family (save for re-posts of posts they make themselves). I have a new-found respect and even fear for what becomes of the images that we mindlessly, naively share online. There was always talk about the world being a scary place, but we were so innocent, because the world we are living in today is a far more uncertain, dangerous and tenuous place than ever before (during my lifetime). I was child during a time when we, collectively, worried about one day finding ourselves sinking in quicksand, we were taught to “just say no” to drugs, and to ‘stop, drop and roll’ (although I do still wonder why were we at such high risk for being set on fire?). We watched afterschool specials on ABC about teen pregnancy, abusive boyfriends, smoking, and drinking (I think they were mostly discouraging these things) and then many of us proceeded to do exactly those things, secure in the knowledge that we knew better than anyone else and that telling us what to do was just not on.
All that said, I am still ready, willing and able to share ridiculous things my children say or do, situations that I find myself in (through my own idiocy and that of others), and observations I make while I move about this world as a perimenopausal woman in the 2020’s. Buckle up, Buttercup, this is going to be a rocky, partially demented, emotionally unstable, hormonally imbalanced, sleep deprived, weepy and rage-fuelled ride, sprinkled with the occasional sugar, spice and glitter bomb. šŖ©