The "I Wants"

I want the things that I assign as grown up things. I don't want to want them, but I do. I want the matching, or okay really eclectic not "matching" but cool furniture that isn't, well, hideous like my current furniture. I want a home of my own - but would settle for the furniture in my current apartment. I want vacations. I want to get married. I want a baby. I want, I want, I want.

For the first time in, it seems like forever, I have a future that I want to imagine. And when I do that it isn't really about the "things" I list above. I imagine being done with school, Kyle and I being married, Kyle having a teaching job and me a school counselor. Despite our terrible school loan debts, I don't think about those in "fantasy future" just panic-inducing future. Instead I have this abstract concept of a home and just hope it has a vegetable and flower garden. We have a kid (see I want to be pregnant but not and I want a baby but really like a 3 year old). We are doing creative thins and all of these images are dripping with sunshine and happiness. But with a sense of grounding and reality. It is hard to explain what lives in my head, but sometimes my mind skips right past this and I think of the I wants out of context.

My friend is pregnant. She is hilarious about it. She calls it her sea monkey (I blame Juno), She is 4 years younger than me and while they (she and her husband) have their problems, they have a home and matching furniture. But I don't really care about that, I don't want the life, I want to be younger and pregnant. Because babies are so so far away and health risks seem to increase - when did it get so scary?

And I want us to go on vacations. To go to the coast for the weekend, to stay in hotels and do fun things. I want us to go to Greece because Kyle has never left the country. I've been to more countries than he has states (and I've been to more states, but that's not the point).

I am happy for the most part but when the wants happen I get sad. Yesterday I tried to focus on my daily mantra. And it helped, but mainly buying my friend a cute onesie (really early I know but Kyle really wanted to) with a little giraffe cuddling with an elephant I had a hard time not being jealous - or sad.

We had dinner with a friend of ours on Saturday and his girlfriend has a 5 year old daughter. So all 5 of us were hanging out and Kyle was teaching her how to play chess and it was the cutest things. She was so focused and he was so so so patient. He is such a good teacher and so good with kids and I can't help but jump to what a great dad he will be.

And I am careful to think, "If I get to have a kid or kids" not assuming that I will because that is a dangerous assumption these days. I have always thought in the back of my head, for some inexplicable reason, that I might not be able to, like a hunch I really hope I am wrong about, but just in case I let it be there to ground me.

Anyways, I am so very happy for my friends who are in different places than me and I know that it was not meant to be in my past - kids etc. But I got married relatively young and had matching furniture and all the things that were supposed to establish a life. And while I no longer long for that back I manage to disconnect from that life and yet think how it is so much later than I hoped for everything. I love Kyle, he is a gracious, good and loving man, he is the partner I could never have asked for and I want so much to be a woman who deserves him, and am trying to be her. Though he seems to think I am enough as I am, I want to be a better person because of him. Which can only be a good thing I think.

But then I get greedy like having a good relationship isn't enough. A house that gets messy so fast, chores that I can't get myself to do, feeling overwhelmed in a life filled with time - time that I don't use wisely. I get stuck. And in that stuckness there is a chasm where my depression lives and sometimes it overflows like rushing water and it takes over the sane and grateful woman who lives in my heart and the "I wants" get bigger.

So I will go ride my 10 miles on my exercise bike and do my physical therapy and call about volunteering and try to get some other things done - DMV, buy wooden beads (trying to make prayer beads but I only have pretty plastic things and old necklace pieces and I find them more distracting), trying to become someone who is less of greedy me and more of who I feel I am meant to be or who I already am but sometimes forget.

Because "it is" - that is my meaning of life. It Is. You know the old joke, man makes plans and God laughs. Not because He's mean but because that isn't how it works.

I will go learn what today's mantra is and memorize it prayerfully and hopefully step towards the less of me idea. Because when am I truly happiest? When I am serving someone else. I want to - I want to, want to.

Thanks for reading what feels like a lot of whining.