I should know by now not to promise in advance any sort of postings. Before I shut my computer down for the night, odds are likely I've already forgotten that I promised to tell about the kids' plans to raise money for the birds (sorry Evy !!!) or my plans to document the never-ending list of ways God has helped me in my life --- to instead write about the more frivolous topic: Mid Life Crises.
Hubby and I sat around the picnic table this weekend while the big kids splashed haphazardly about the pool before us and Little S plunged herself freely into her plastic pool at our feet - discussing Big Stuff. The meaning of life, the wonders of faith and - you guessed it - celebrating middle life. No. Seriously, we really did. All of that.
I'd say about two years ago I began to consider that this all ends. In those days of hiding in the kitchen and praying that God would make the long hours of being a speech therapist end, it never once occurred to me that it actually would. End. One day. And that I might actually look back at those days and pine over their carefree ways. Carefree. The days of my working 12 hours plus, driving from one end of St. Louis to the other to the other and back. Staying up typing reports and planning enriching activities for little people who sat in the stench of their dirty diapers and their parents who could care less as I worried about my car being vandalized on the street and the ice storm looming in the horizon, keeping me from getting home to the safety of my life in the suburbs...Carefree. Yeah. The days before the pressures and absolutely loving with abandon the little people who run about calling me mom and expecting me to feed them and keep them clean and run them places and teach them about the bible and maintaining a budget and waking at all hours of the night to need coffee to put a smile on my face because this is it - this is the life days that are Today. Mhmmm...those other days were carefree indeed.
It never even occurred to me that this would be tougher. You know - the whole parent thing. But about two years ago, I at once saw the crows feet in the corner of my eyes and the increasing depths of the crease between my eyes ... and life stood still. Before it took off head first into the deep end of Oh. My. God. - This is life. - This is it. The What. Am. I. Doing. With. It. Because. This. Ends. Too!!! sort of panic that I saw in my expression in the mirror.
Anyway, as Hubby and I discussed Solomon and his writings in Ecclesiastes that the whole entire purpose of life - from the man who had wisdom and wealth and concubines and crops aplenty - is to worship God, I began to consider that this - the wonder and amazement and fear and realization and the waking and the sleeping and all of it --- this is my mid-life crisis. I don't know that it's a crisis i.e. catastrophe, crazy thing I do as much as it's the reality of the crisis - the wonder, amazement, fear, realization of the waking and the sleeping of it all that eventually crashes into the wall of Done. Finished. Finito. You have been there and you have done that. The critical moments in my life when I realize: Wake Up, Buttercup. Cuz one day you're gonna look back and pine over these days. And they'll be gone. And you'll be old. And you'll realize. This was It.
This is my mid-life crisis.
