Thursday, April 21, 2011

Hey, Mama

Buckeye Annie2 asks:

I totally live a very similar life and can offer some lovely canned beets for the food drive but not much in the way of advice even though I have somehow raised my kids to Teenagedom oh wait you wanted me to ask a question so I'll ask a real stumper: How are YOU behind all that mama-ness?

What a good question to begin with, because lately I've had the most wondrous sense of disappearing. Last week I went out of town for four days for book-related research. This is the longest Daughter and I have been apart since she was born. This turned out to most serendipitous, because with home-schooling and all that, Daughter has begun to take me for granted on a par with taking oxygen and Kardashians on our television for granted. Within an hour of leaving for the airport, I got the first text from her, telling me she missed me. When I landed on the East Coast, I had three more chatty Daughter-texts waiting for me, telling me this picayune event and that inconsequential anecdote, which is another way of saying "I miss you." Wasn't being taken for granted now, was I?

But did I miss her? Did I miss Consort? Of course I did, but I wasn't exactly longing for their nearness, because while on this trip I was productive and if they had been there we would have had fun but I wouldn't have been nearly as productive. The feeling which I found odder was that of freefalling through my day; if I wasn't mothering, there was all this time and energy left over. I happily lose myself in the job of mother but am starting to think about the razor's edge between losing yourself and getting lost. I'm not unhappy giving myself over to this; in fact, this is the longest sustained sense of joy and satisfaction I've ever had. But the cold fact is this job of full-time mother has a lifespan and I'm closer to the end than the beginning of it. It's time to think about what will get all this energy next, my Quinn 2.0. Oh,who am I kidding? Quinn 15.0. And I think we all know the program will be buggy.

And I have no idea why this is, but everyone has canned beets to offer a food-drive. We like them well enough to buy them but not well enough to eat them.

Someone else can answer that one.

1 Comments:

Blogger thelittlefluffycat said...

Or, you could be like me - I have a devoted beet-eater, but never purchase them, due to my terror of having them in the house.

We send the boys to bed and they ask us, "when are YOU going to bed?" I tell them the truth, that they will be gone very soon, or far less in need of us, & we need to make sure we still know how to talk to each other when that happens. :) Sounds like you've discovered a form of that, yourself.

I think Quinn 15.0 will work just fine. ;)

3:41 PM  

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