Searching for leprechaun gold and unicorns

Well, it's a bare feet and sunglasses kind of day.  Luckily, I have a couple of little ones who think it's grand to do all of the running so long as they can flop and squeal on Mama every so often.  I call that a "win-win."  They run about and generally act crazy in a controlled environment (namely, a fenced in yard instead of a walled in house), and I bask in the sun on soft, spring grass like a cat. 

That was the happy prelude to what I really got on here to write about.  I've been wanting to take a break and write something for several days now, but often when I sit down to do so my mind either goes blank or feels all negative negative negative, neither of which I generally want to share on here.  Who wants to read any of that?  That's not a rhetorical question because there's definitely an answer, of course: No one does. 

Still, every so often there's a bit of frustration that bounces around my general psyche, and today is the day that I'm going to share this with the inter-web-world.  We are pretty steadfast in teaching the mantra "Everyone is different.  Everyone is special.  You are no better than others.  And that's all okay."  We're down with this ideology in our everyday lives but also mindful of preparing our kid(s) in a manner of ways for life after pre-school when things get real. 

My frustration stems not from anything to do with the wee babes, though, but rather how this affects my own life.  I'm something of a fish not so much out of water but an hermit crab's aquarium.  A tank is a tank, you might say.  Why does it matter whether you live here or there?  Well, it matters a lot.  My talents and areas of interest are decidedly unnecessary and obsolete in the place where we live.  And it's been rough trying to reconcile that with the life that the boy has created for himself insofar as he is right where he needs to be, doing what he needs to be doing.  How does one compromise that?  Either one half of the equation is always happy and the other half isn't or there has to be a complete life overhaul. 

So we're in the process of essentially buying a new house, and the frustration of this, for me, manifested itself readily last night.  I was talking through some inspection/renegotiation issues with the boy as we expected when I got the old "What's wrong?  Your eyes are watering" comment.  (Does anyone else's significant other ask this as discreetly?  "Your eyes are watering."  Well, then.  That's calling a cabbage a rose if ever I've heard it.)  I know that in my previous post I wrote how "zen" I felt about the house-moving-change situation, and most of the time, it does feel like that.  But then there are those times when the "zen" actually feels more like "prisoner to a situation."  Regardless, I'm still sure that this whole situation has happened for a reason, one which we are meant to act on purposefully, but the frustration doesn't dissipate because of this certainty.  We're definitely in the "You don't need it...you want it" stage with our youngest, and this translates to me just as much.  Here's the bold, bald truth: We don't need this house.  We want it.  And it keeps us here, indefinitely.  And I have a stark, blank future being here.  That's about the scariest, most frustratingly un-plannable thing in my life.  At some point, I should learn from the past and work to let go of that insatiable need to plan.  We certainly didn't move out of this present house after 3 years (it's been 8).  We certainly didn't leave this place after a year or two (it's been 9).  We certainly didn't move away straight out of college (unless by "move away" you mean back to your boy's hometown instead of the east coast). 

So the last 9 years have been an ongoing lesson in patience (largely) and learning how to cope.  Apparently, I haven't figured these out yet, else I feel we would surely be called elsewhere.  We're still here, likely going to continue being here, and will remain here until later.  That's the plan.  This will be a new way of thinking! 

In the meantime, I'm utterly unqualified for living in a blue collar town what with a Masters in English Literature and all.  Whenever I figure out how to get paid just for talking about  books, then I will definitely share.  I have a feeling that this job is just around the corner, over by where the leprechaun hides his gold at the end of the rainbow.  Right beside the unicorns.