We have a house full of family this week for Thanksgiving - my parents, my mother-in-law, my stepson and of course, my two girls. It's a good life to have a house full of people sharing good food around my lopsided dining room table. I bought the table at a consignment shop, made by a local designer, but unfortunately, the chairs are all different heights and the table is slightly lopsided. When I picked it out at the showroom it seemed majestic and elegant. When I got it home I realized it had a few flaws.
That table is a good metaphor for my life. See, when I was a little girl I dreamt of someday being a wife and mother (along with an actress and novelist). I named all my dolls and pretended they were my children and I used to wonder what my husband's name would be - I thought Greg for some reason but that's neither here nor there. And, in these daydreams I imagined myself the perfect wife and mother - my children were beautiful and well-behaved, my husband handsome and funny. I never lost my temper, always had some kind of life lesson dripping from my lipsticked mouth each time these imagined children encountered difficulties. I think I saw my future self looking like the wife on Mad Men and having the demeanor of Ma from Little House on the Prairie.
My daydreams have all come true. Only, just a little tilted and unexpected, like my table. I married a man named Dave, not Greg, and he is handsome and extra smart and he thinks he's funny. I constantly have to remind him that I'm the funny one in the relationship but I can tell he doesn't believe me. He came with a son from another marriage. I never imagined I'd be a stepmother and it's stretched me in remarkable and positive ways, but sometimes it's been really, really hard.
My children are beautiful and most of the time well-behaved, but I had no idea how them they would be. Or, how my heart would be ripped from my chest, pumped full of something unnamed so that it quadrupled in size, and put back in my body the minute I held them in my arms. My oldest is fierce in every way, artistic, high strung - she lives life out loud, so to speak. Just like me. But, she's a math wiz like her dad. My little one is stoic, and funny, she laughs all the time and constantly amuses herself and is crazy for books. Just like me. She can take something apart and put it back together at two and a half, just like her dad. And, all those qualities combined makes them, them. And, to me, them is perfect.
I don't look like the wife on Mad Man - not even close. And, I don't have Ma's patience and wisdom - not even close. Sometimes I yell at the kids, or don't listen as carefully as I should when they tell me their ideas, or count the mintues until they go to bed so I can fall exhausted on my bed to watch something beneath my intelligence on television. Sometimes I'm downright critical when I accuse my husband of leaving every pair of shoes he owns on the living room floor instead of the closet.
But, sometimes I'm brilliant. I say just the right thing to keep my husband from despair when he lost a business deal, or connect with my crying dramatic daughter by telling her a story from my own childhood, or let my youngest 'help' me make dinner and don't even stress when she spills tomato sauce all down the side of the counter.
Maybe some brilliance every now and then is the best we can hope for. The rest of the time we can be thankful, in the words of Scarlet O'Hara, that tomorrow is another day.
Wonderful.
Posted by: Josh | March 12, 2010 at 06:31 PM