I appreciated this at the time, but I thought about it more this morning.
Yesterday was kind of a downer day. And, after the long weekend--having
gotten to bed a little late--I woke up groggy and, you know, just meh.
Sometimes, it can be hard to put your real life (translation: work
week) back onto your shoulders and move forward.
I don't know how this happened, though I suspect it
to be cosmically connected to the fact that I have the "test of my life"
to study for, but there are suddenly dozens of books lying around my
house that I haven't read.
After I blogged about my child's Harry Potter
birthday, a good friend challenged me to read the series. I explained
to her that I had a test to study for, but have somehow managed--in
three weeks' time--to make my way through the first three books. Having
finished The Prisoner of Azkaban yesterday morning, I was
glancing around for a new thing to put me to sleep last night, and my
eye fell on one of these mysterious lying-around books. I gave it a
try.
It was one of those books where you know the whole
story from the first line. I groaned and almost closed the book. But,
as my object was to go to sleep, anyway, I tried the second line. It was better.
I kept reading, and, while I wouldn't have written the book that way,
the author is quite charming, and I think she's managed to get me
hooked. At least for now.
It's a light-hearted construct about falling in love that, I suspect, can draw any chick in. I forced myself to stop reading
it this morning so that I could get to the gym, and thought about it
while driving. The girl in the book's true love just happens to walk
into her life, and she finds herself having "the conversation" she has
"waited for all of" her life.
I thought about the power of this construct, and how
it drew in even a middle-aged, married, mother-of-seven, skeptical
woman like myself. I guess even old women like me, who have to exercise
their necks to keep them from looking crepey, long for magical things
to happen to them.
Not that some man is going to walk through the door
and change my life, like in the book. That's already happened to me. I
remember how I felt when my husband started dating me. I could hardly
sleep, just knowing somehow that I would soon be married and having more children again. That was a magical moment in my life.
Though, a long time ago. And then, I wondered, is
it pathetic for people to still hope for magical moments, when they've
already had them? Maybe not the same ones, but other magical moments?
We all need to have hope for good things to still come to us. Are
there still conversations waiting out there for me that I have been
waiting all my life to have happen?
That's when I remembered my son's four words, "Mom,
you look thin." That is definitely something I've been waiting to hear, I realized. I remember how hard I
worked after having my last baby while he was away for two years, because my weight had gotten up almost to a very scary number, and I had promised myself that I would get and stay far away from that number as fast as I could. I remember hoping
that when this son got home and saw me again, he would say something like,
"You look like you did when I was a little boy." Those are the words I
conjured up for him to say at that time. Because, when he was a little
boy, I was pretty hot, in a thirty-year-old, single-mom kind of way.
Not that he noticed it then. Then, he tended to tell cashiers my age
and once told me I was so old that I had forgotten how to run.
("I ran all the way around this park today," I told him then.
"You did?"
"Twice.")
But,
unless we somehow become the characters in our stories, not even the
writers among us get to hand the people in our lives scripts and have
the conversations we've imagined.
Not that conversations we haven't imagined exactly
right cannot be the conversations we have waited for all of our lives.
Sure, there are conversations I'm still looking forward to having. "Mom, you look thin" definitely qualifies.
And that's the magic part, I think. The magic
happens when you are just going about your mundane life, doing the
things you have chosen to do because you believe that, someday, they
will lead you where to want to go, and then some words are said to you
that tell you you are getting there after all. Because there is no more
mundane part of my life than getting up each morning and getting myself
to the gym.
But hearing my son say that created for me one of those magic moments when the mundane
details of life pay off. Remembering his words this morning chased all my drowsiness away. No more meh. Energized and purposeful, I moved forward and worked hard.
I like to watch for
those moments--a meaningful look someone you know intimately throws you
to silently share something that he knows amuses you both, a little arm
around your neck, something hilarious happening, receiving a well-meant gift from a child who has put
his whole heart into making it,--and tell myself that I am right then in
the best moment of my life. Because, who's to say it's not? Those
moments are so few and fleeting by comparison to mundane moments--I like to think I can catch them like
emotional snapshots and, by acknowledging them, somehow elevate them
into something lasting.
Being pathetic avoidance insurance, I think.
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