Feb 27, 2017

I feel half guilty that I’ve sort of abandoned the cause of writing normal mom posts for this month and half justified in the fact that boring, all-over-the-place life is normal mom life. 

It isn’t scheduled or cohesive. It’s a mess that starts out looking at one thing and gets flopped around throughout the day/week/month/year(s). One day things are calm and I can focus on personal endeavors. The next day we’re moving forward on buying a house. It is what it is; it’s life.

And I can’t say I’m even mad about it. As appealing as it sounds on paper to have things move steadily along on a predictable course and rate, I’m glad real mortal life isn’t like that. I think it’d be nice for a few days and then get really boring. Not that I’m wishing for some big terrible trial (I’m def not), I’m just saying I’m grateful that sometimes things like buying a house come up out of nowhere. It makes life exciting. Just like having the flu or terrible weather for a week or being on food stamps for a few years makes me really grateful for good health and sunshine and room in the budget for groceries.

We got to walk through the house again today so Bryan could actually see it in person for the first time and it was one of those good moments in life. In some ways it sounds like this came up spur of the moment, like we just get to plow forward into something big and fun and exciting like buying a house. But the long and boring and true story is that we lived in a 500 square foot apartment during undergrad for the first two years of marriage, followed by a sub-par townhouse in not the greatest part of town during grad school, followed by a super creepy terrible house where I’m glad we weren’t murdered, followed by a really charming cute house that I loved but only had one bathroom and happened to be located in an area with a dying economy and, shall we say, not the most honest of bosses for Bryan, followed by a townhouse with a landlord who I’ll refrain from saying anything about in case he’s one of the seven people who read my blog, followed by looking at a lot of ok-but-not-great houses in an area that still doesn’t feel like home, followed finally by the first house we could potentially own that I walked into and felt like I could breathe and maybe stay a while.

Real life only goes fast on social media or in the opening credits of movies. In person it takes a long time. Nine years of marriage in renting cinderblock apartments and oak front cabinets and housing built in the 1960’s and trying to make things beautiful but really just knowing we’d need to wait a long time before we could get where we really wanted to go. And I’m grateful for every single day of those nine years. It wasn’t just in between time. It was life. But my point is that if I had read this blog post nine years ago I’d be wishing we could buy a house and maybe even secretly feeling a little like everyone else had it better than us. When the truth is that, yeah, some people get to move along faster, but in general everybody else has to wait their own nine years too.

I don’t think anyone really has a more glamorous life than anyone else. I think some people are just better at hiding the moments in between. Or the hard parts. Or the toiletries that got stuffed under the sink because, really, where else are you going to put them?

Boring, exciting, ambitious, exhausted, happy, sad, hard, good–I’m grateful for real normal life.