Can I have a Do-Over?

When I was younger, I thought grey hair was beautiful.
When I was younger, I swore I'd never drive a minivan.
When I was younger, I couldn't understand why women freaked out over turning 35 or 40.
When I was younger, I told myself I'd never yell at my kids.
When I was younger, 50 was old.

Something happened between the 31st of December, 2010 and the 1st of January 2011. A cosmic shift developed in my whole being. I experienced a change in my perspective from that of a not-so-old 34yr old to a woman swiftly approaching her 35th birthday. In short, I became old.

Wow.

I find myself looking at my hands, wondering if they show my age. I spend more time peering into the mirror at my hairline, wondering when the 1st grey hair will appear (since I can't see the back of head, maybe that's where they're hiding). I've started exercising, all the while thinking to myself that it's waaaay harder to lose weight after you turn 35, so maybe I should've started earlier.

Maybe it wasn't entirely an overnight shift, but a gradual morphing of my middle-adult perspective. I've noticed that when I was younger (there's that phrase again), I made sweeping declarations with respect to never doing this or that. I can't really recall why, but at the time, it seemed to me that I would not ever, even remotely consider the alternative. I find myself watching the news, reading different newspapers, participating on varoius committees, all the while coming to the shocking realization that for the next 25 years or so, I will ALWAYS be old to my children. My mom appreciates the fact that I no longer consider her old.

I wonder what the next 35 years will bring?

I should have taken off my pants

Seriously! Why do I even bother trying to look nice? My preferred colour on the bottom is black. The drawback to this fashion staple is that I have a blonde dog and a grey cat, both of whom must have some sort of "Black" radar because they are attracted to my black clothes like freakishly accurate nerf darts. I feel like I am the sole purchaser of 3M's lint roller. The bottom line is that I should have taken off my pants when I got in the door. I suppose that there's a downside to that option as well (isn't there always?). My children have very extensive vocabularies and usually exhibit a single-minded determination to expand their knowledge at every opportunity. I can just imagine the rapid-fire questions if I walked around pant-less...

"Mommy, why do you have lightning bolts on your legs?"
"Mommy, why do your legs jiggly-wiggly?"
"Mommy...What's that???"

Nope, best leave the pants on. Life will be so much simpler for me and my lint roller.

What's lost is found

I am terrible at keeping track of things. I've lost this blog twice and once more am back at it. Is it that I have some sort of attention issue or maybe that I was once again disappointed that I was not yet famous in the mommy blogger world?

Whatever - hello again.

I started a list of mom-isms this week. I actually said to my son (the previously mentioned 4 1/2 yr old is now a quickly growing 9yr old) "Next time, could you eat that please? The floor is not that dirty." How bad-mommy is that? But really, I do tell people that my floor is clean enough to eat off of - there's always a snack under the fridge. The next -ism that I came up with? "Yes, you have to have milk on your cereal. Milk is an important part of breakfast." Seriously? This coming from the woman whose idea of breakfast is 2 huge mugs of strong coffee, diluted with milk and chocolate syrup. I'm lucky if I eat lunch, let alone actually have breakfast.

I am an unwilling disciple of the 'do as I say, not do as I do' parenting model. This will not come in very handy when it comes to the serious side of growing up - mainly drugs (Yes, I did inhale) and drinking (I didn't drink and drive, often). By the way, confession is not good for the soul. I'm about to have my Good Parent Membership card revoked.

Change is good, right?

I've always survived. There have been several near misses, mind you, but I'm still here. I just don't get why things have to be so hard. I grew up thinking that other people always had it better than me. As I've gotten older, even though I have seen for myself that not everyone has it better than me, I still see fit to complain. Why do I have such a difficult husband sometimes? Why are my children so emotionally draining, and they're not even in grade school yet? Am I just ill prepared for life in general? I think that my parents tried (very hard sometimes ) to instill in us the harsh realities of life. We had our share of dogs dying and budgies being poisoned. And certainly there were more than a few goldfish that went belly up - most notably the time my sister boiled my gold fish. She said it was an accident, that she was trying to make sure the water was clean. Our parents also uprooted us and moved about the country until well into my teens. This act, in and of itself is probably what defines me the most. I have always been on the move and have never been very good at sitting still. Even now, I fidget terribly whenever I go somewhere in the company of other adults. I sometimes feel like such a child. I feel like I was never given the chance to grow up because every time I tried, we moved.
I was six weeks old when I first saw my life packed up in boxes and shipped to where my dad was waiting for us. After that, every two to three years we did it all over again. I loved the adventure, but at the same time, I was terrified of what might be waiting for me. I never had the chance to get used to things. Life never became routine. People changed and so did the places, and looking back on it now, faces are jumbled together with street names and I can't really put my finger on why some things seem familiar. I always joke that I would be so much smarter if it weren't for the road maps in my head of the small towns and big cities in which I've lived.

The Great Thinker

I've had a lot of time to think lately. Not because of anything of special, but it just seems like the right thing to do. I feel like I'm at the point in my life when I should start thinking and although most of us cannot go a breath without thinking of something, I feel like I've just begun. You see (or maybe you don't), I've just finished school, I'm out working and yet I still have this sense that my life is on a treadmill. I'm doing lots, but not really doing much at all. Which brings me back to the whole thinking thing - if I stop and think about what I'm doing, then maybe I'll finally get somewhere. But, where do I want to go? I suppose, to answer that, I should look at where I've been.

The more things change...

It's been a little over a year since I first starting sharing. Funny how I haven't even thought about this place and just today, it occurred to me to try and find it.

I haven't been sitting idle for the past 12 months and 17 days, my brain has been busy. I've been trying my hand at writing and one of these days, I'll figure out how to showcase my photography - which I'm hoping will turn out to be for profit, not just for fun.

It all started when...

It's been repeated over and over - write about what you know. Well, what if you don't know anything? Or what you do know is old fashioned and and just plain weird? Where do you start? I guess I could start with thinking about hundreds of pages of blankness. I could start with trying to explain what I'm feeling. Or, I could just start at the beginning.
My mom told me that I have been writing stories since I learned how to write. I started with Bruce the Bear. I have no idea now who Bruce the Bear was and what he used to do, but I imagine that he might have been somewhat like that bear from Paddington Station.

When I was about 5, I was in the hospital and someone ( a well meaning friend of my parents) gave me a colouring book and a bear from Paddington Station and so it seems logical that I might've started to write about bears. Although I could also say that it is just as logical that I should be creating a colouring book. Anway, many years passed between creating Bruce and my next writing venture. I remember writing endless dark lines of poetry. I wrote and wrote, as if trying to wash away my teenage angst with ink. Didn't we all? My poems were of love lost and hearts broken. Cryptic lines that seemed so cool and deep at the time, which now just seems so not who I was trying to be. They even seem funny, looking back, because I never really knew any sort of love in my teenage years and mostly just pined away quietly for a myriad assortment of boys and men.

After that, I went through a diary phase. I have about 4 diaries in a box in the basement. None of them have been finished and most have only a few pages on which I swore I would keep writing so that one day, someone would know who I was. Everyone always wants to be a somebody, don't they? Just recently, I started a blog. I laughed at 'bloggers' for a long time, but then something inside me thought that it would be interesting if strangers thought that my life was interesting. But then I got busy and I've lost my blog, somewhere. And that pretty much brings me to where I am today - sitting here, trying to tell you about me, or the person that I want to be - I'm not really sure which.

Gack!

Remember the Cathy cartoons? Well, gack and argh pretty much sum it up for me today.