The Life You Want

 

Late afternoon at Las Catalinas on Playa Danta last month.

Life since we're returned has been the utterly mundane, just like I like it. Even the back and forth with ICE over the problems with our internet. It looks likely I cannot get decent upload speeds that seriously limits making YouTube videos. Today was hit Mega Super for the 4 for 3 specials and go talk to ICE about the upload speed being almost zero. Chase around the dentist because Jim is infected after having two teeth removed.

I've been reading CNN anchor Don Lemon's new book released yesterday. I entirely read it yesterday as Jim is sick with an infection from having those teeth pulled, and I'm fighting another stupid sinus infections. Lots of laying around happened. The book is called "This is the Fire" and it's about racism in the United States.

Interesting book, at least to me. I'm six years older than Don Lemon and grew up near where he did. Except I lived in Buffwood. I'm not sure where in the town of  Baker he grew up, or in Baton Rouge. We moved to south Baton Rouge when I was in my teens. In my early years we'd lived all over south Louisiana before settling in Baker when I was five.

I was disappointed in the book for a handful of reasons having to do with unrecognized privilege, and a lack of real solutions for the problems of systemic racism. I realized that Don and I had been students at LSU at the same time.  But the book made me think, remember back to that young girl living in Baker, her dreams and ambitions. It struck me today I've actually fulfilled what it was I wanted to do with my life.

This sounds so silly, but as a girl, from about the time I was twelve, what I wanted to do with my life was to get married to someone I loved, and spend my life as a wife and mother. Yes, as unfashionable and gauche as it sounds I wanted to be a stay at home mother. Part of that I think was in reaction to my own mother going to work when I was five years old, but part of it was me wanting family, a big family.

Three kids isn't a big family like I was planning, but it's enough. I had my happy marriage of 35 years now, my family, working or not working as we needed or I wanted. I've lived long enough to watch all three be successful in their chosen fields. Gotten everyone through college. 

My other ambition then was to sing. I achieved that dream as well, first in bands in the 70s, and later on different worship teams. I've sung on Easter morn at the Lincoln Memorial. 

I've been fortunate enough to live overseas twice now, climbed a mountain, climbed a volcano, seen sunsets and sunrises over the various oceans. Traveled more than I dreamed I ever would. Done some crazy things that seemed impossible when I first thought of them, like write for No Longer Quivering all those years.

What my senior citizen years hold for me I do not know. I just know I'm still never going to fit in the small little boxes that other folks want to cram me into.

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