Tag Archives: husband

Is the Beginning of the End Too Late?

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Is the beginning of the end too late?  I know I have already asked this question, at least once this year, but it is rearing its enormous head, yet again, begging my attention.  I feel that everything that is happening, with my job, with my family, and with my interests and pastimes, are all coming to some sort of end.  The thing?  Well, a simple, “What is going to happen next week?”

It is easy for me to be a coward, until, that is, I realize that if I choose to not do something, that I will literally end up with nothing.

The next step?  I need to be clear that I want my job, that I want to be with my family, and that I value my lesser talents in my hobbies.  Yes, an enormous and ugly head is rearing itself up, right now.

So, in this end, I ask, “Let’s do something!”

With some disposable money, a short trip outside of this one horse town is possible.  Then again, visiting friends or throwing a big party and inviting some out of town guests is always fun too… and probably something worthwhile if I can promise some fun and a magical tour of the city’s bars in the trendy and bar part of town.

About time….  My children are going to be hanging around the house for the whole summer!  Should I promise them another Camp  Summer?  Or, should I home school for two months and have themselves teach themselves a new skill?  And to practice on it?  I had perspicacious parents who did this to me every summer.  I would get home from summer school, which was filling half the day, and i would have to read books, practice piano, or do a chore like bake muffins or cookies.  Having responsibilities like these made me aware that I was more privileged than other children.  It made me aware that I had a lot more to do, than just come home and watch television.  I actually loved a lot of the things that happened to me in childhood, and I valued the things I could do, and having control over these talents, tasks, and knowing things when I heard other people talk, helped to keep me interested in school, life, and other people.  I accredit my parents for being the smart and cool parents for doing so.

So, this end that I see approaching, very quickly, is it for real?  Is it too early for everything to end?  or is it in fact too late?  Am I now too old to start a second career?  Am I too bored with my job to be able to do another similar job?  Do I have time to go back to school and find that magical, hoped for, favorite second job?  all these things are true, which makes me ask myself, “Am I filled with enough energy to handle two lives happening to just one person?”  Can I be a student and still be a parent to a family and a wife to a husband?  While I go to school, will I have time and money to cope with all of it?  I really cannot take out a second mortgage for myself, while I also envision taking out a mortgage for my children’s education.

With responsibilities pressuring me in a way that I could’ve never understood before, I feel as if I am giving up on myself in order that I am responsible for my children.  As well as for my husband.  Being a wife and mother changes priorities.  Men will always win, as men are.  And I am willing to put my education somewhere at the back, where perhaps, when all monetary responsibility for my children and also my physical responsibility for providing a home to them, is past.  It is not as if I have lost hope in myself.  It is at this fork in the road that I yet again, take the right hand fork.  I can’t see how far it leads, or, where it will begin again, but I am confident in being here.

If I can convince my children to fend for themselves a few days in the week, with promises to pay for visits to the theme park or the water park, and maybe a ten day trip family camping or going to rented cottage, this summer, I think I can still live with myself.  I will have the time to indulge, in secret, my interest in art.  As I fumble with the pencil in my hand, and play with the color of paint.  This looks as if it will become a satisfying two months, before the next time  I will have to yet, again, make the THE decision.  I will have to decide whether to be more of a mom, more of a wife, or more of me.  So, for now, it is done.

The World of Paul Frank and Hamsters

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My mom likes my Paul Frank PJ’s.

My hamster is awake all night.  It bit me at the pet store before I decided to buy it–then I bought it.  Even though the teeth are sharp, the size of the tooth cause more pain than a needle at the doctor’s office.  The blood quickly beaded and I had to hold the bit incision, covering myself in blood.

My mom claims there were no cute things when she was a child, and she always say how lucky we are that there is so much softness and fun, as if childhood never ends.

Paul Frank is a monkey–mostly he is all head and mouth.  He is always laughing, sometimes eyes closed, sometimes eyes open.  His image is printed always or embroidered on something soft–Pajamas, backpacks, sweatshirts.  I always see Paul Frank on the adults who never grow up.

I am fully, tragically, in love with Paul Frank–I have no picture for you, but if you see him, by yourself–you’ll know it is him.  Mostly, I think  I laugh at the people who wear Paul Frank.  It is daring–and if you are a grandmother, then I think only your grandkids take you seriously.

Now, in our house, I am surrounded by monkeys and hamsters.  Even if I didn’t want Nibbles and Paul Frank here, my kids would’ve found some way to bring it all into the house.  I sometimes think my kids and their friends hanging out at our house, love the things they trade and share more than their parents.  They clean up after themselves very well when it is they are having a good day trading secrets and just looking cool in each other’s eyes.

I worry about situations like these.  I lose track what it is they are doing, and what it is that they own.  They have some money to spend now, and if my son doesn’t come and show me his convenience store purchases, I worry.  I still dress him….  He will be in the “perfect” store, and we will try on sizes until we get it right.

Surprisingly, I overheard my daughter talking with her friends in the backyard.  I just happened to walk by the open back door and heard her say that she thought I was cool.  It was one of the most gratifying days of my life.  She is still young, but she is very well-versed in things cool.  I will always think that she is cool.

Even when I begin to imagine all the things that could be made in my children’s lives, filling it all with fun, learning, and life, I sometimes scare myself.  What if they contract an incurable disease?  What if an accident were to happen, and they end up paralyzed for life?  They look so perfect now…  the things that they grow through are nothing like the disasters I have foreseen in others….  I’d be overjoyed if they could make it to adulthood without the most frightening failures of life happening to them.

So, now, back to the issues of monkeys and hamsters.  We share everything.  Everything in the house belongs to “our family.”  We try not to be strict and draconian.  They will grow into the stage where they will try to hide things….  and I do not encourage that age.  I want them to feel free enough to bring up those things that kids will sometimes hide.  So, yes, “our pet hamster,” named “Nibbles” in a communal naming spree, is shared.  We all take care of Nibbles, which allows me, my daughter, and their father into my son’s room to take care of Nibbles.  We ask permission, to “take Nibbles for a walk” and we will take turns cleaning the cage and refilling the food.

I get to look cool on my weekends with the kids.  My t-shirt with Paul Frank’s happy face recognizable instantly by my children, my mother, and, of course, my husband, who thinks it is just juvenile of me to keep Paul Frank around the house.

Right now, my daughter just finished planning a birthday party for Nibbles.  She drew a picture of it and showed it to me. It immediately went up on the fridge.  She has asked me, since then, when a good day is to have the party?  I don’t really know, but I do keep telling her, tomorrow.  She thinks I delay too long, and I think that the days pass by so quickly, that I’m afraid that I will forget them.

I don’t think there will ever be a day when we will take Paul Frank, or, hamsters, out of the house.  They have come in, and I think that they are staying for life.  For now, if the Dollar Store is not selling hamster-sized tea cups and balloons, we will have to keep delaying the birthday party.

The Pursuit of Happiness

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Aged cheese and aged wine.  Grapes and cake.  Sometimes people just need some time and a good way to forget.  There is so much in life, and to think that the majority of the good things are bad is depressing in itself, without some devastation to make it all the blackest of sin to be living.  The question I am thinking of, because I was just thinking about my life in terms of life-changing events, is:  “Is the beginning of the end already too late….  Or is there just more to work with?”  Immediately, I started having berating thoughts:  “What if I was just plain lazy?  What if I always did the easy thing, chose the easy way, and made anything difficult to do something I couldn’t have in my life, even in the sense of the difficult as something to contemplate?”  What if I don’t know how to do anything worth while?  Will I die a horrible death?  Will I suffer until I die the horrible death?  I started on this road of thought because I started comparing my life with, obviously enough, my sister’s life.

She started fast out of the gate….  Always the straight A child, the one who won more than the “Participant” award.  She would win first place, she wuld win the cool prizes with $100 or a new wardrobe, and she had the cool friends, who, for some reason were in Indie bands who played in the bard around town.  She got into the best schools, and had the vest and coolest hobbies.  She could talk on the phone half a school night and still get the straight A’s again.  She could always choose the winners of the year before they were announced on Oscar night.  She used cool words, even the Professors thought were cool.  And, to end off the comparison with her graduation from a Masters Program, she took a two month trip through Europe.

In comparison, I did the things that were less.  How do I come to this conclusion?  Easy….  I do the easy jobs that pay less.  I married a man that drives a Honda instead of an Audi with leather seats that even looks sleek and sporty in grey metallic and four doors.  I have thought about having a big family, with three children and an option to have four or even five…  but I just can’t afford it.  Children require a two-income family.  And on two incomes, if I consider the need of a private school education, my husband and I can only afford to have one of each… a boy and a girl.  And lucky us, it just did happen in this million dollar way….  One for me and one for who I married.

In a sense, when the first child was born, it definitely marked the end of my life in some sort of big way.  Everything I started doing, and that I keep doing, now, is look after the life of my children.  Their schedule comes first, and lucky me, I have a job that is flexible with me to run to the aid of my children when it is necessary.  I was of the generation of feminists who demanded equality with men in every way, but, surprise, when a woman falls in love with a man… the man always comes first.  They are chivalrous because we love them that way, and we let them come first, because they like us this way.

So, I ask again, is the beginning of the end too late….  to have the things that you always wanted?  Or is the compromise…., always necessary?  Will I never have the chance, ever again, to experience the things that I thought I would have the chance to experience…  Sometime?  I don’t have to think about now…  Now, my children know what it is that takes to raise them, already, and I will not disappoint them.  In some way, it is an investment, after 65 I will not work any more, and somehow, I would like a home to live in for as long as possible….  And in this way, I invest in my children.  I am looking at least thirty years into the future.  So, with this mark as the beginning of the end, have I missed out on a life of glamour, the one I envision where I get to fly the world, taking photographs of famous people, famous models, and creating great artistic works that people will hunt for?

All of a sudden my teenaged dream of this life of glamour was replaced, even before I knew it.  I did marry an artist, and in some ways, I live vicariously through him, often, but, even he, doesn’t have the glamorous life I dream about.  It’s a lot of nine to five work.  We are mutually looking at our lives, feeling that it has been replaced with domesticity.  Our children now walk us.  We daily rate what is most important, and yes, our children take top place.  I revel in their victories and cry with them in their sorrows and failures, as does my husband.  We laugh, now in a way we never thought we would laugh.  Laughter used to mean something coll and funny, now, it’s love that comes tumbling out of our mouths. We cherish those moments.

Until we are able to have more time for ourselves, we will continue to sell our souls for the money that keeps our family together, in our home.  So, is it beyond possible to change our lives and have those things we have dreamt of?  Is it too late?  I hope that it isn’t true.  I watch as younger artists gain so much more with half the time that I have.  I watch as young graduates take those enviable jobs that I have secretly wanted, with half the experience I have.  As these opportunities are “taken away” from me, I ask again….  Have I been too lazy and only settled on the easy things?

Let us hope, then, that this is not the truth.  I hate the idea of compromise, but I am not completely sure that I understand the concept of compromise.  I look at the time ahead of me, and I am now beginning to think, “things never really change.”  I consider myself as someone who is born to be an artist.  It matters that I hold onto this part.  It keeps me occupied, and I know that I will be occupied, and I know I will be occupied beyond the years that my children need me.  I would be pleased to be an older artist…  So, is the beginning of the end too late?  I don’t think so.