Where to Begin

Even just the idea of writing a post makes me feel lost. There are just a lot of things. Too many feelings have come and gone since the last time I wrote, and I just have that feeling that I'm not good enough to find a way to translate them all. Where you could understand. This post is potentially going to be the geekiest, cheesiest corner of the world ever, but you just bear with me, okay?

I guess I can start with this...if you are in the mood to absolutely emotionally brutalize yourself, read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's told from the point of view of a kid named Oskar, who lost his dad on 9/11. It sounds so Oprah Book Club, but there's this quote that explains the brilliance of this book. "Trying to describe music with words is like trying to describe architecture with dancing." Let me explain: that book finds a way to describe emotion that I've never encountered before. Like someone really finding a way to describe architecture with dancing. You feel your way through that book like a blind man. I've never been more effectively transported into someone else's shoes.

Something else weird it did to me, I fell in love with Oskar Schell, the little boy. He seemed so real. I started to understand how parents can love their children as big as the sky. I was so adamant about not wanting kids because I thought that I would be doomed to a life of minivans and white picket fences and gossipy neighbors, and I'll never want that. Not ever. Life is bigger than that, and better too, but I'd never seen the child rearing business done differently, so I assumed that was all there is. Just that. Just the gossip and the soccer practice and the Osh Kosh Bigosh overalls and the McDonalds and all of the possessions and belongings that were always clean and always surrounded you but had no life in them whatsoever. I thought that whole life was empty, and that the people who lived that life were just checked out.


So anyway, I wasn't a fan.


But meeting little fictional Oskar Schell made me realize that parenting could look however I wanted it to look, and that that was okay. I'll still be a great mom. It's just that when I picture parenthood, it looks more like this:

I want to adopt all of my children. Really listen to me here, because right now I'm choosing every world carefully. I want you to hear me. I just know that it's in my ability to pluck some kid out of a life where they don't feel wanted, where everything is two sizes too big and they get shuffled around...I could save a kid from that. I could give him a life that looks so different, where we'd go on adventures and solve mysteries and puzzles and collect rocks and get the carpets dirty and dance all the time. And I want to write a long story about how I've been waiting my whole life, how I've fought through jungles and jumped out of airplanes and searched the entire world just to find them, and then I want to read that story to them all the time, so that they know that there was never a time that they weren't wanted, not even for a single, single second.

The only item on my bucket list right now is to see all seven continents before I die. And I want to take my babies with me, and I want to teach them about the world and show them all the different faces of it, so that they can grow up to be compassionate, understanding human beings who recognize the humanity in those around them. I want them to live their whole lives knowing the goodness of people, knowing that sometimes you just have to poke around a bit until you find it, but that it's always there. I don't want them to have to wait to figure that out until they're older, like I did.

I want to write a letter to my future husband, to tell him about all the ones that didn't work out. To tell him that I'm waiting for him, and that I'll know him right when I see him. Maybe just so he'll know that even though I'm kissing other boys, he was the one for me even before I'd ever met him. I was just waiting.

I'm graduating soon, and it's got me so shook up that I can hardly sleep, or eat, or do anything but stare out ahead of me and give myself ulcers. I've never been so scared. I probably won't get in to nursing school this round, or maybe even the next round, or the next. I'll have to get a real job, a really real job, which I've never done. Not a job that you depended on to pay your rent. It's such a big step out in to such a big space. This is when I really get a chance to mold my life into what I want it to be. It's such a big responsibility that I'm afraid I'll just freeze up and not take the big risks. And I'll just end up a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly until I die of tooth rot (can you die from that?).

I want to be a bartender. Not forever, just for right now. During the day I want to console the old drunk men and try to convince them that life will be good again, if they try hard enough. And then during the night I want to dance around and listen to loud music and pour drinks for the younger ones. I've never gotten the opportunity to make a dream come true before. In college you always talk about your dreams and how it'll all happen once you graduate. You never think you ever really will, though. So here's to hoping I do myself proud.