So often it feels like the same old thing:
Wake up, do the chores, drive the places, cook a thing.
Over and over – Lather, rinse, repeat.
Maybe it’s these middle years;
Now past the ones filled with changing diapers and cleaning off finger-paint.
Sometimes this time feels like not much of anything, really,
except time spent evaluating, and remembering what used to be.
I used to hear their shrieks and giggles ring gleefully down the halls.
They used to smile sweetly as I kissed their cheeks.
Those days when I hung the moon….I miss those.
Now I just wash the same dishes and fold the same clothes, weary of being the keeper of everyone else, while also being a me I feel no one truly even knows.
Sometimes I like the quiet of the middle years,
but sometimes it also feels lonely to me.
I find myself missing even the times during quarantine when the girls were around more, and when these walls were also their everything.
But now I sweep these same floors again,
wipe down the mirrors,
pray they one day see the love in the small, often invisible things that I did for them.
The other day I asked them if they wanted to join me on a walk.
Their staring and silence after I asked was answer enough, but I needed a change of scenery after being home all day, so I decided to go alone.
What was one more hour of feeling that way?…
I slipped on my shoes, and told them I’d be back shortly, lingering by the door hoping maybe someone’s mind would change, and they’d call that they wanted to come with me.
When they stayed put, I set out on my usual route:
Up the side street and back, to the top of the hill, then up to the gravel end of the street where the blackberries grow, and sometimes you can see the foxes come out.
I kind of laughed at myself.
I even walk the same loop.
I neared the orchard and noticed several birds on the fence-line, taking turns darting off for bites of fallen fruit. Their carefree song stopped me in my tracks, and I stood and watched them for a bit, until I felt awkward about if the neighbors who owned the orchard were perhaps watching, and wondering what I was doing standing and staring at their Eden again the way that I sometimes do.
A chit-chit-chit above, then a crack had me craning my neck to look way up above me in an old pine tree to see a happy little squirrel enjoying his daily provisions.
He almost smiled as he chewed;
Happy even though he was dining alone.
On I walked.
Same houses. Same curve. Same row of mailboxes.
Up ahead the same neighbor that’s always out in his yard stood on a ladder with the upper half of his body hidden inside his persimmon tree, preparing it for its winter bounty.
I thought about how long I’ve been looking at this view.
We moved to this neighborhood when I was eight years old.
My parents, in a quest to save a struggling marriage, decided maybe what would fix it was to change everything, and that meant our coastline, too.
We left everything we had known in Georgia to the soundtrack of my aunt warning me she’d heard that one day California would fall into the sea.
We left a full-of-life family, our church, our school, and our sense of home.
I remember the first time that we pulled down this road after days in a musty smelling camper to see the house my dad had come ahead of us here to rent and prepare for our arrival.
Compared to our big white house with three pillars in Georgia, a bright yellow two bedroom duplex had felt like a painful downgrade.
I remember knowing I should not say so.
One month after our move, and before the boxes were even fully unpacked, there was a massive flood.
We had no power for weeks, and water rushed over the road and down the culverts with a fury I’d never seen. I wondered if it was the beginning.
“Is this what Aunt Toni means?”
As my mother worried over whether the water would make it up the driveway and into the garage, where our entire life still sat in boxes,
I remember walking down to the creek around the corner, rain soaking through my clothes as the sky turned black and the water flowed,
and, ironically then, for the first time since coming to this place it didn’t look like disaster that I saw around me.
What my eight year old eyes saw was adventure because of that storm-churned creek.
I smiled a little bit, then, and tossed in a pine cone.
I watched as it sailed swiftly through the drainage canal, and in that one moment,
instead of seeing my surroundings as my own destruction,
for the first time in California, I remember my 8 year old self saw what was around me as an exciting new land, full of mystery and adventure.
Full of “Who even knows?”
The years that would come to be spent here would come to nestle into my memory as my very best ones.
The street where I would ride my bike with baseball cards making motor sounds in the spokes, and I could throw balls, and walk right in the road;
Let my pets run free.
A safe space tucked back in these very trees.
It became an oasis where a dumb old yellow duplex used to be.
I think my memories were so fond because of what this place let me be,
which is why, when over 20 years after moving away from it,
the moment I saw a listing for a house available right next door to where I grew up,
I knew this exact spot I am in is where I absolutely wanted to be.
I drove my family out to look at the property hoping they, too, would be able to one day look past its smallness, and see in it what I see.
As I walked alone that day I heard a voice asking me,
“Isn’t the sameness what you wanted? Isn’t the way this life feels like what you’ve always known, what you can predict, what you came back here for, anyway?”
The birds cheerfully gather their provisions.
The squirrel happily munches away.
I rounded the corner onto the lane.
I was at my childhood home, now, and I noticed something:
The old tree my dad had planted had been split in half.
One side of its wishbone still green, and flourishing, but the other half had been cut back all the way to the stump.
There was nothing left of that branch.
I had never much thought of that tree until that moment at the edge of the lawn.
I had taken for granted the way it had looked, lush and full, casting its shade, until it was half gone.
Often, in life, it is that way.
We don’t appreciate what we have, fully, until one day it is gone;
Until everything has changed, and then, when it’s too late, we’re back to yearning for things as they once were.
All at once that sameness is what feels most like home.
As I stood, sad, about the tree looking that way,
I felt like it spoke to me.
There is a season for everything;
For the laughter in the hall, for the fingerpaints, for the repetitive chores, and also for the grieving.
The truth is we’re all grieving something these days.
Whether it’s time lost, a changed view, a time we wish we felt free.
Many of us are grieving something or someone we’ve lost.
Maybe right now you’re the stripped branch grieving being like the other half of the tree.
Maybe you do the same chores, say the same words, walk down the same street.
We are entering a season of both gratefulness, and change.
We face both everything that looks different than we want it to,
and all the beauty around us that remains the same.
The trees around my home on that day stood as examples of provision and safety – Both for the creatures, and for me,
but one tree spoke of how often the life we dreamed of doesn’t look like the life we currently see.
The same chores, the same lists, the same exact street,
but then
I remembered the way I saw my life that day when I was younger down at the creek.
My pine cone did not float away very far.
Here’s where my boats first sailed,
and here they still are.
The sameness.
The sameness.
It could feel boring, or comfortable, and sweet.
Maybe the bare branches are the only ones you can currently see,
But life – when you look back – then you will see.
This life: some bare parts, some full parts,
Is both sides of the tree.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
