Confessions of a Young Soul

I was watching "The Real Housewives of Orange County" today. Why? I don't know. They completely piss me off with their crazy-ass attitudes and their fake bodies and their sheer abundance of everything materialistic. Nonetheless, I sat there, soaking them in, wasting an hour of my day. Thoroughly wasting it. I had laundry to do, a house to clean, bills to pay, dinner to think about. Yet, there I sat, daydreaming about their problems. ("We should really sell one of our homes or our yacht... we don't really need to be spending so much money every month on places we don't even sleep in and toys we don't play with...") Boo-hoo. I feel so bad for you!

It got me thinking, though, about the whole "Keeping up with the Joneses" thing. It bugs me to no end that so many people feel the need to keep up with their neighbors. If anything, I feel the desire to be the opposite of mine; the freaks of the neighborhood, the family that the neighbors shake their heads at as we drive away each weekend while they mull endlessly in their yards. I want to live. To hell with a manicured yard. The image of perfect surburbia be damned.

My kids came early in my life. Married at 23, right out of college, all three of them were born by the time I turned 29. I gave up my twenties and the first half of my thirties entirely. At 37, I want to rejoin the living world. I want a life outside of dirty diapers and endless homework and chauferring kids to way-too-expensive club sports. I want to explore the world; breathe in fresh air, see the beauty that lies beyond the cookie-cutter homes with their pristine facades and blooming landscape. I want my kids to see it, too. I want them to love the wild, erractic ways that the forests grow, the majestic peaks that jut skyward from the Earth. I want them to be lulled to sleep by roaring waters from their cozy mummy bags in our cramped tent. I want to smell the heavy mix of firewood and pine that permeates our clothes and get annoyed by the sand that sneaks its way into everything we own. I want to live off the grid... yet what am I doing? Diving deeper into technology - the antichrist of nature! I'm blogging!

In all fairness, there is a happy medium. And I find that I'm always in search of it; teetering back and forth between what I want to do and what I should do. Can you have both? I sure as hell hope so! Otherwise my hubby and I are barking up the wrong tree. That would suck. And as much as I want to expand our horizons as a family, what I really feel I'm in need of is an expansion of myself.

I feel myself regressing - reverting back into the life I would have had in my twenties had I not been elbow deep in motherhood. I'm rediscovering some of my old passions and finding many new ones to dive into. I've been to more concerts in this last year than all my previous years combined. My daughter, thirteen and a bit of an old soul, accompanies me to most of them. I drag a few of my friends along, too, kicking and screaming (yeah - right!). Having their young souls in my life makes me feel vindicated - less of a freak for wanting to be who I am and live the life I want to live. God bless them!

So why am I sharing all of this? Why have I decided to blog about it? Hell if I know! Guess it's just another whimsy, one more thing to keep me from falling back into the trap of being everybody's everything and more of the individual that I am. The girl my hubby fell in love with. The woman my kids can admire for being true to herself. If I'm fortunate enough to live a very long life, I want my grown children and grandchildren to say, "She was the best - such a young soul!"