Get Me Out Of Here

I am having some kind of stupid birthday crisis. As I was loading the dishwasher this evening I was ruminating on how aggravating it sometimes is to have to share every single little bit of your life with someone else. I had just answered the door to a charming young lady wanting me to sponsor a child, and I said no because I know Blake doesn't want to donate money to charities until we're out of debt. If it was just up to me I would probably give a little bit every month regardless of debt; it's not like malaria is going to take a break while we pay off our reno. After bidding the charity girl good luck I went back to loading the dishwasher, which I have to do Blake's way because Blake unloads. Fair enough, and all this is perfectly reasonable —I am by no means faulting Blake here, I couldn't ask for a better husband. It just gets a little tired constantly having to consider someone else, or in my case three someone-elses.

After I finished the dishwasher I followed a link from my brother's blog to this dude's blog to TV Tropes where I spent an enjoyable hour or more reading about Buffy and Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (though perhaps I should not have read those spoilers), and I really miss good TV. I miss watching thoughtful, well-written shows, and I miss going to work the next day and discussing them with smart people, either live or online (yes, I spent far too much time discussing TV at work, and I guess I will have to remove that admission from this space before I look for another job). I miss having the time and the spare emotional and intellectual resources to dedicate to TV shows.

And somehow (there may be some hormones involved) that particular nostalgia has snowballed irrationally into missing the days when I had lots of time to play on the Internet, when my life was spent in a shiny air-conditioned condo on a busy street and I took a train to work and played on computers all day. Now suddenly my life seems to be spent playing in the dirt with two messy, demanding, noisy, emotional (why, oh why must they be two and four at the same time!) little people who seem to have no interest in discussing Marti Noxon's Season Six intellectual breakdown, or whether there is any point in improving Internet security technology as long as it is still possible to adhere a Post-It note with your password written on it to the side of your monitor.

Oh, I miss grown-ups. I miss them so much. I miss air conditioning. I miss meetings. I miss lists of things to do that don't involve zucchini. I miss computers and filesystems and data and logical problems and whiteboards and deadlines and lunch rooms and that idiotic conversation about where we should go for lunch this week. I miss being something other than Mom ("mudder", she calls me) and homemaker.

Being Mom is something that will never change, but one day it will involve less dirt and hopefully more conversations about Marti Noxon. (Or actually hopefully not, now that I think about it.) And one day I will go back to work and they will probably have outlawed air conditioning by then, but there will be computers and meetings and deadlines and I will soon refresh my hatred for all three things. Life is all about balance — you have to hate lots of different things to be truly happy.