Monday, September 12, 2011

Everything old...

...is new again. How trite and true.

It was with a little tear in my eye that I walked my sons to my very own elementary school where my oldest is starting kindergarten. The very same crossing guard still works there, and she crossed us over with the same sunny disposition and bright smile she had 30+ years ago.

The school looks the same. It smells the same. It sounds the same. (I'll bet it tastes the same too, for the wall-lickers...)

It's kind of funny to think that I've left and come back half-a-dozen times trying to make a "new" life for myself, yet I may just as well have never left, for the way it turned out. I live in the same house - with my mother, for God's sake; taking my kids to the same school; driving to the same stores, etc., etc. Was it all for naught?

Well, I have my kids, for one thing. And I suppose I've grown in ways that I couldn't have, had I stayed in one place. It's a nice life here, in the upper-middle-class suburban bubble. Maybe I couldn't have appreciated it this much without all those laboriously-learned "life lessons" that everyone so stereotypically talks about.

I can't be "one of them," though. That can't happen, ok guys? I mean, I think to do this, to live this life, to take my kids to soccer practice and bake pies - I am going to need to make up a fantasy in my head that I am a pod, sent here to observe the suburban mother in her natural habitat - among hydrangea, speed-walkers and toy-breed dogs; having deep-conditioning treatments, taking yoga and whining to therapists about how stressful life is. That's it. From now on, I am a pod-observer.

Of course, I'll have to infiltrate their society and act like one of them. I'm going to start right now - right this second - by jumping into the SUV to get a tall, skinny, non-fat, half-caf latte on the way to my bikini wax. Waxing hurts so much, though. Don't you feel sorry for me? I mean, isn't life HARD??