Happy Monday morning all! I hope you are all waking refreshed and your spirit nourished by the relaxation or the adventure of the weekend. I am starting my week with a little existential angst. I woke this morning in a fearful sweat, having just wrenched myself from the worst dream. I dreamed my 17 year old daughter had a baby she was concealing in her her room. It was about 3 weeks old and somehow my child had hidden her pregnancy, the birth and the baby in her tiny room until I happened to hear what I thought was a male voice, and investigated. Yes, there was the father, also hidden away in her room. What a freaking nightmare!!!!! I remember being so shocked, horrified, sad, and then in my dream I intoned to her in some Jacob Marley-type voice that she "would be living in low-rent housing, working a low-wage job, and would have to drop out of high school." Then I woke, shaking, sweaty, with my nightgown cutting off the circulation of my arm. Maybe that's what the dream was about - lack of blood flow to my brain?! I can only hope. Please don't let me psychic.
This year is a big one. My daughter is turning 18, graduating from high school (barring a pregnancy god forbid!), I am turning 50, and my 20 year wedding anniversary is in June. Wow! Big chapters of my life, key decades, are reaching ends, and beginnings. Milestones are being passed, and new ones are appearing on the horizon. My husband and I have been parenting his son and our daughter now for 27 years total. We started in our 20's, and here we are, on the cusp of 50. I'm just glad we didn't wait any longer to have kids and we are hopefully looking at a couple of decades of freedom. Freedom combined with the wisdom one inevitably aquires having lived that long and parented that long could mean: A GREAT NEW LIFE!
I would like to celebrate this summer's momentous turning points, not with a party, but with a vision. 50 years on the planet, two children raised, 20 years of a loving marriage still intact: it's time to rock the world. I'm ready for a new chapter, one where the hubby and I live alone, in a cute little apartment somewhere fabulous. We have dinner dates every other night, weekend trips every other weekend, and we subscribe to the New York Times. My favorite past time these days is scoping real estate websites. Exploring apartment after apartment in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Seattle, even NYC. I love to hit the "street view" tab and take a walk through the neighborhoods, imagining myself strolling along, Faye on the leash, stopping for coffee, picking up a few groceries for our little dinner in our fabulous little apartment. No more worrying what the teen will eat, will waste, will throw a hormonal tantrum over, it's just he and me, easy-peasy, with calm, intelligent conversation, peppered with hilarious banter. Ah, yes. La vie en Rose. Ah ha! That's it! We'll live in Paris. Un petit apartement sur le boulevard, non?
Stay tuned, summer's not far off, and the Future is nigh.
xoxoxoxo DR
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