What will Alex think??

I often wonder how my life would be different if I were truly creative. …If I had the gift for painting or drawing or writing long novels or short stories or deep complex poems. …If I had an outlet that took no work from me, just helped me to relieve stress. It would be a way to express myself, my innermost thoughts, views, creativity that people would want to see. Not even for the monetary benefit, just for the pure joy of release and the feeling of pride and freedom that I’d get from knowing that something so beautiful could come from my mind and my heart with such ease (although the big bucks that could come from it wouldn’t be all bad). That it could flow from me so easily and others would ponder how I see the world. I want to see beauty in everything. I want to remember to hold onto that beauty that my eyes consume for more than mere seconds.


Too often, I do notice and appreciate the wonders of my world, but I feel like I lack the ability to use it for something. Trees, water, clouds, even grass draws my eye if I take the time to notice. The smell that emulates from the freshly mowed lawns on Saturday mornings in my neighborhood make me feel the earth’s true beauty. Those perfect days of the year when I can step outside and the temperature is just right, the comforting smell of the perfect breeze… those are the things that should stop us in our tracks… we should all smell the roses whenever possible. The lazy days where there isn’t a care in the world except what to see first are the ones I miss. Now that I’m a mom I feel the need to just explore and take the time to see it all and show it all to my son so he can know such beauty and perfection.

Often lately I’ve thought back to my younger days. The days when I didn’t have a worry but was mostly too distracted to allow myself to consume it all. If I could I’d go back for just a day to a time when I could have spent hours on end laying in the warm sun and watching nature, listening, smelling and breathing it all in. it would have beat the moments of endless, draining boredom that we spent all too many of indoors back then. Then again, at the time, that boredom was what made us happy. As children we all loved the tv and whatever mind-numbing sedentary games we could get our hands on. Yet, to this day, my fondest memories of that time are the messy and adventurous ones. …The days when we’d sneak away with our best friends to forbidden parts of the neighborhood to see what we were missing. The most thrilling times were when we hopped on our bikes, actually got some exercise just because it was fun, and went to a hideout full of nature and bugs and dirt, and that was what made us happy! Now I wish I had pictures of all of these fuzzy memories.

They are fading. The friendships are lost in time and space and can never be what they were fifteen or twenty years ago! I never called or wrote. They never called or wrote. We had all moved on to new houses, new friends, new adventures, schools and goals. We didn’t want to spend our time in the house on the phone or hunched over notebooks in our rooms writing letters to our old pals and at the time we couldn’t think of a thing to write about even if we’d tried. I had spent day in and day out with the closest of friends. We’d had innumerable sleepovers, campouts, contests, chats, and laughs. Then one day, because we were military children, one of us would move away and we all took for granted the relationships that had been built. Now I think of my child and the possibility of him going on in life without a constant friend to grow with. We are also a military family, just like I was growing up, and he will likely live exactly the same life that I had. The only difference is that technology might keep him in touch, but not indefinitely, with some of the best lifelong buds he could have.

When it was me, I adored moving! I got so excited about the whole deal! I loved new friends, new schools, new places to see and people to meet. I love fresh starts, and I’ve always loved change. Being an ‘army brat’, as we call it, was the coolest thing ever!! There was so much excitement in all the new schools, new friends, new teachers, new places, new houses, new customs, and my core family always remained constant and strong.

But, there’s always a but, now I think of what I might have missed out on. Do I want my child to experience the sadness with every move? Do I want him to have to leave every friend he’ll ever grow to love? Or do I want him to know what it’s like to have the kind of life where he can know his friends from preschool all the way up to when he leaves for college? He could have lifelong friends!! They could know every secret, every quirk, every fear, every family member, pet, tradition, or pain or joy that would have been shared.

As a mom and a wife I have the heart of my world to share and grow within my new circle. I will have them to love and support for the rest of my life. My son will always have me to believe in him and to love him and teach him and help him no matter where we live. I just wonder if we are meant to follow the same path that I grew up on. Will my child wonder what it would have been like, or regret, or resent the choices that we made for his life? I love what my childhood was for me, but what if he doesn’t want the same? Will his biggest wish in life be to have had friends that knew his every side through all of his life? Will Jason and I, as parents, wish one day that we’d let him experience what we didn’t have, or will he grow to love it as well? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? There isn’t going to be much that we can do to change these things, this is after all the career path that we have chosen for our family, but will he benefit from it?

These thoughts and feelings are what fuel my desire to have a large family. The more children we have, and the closer they are in age, the stronger their bonds will be, and the happier they might be! I think…