Living above the goldfish… October 9, 2009

A friend emailed me this today…I can so relate and thought it was a beautiful perspective…Enjoy.

(From a very cool blog)

I hope this doesn’t sound too poetic, but sometimes I feel like I want to transcend.

It seems like so much of life is cleaning out my car and throwing away string cheese wrappers.  Or making sure the ill-designed juice box doesn’t squirt out as soon as my three-year-old holds it in her little hands.  So much my hours are spent looking at myself in the full-length mirror and walking away disappointed, enduring I-don’t-want-to-brush-my-teeth episodes from a second grader and scrubbing clean the crock pot the morning after a tri-tip has cooked all afternoon the day before.

I combat goldfish crackers between sofa cushions, voicemail messages I’ll never retrieve, the never-walked neighbor dog barking, toilet “requests” from a preschooler, and the always-messy downstairs playroom.

My life is normal.

But sometimes I want to clean a room of my house so it’s spotless, lock the door from the inside, light a candle and turn on the music and transcend the baseness of normal life.  I want to live above the grunge and the dusty corners of my world.  I don’t want to think about my crumpled-up to-do list on a wide-ruled piece of notebook paper that makes a circuit between my jeans pocket, my purse and the console in my car. I want to just forget.

But that isn’t realistic.  Or right, even.

Because I have responsibilities.  And promises I’ve made.  And things I’ve chosen.  Blessings I’ve been given.

And they require me to live at the base level of life where I’m putting three-year-olds in time out and sitting with seven-year-olds during homework time.  In order to have the privilege of climbing into the same bed as my husband each night, I pick up dirty socks and iron crisp cotton shirts.

I’ve chosen to live as a wife.

I’ve chosen to give birth to two daughters.

I’ve chosen to love the art of writing and I’ve chosen to spend my spare time doing it.

I can also choose to focus on the good and the sweet in it all.  On the blessing.  On the beauty, even in the dusty, grimy corners.  I can try to hear the pain through my daughter’s angry words and see her blue eyes wide with fear instead of defiance. I notice them.  I try not to notice the un-vacuumed carpet.

And then I fall in love.  With my girls and my husband all over again. With the whole chaotic mess of it all.

This is where I can transcend.  This is where I can live above the goldfish.  The music and the candles, those are just extra.

How do you “live above the goldfish”?