all these buckets of rain

Pull up a chair. Drink a london fog. Outside is permanently damp and the mold from the fallen leaves makes you tired and melancholy. Sitting in your chair looking out the window for hours on end. Contemplating how strange life is.

I ran a half marathon last weekend. Four in 365 days. Running continues to be the best thing i’ve ever done. The thing that changed my life, filled me with passion and pride. Gives me the strength to wake up every morning, especially the shitty ones. I’m running another one in two weeks. I need the races right now. The feeling that i am doing something just for me. That for a few hours my world is all about me.

I sit and wonder where the years have gone and why it bothers me so much that every other commercial is an anti-aging/age-defying/erase me  product. Why do my kids think it’s funny to call me old. Surely they are picking up on my own insecurities. I hate having other people take pictures of me now. I do reflect an insecurity, a disappointment in what i see.

Needs. We talk about needs all the time. I can’t seem to be the good wife. I try my hardest, i do all the things my upbringing taught me. I take care of all the household stuff, manage all the millions of kids needs. (There it is again) I put a warm dinner on the table every night, make sure homework and dishes are done and clean clothes set out for the morning. I am a perfect housewife who also happens to put a decent amount of money into the family budget.

Yet i am consistently not good enough. It weighs heavy on me this language we use to assess our lives. My kids use words like magic. They can cut each other down with a single stinging comeback. Hurt each other the way siblings do. And sometimes they say exactly the most beautiful thing you have ever heard without even knowing it. Rushing through the door after school – tired, hungry and happy – “Wow! Mom, i missed you today.”

The murmuring around the water cooler is that it’s going to be a very cold winter. “The coldest in recorded history” they say. They say some variation on this every winter and every summer, yet the years keep going by. Nothing really changes except the number of years we write down on passport applications.