GBE Challenge: Longing

Not to toot my own horn...well, okay I will. I saw this week's challenge and KNEW that I had it finished, polished and wrapped up in a pretty little box with a great big bow on top. I'm all over the topic of longing.

I can write about longing, I thought, simply because my husband and I talk about it all the time. We say how we won't do it. It gets us nowhere. No way. No how. It's a bad road to take.

So, in I walked to my Mom Cave this morning ready for the challenge. To start off, I decided to look at the definition of longing--just to get me mentally prepared. There were lots of on-line definitions such as:

"A strong, persistent yearning or desire, particularly one that can't be fulfilled."

Well, that definition didn't really suit my needs. Wait a sec....

"persistent craving."

"strong desire."

Well DARN IT ALL! So much for winning over this topic!! I do this stuff all the time! This is why the Mom Cave was invented!

Come on in, my friends! If but for five minutes, sit down! Take a virtual load off and HAVE AT IT!

LONG for your children to stop putting rocks in their pockets because, really, who has time to check them before they go through the wash? While you do that, I'm going to yearn, in turn, that my husband takes his darned glue sticks and red sharpies out of his pockets. You have no idea what that does in the drying cycle...

I have a strong, burning, almost palpitating desire for my children to use the toilet and actually HIT THE TARGET! I long for the days when I don't have to bow down on bended knee, the Goddess of Clorox that I am, and bury my hands in the never ending filth.

Right now, as I type, you'd never guess it, but I'm longing almost without trying. I'm longing for it to be bedtime, and I'm longing for my kids to just fall asleep hard and fast ALL BY THEMSELVES!

It is my greatest desire for my younger son to learn to shut his mouth on a more regular basis. And, well, if that sounds a bit harsh...okay, how about I long for the day when he can find that vein on my forehead and connect the fact that it only pops out and throbs when he is talking at me about something ad nausuem.

On a more serious note, sure, I have other strong desires, strong desires that I think about daily. I just didn't think that they constituted "longings", but, perhaps? Every day, I push for a better education for my kids. Every day, I police their days: their buses, the aides on the buses, how they are treated on the buses, their arrival into school, their interaction with the kids, their teachers, their classroom environment, the tools available to them throughout the school day, the timing of their day, the timing of their day in relation to their needs, how they learn, how can they learn better, where are the gaps and what can I do to fill them in.

Yes, I yearn. I yearn long, hard and unending.

However, there is ONE type of longing that I never, ever do. The one type of longing that my husband and I said from the start of this special life that we will not waste our time with because, quite honestly, it is unhealthy.

I do not sit at any point in my day and long for a regular life. I don't long for typical kids. I don't long to be a soccer mom. I don't long for regular educational classrooms void of therapy sessions, and I don't long for the scads of money that we would undoubtedly have in the bank because there would have been no special needs to spend it on over the past ten years.

I don't do that, because it gets me nowhere. And, yes, I suppose yearning for my chattie son to quiet down is probably a fruitless endeavor as well, I note a distinction between the two.

My husband and I have always felt to go down the bitter road of thinking of what our lives could have been somehow denies what our life is. And, yes, a lot of our life can stink. We know pain and we know work. I also know that, at too young an age, our children know pain and work---at much younger an age than I ever did. So, no, I don't long for the life I thought I would have but which never turned out to be.

If, in the process of living this life, I yearn for a spa boy in my Mom Cave while longing for quiet in a house that is ever-chaotic, well, I'm human. It's my coping mechanism. Besides, a girl's gotta have a little Mom Cave fun or else she'll go nuts!

Pedicure, anyone?

Right now, I am longing for a Mom Cave upgrade. Wouldn't this be nice? :)