This Petty Pace

Today I was reading a blog by a Theatre Professor at UVU, who does a study abroad in England every year, and it hit me, how plebian I feel. How very...low brow. I'm sure everyone feels that way sometimes. Even Avram, who has studied almost ten languagues, and reads The Bible in Hebrew to take a break from studying Arabic, spends most of his free reading time with Role Playing Books. I have an odd obsession with the BYU honor's reading list (Just read The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty - another line has been highlighted!). But...the last movie we watched was Galaxy Quest. And, I spend an awful lot of free time not bettering myself (thanks Internet!). And my children make me feel claustrophobic sometimes. As in, sometimes, I get cabin fever from my home, and my job description. Like this week.

I'd like to believe it's because I'm basically unsettled from not knowing about buying a house or not. We have a meeting with a loan officer this coming Monday, and from that we should know whether we'll be able to buy one or not. But it saddens me that this is the greatest desire in my heart right now. When I was still single and at BYU I worked for a short while as a custodian at Wymount. Mostly we did deep cleaning for apartments after people moved out, but occasionally we had women call in for a special spot carpet cleaning, usually because their baby had thrown up or peed on it. And even though they had cleaned it up themselves, they needed our chemicals, because they just remembered where it was.

My boss hated this. I must admit, these women usually came across as a little wimpy to me. (Except for the time that someone had us clean pig blood off her carpet, because her sister had stored her belongings at their house in between apartments, and had forgotten that her freezer bag was in the middle of her stuff, and they only noticed when the living room started stinking, and there was a pork roast bleeding all over the floor - that was a very legitimate use of our chemicals and prowess with carpet cleaners. Good times.) Aside from this, every time we visited one of these apartments, it gave me claustraphobia. The cute decorations. The dimness indoors. The small child and mom. Alone. In an apartment. 560 square feet. ALL DAY LONG.

I grew up babysitting. I also grew up in a large family. I knew I wanted to be a homemaker. But visiting the reality of it....I couldn't handle it.

Then I got married. And had Lydia. And Loved my job as homemaker. It was a very natural transition. I loved the quiet and calm of the apartment, all day long. At this point in my life, I would sometimes visit my sister who owned a house, and whose husband had an "adult" job, with adult income. She was a year younger than me, and very settled in life. And although I loved visiting her, the idea of me being that settled really did not sit well with me. I couldn't imagine being that tied down. Of being where you'll be until your kids leave home. Yikes.

And now I want that. I want to own a house. It no longer scares me - I see it as very attractive - more housework and all. Even if we don't buy a house now, I'm fully in that stage of life. Multiple children. The Mommy stage - the mommy brain. It's a good stage. But....sometimes, I want to feel on the edge of things.

Avram and I decided recently that we may have him go alone to Israel to study for a summer, but we would not be planning to have the family go for a school year, like we had previously talked about. The idea of finding an apartment, paying for air fair and visas and passports (Avram's expires after the turn of the year), and working out funding, and trying to sight-see, and doing all of this on a student budget, with small children who need naps and routine....It's just too much for us. For me. The stress of it all - I just want to not go.

Of course, if we found out he randomly got funding that could cover us coming as well, I reserve right to immediately negate the previous paragraph. But looking at it right now, it just seems preferable to stay settled in America. It saddens me I feel this way -that I would rather have stability and ease than life-changing experiences. Maybe it was being in England, where I wanted to do amazing things, but instead spent most of my time in a small third story flat, pregnant and anemic, with no energy and no money, living off of student loans. I feel like I never really got to see England. That I had all this...potential experience at my fingertips, and most of it slipped through them, without me seeing it. Being in England, but never Seeing England. I think under the circumstances we did alright. But....I don't want another foreign experience like the last one. I'd rather wait until Avram was a professor, and we could actually sight see, and our kids weren't so young. Even thinking about it right now...I don't want to go.

I'm not really complaining, in the sense that I wish I could/would change. I recognize that there are times and seasons to life, and right now is the time and season for being a mother of young children, of settling down, of security. And that even through this I can, and am, keeping up my other interests. Reading literature. Having nonsensical conversations in Arabic (That's about it for my intellectual activities.) I know that later there will be plenty of time to travel, to see plays, to mingle with others and have scintillating conversations that do not include phrases like, "Are you sitting on the potty? Good girl!" or "Can we hit our sister? [No.] What can we hit? [Drums]"

Sometimes, I dream, though....