Tonight I am bored. Tad went out with some friends and I put the children to bed. I cleaned the house. Walking around, mopping and dusting with my iphone in my back pocket, playing a Mason Jennings station on Pandora... I felt a little melancholy. I am bored. It is February. I just finished a week with a lack of usual daycare coverage and a snowstorm. This means that I have been in my house and entertaining my children non-stop since Tuesday at noon. (Aside from a brief foray to the office today, accompanied by my daughter). Tad had plans tonight. So yes. I'm bored. I live in Wisconsin and its February, of COURSE I'm bored.
So anyway, as I listened to music, and moved around my house... cleaning it, the music got me thinking, as music does. So my thinking path started out with me feeling a bit resentful. Yes, resentful, I'll admit it. I went over how hard I have been working at work and how much work it is to be a mother and remembered when I was single and childless and I did whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I wallowed in that for a while.
But then, my mind and perhaps a song, took me back to the age of 23. It was a night much like this one, winter in Wisconsin, probably even February. I was home with my sister, Beth in our lower duplex on Frederick Avenue, students at UWM. We were bored. We were single and young and interested in going out and looking for some action. Some music, some bars, someone to flirt with. I remember being so frustrated and just so BORED and thinking that someday I would fall in love and have a house and a family of my own and then I would never feel like that. Funny. I guess we always have something to wish we had, no matter what we do have (and don't realize). But here's the thing. That night, as Beth and I walked through the dark snowy night to the bar down the street, I remember looking in windows of houses and seeing people moving around and thinking...'I wish I were in that house.... I wish I were in that one...'
And now, here I am, 12 years later. And I can say this with absolute honesty. The house I'm in, the one with the lights on and a warm glow coming out...the one with the kids sleeping upstairs and the husband who will be home in a few hours and put his arms around me until I fall asleep... The one where a woman sits in side typing on her laptop, listening to Iron and Wine, a little bit bored... THAT is the house I want to be in. I began to want to be in my own window, and stop looking into others probably when I was about 27. Just before I came home from the Peace Corps. And once I was happy with my own window, I found Tad. And as soon as I met him, I remembered that night when the 23 year old girl was looking in windows. And the moment I knew my life was going to be lived with him as my partner...I knew that there would be no more windows I longed to be inside of...
I guess it may sound a little overly romantic.. but its the truth. And I will get bored no matter where I am and what I do. So tonight I am done cleaning my house. And I am going to keep on listening to music, and try to dust off the boredom and appreciate the quiet of the snow outside and the songs that I am hearing.
Good night.
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