middle age | Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

My husband and I are at a weird stage in our lives. I think most refer to it as “middle age,” but, as most stages go, you don’t fully understand it until you reach it yourself.

I was talking to one of my friends recently who was lamenting this phase as well: “I have one kid planning for college and I’m packing ‘extra emergency accident clothes’ in another’s backpack. It’s wild.”

Which brings me to a little story I’ll call “The Saga of the Missing Suitcase,” which started in early October and ended last week with the serious revelation that I need to start taking those memory supplements my mother gave me for my 40th birthday.

Anyway, God bless all my friends, co-workers and family, who, for a solid two months, have had to hear about the absolute mystery of how I could have lost an entire suitcase that contained my expensive curling iron and hair dryer between town and home when I distinctly remember unpacking it on the floor of our bedroom.

What could have happened to it if it’s not in my car, the pickup, the garage or anywhere in my house whatsoever? My mom was looking. My husband was looking. Could it be in a ditch somewhere with my sanity? Did I hallucinate the fact that I brought it inside and unpacked it? Did someone come into the house and steal it? I was mixed up and totally frazzled, and so was my hair.

“Do you remember what that suitcase looks like?” my husband nudged. “No one is going to steal it. More likely it got thrown in the trash.”

After a month of searching with no success, I broke down and bought myself a new, too-expensive curling iron and dug out the old hair dryer we use to warm up cold, newborn calves in the spring. I decided only God truly knows the fate of my wares and wondered how early is too early to check myself into the nursing home …

Fast forward to last week when I was organizing my closet and preparing to pack for a trip. Because it’s barely been above zero for the past few weeks now, I decided it was time to store the last of my summer clothes in the big blue summer clothes bin. To get to that big blue summer clothes bin, I needed to climb the stairs, open the door of the closet, and remove the stack of old picture frames and purses I need to give away from the top of that bin to get to the lid.

What I’m saying here is that it took effort.

As in, I had to dig and un-pile piles. I had to get on my hands and knees and rearrange items. It was a whole thing. Which is relevant only because when I finally got to the part where I opened the lid expecting to toss the summer dresses into storage with my shorts, tank tops and sandals, I found instead … my suitcase.

Of course I did.

Because that seems like a logical place to store an only partially unpacked piece of luggage.

Why? I really couldn’t tell you. I have no real memory of the task. But at least I was right about my missing beauty appliances sitting inside as the only things I didn’t bother putting away. I apparently just needed to spend money on a replacement for the mystery to be solved.

Anyway, now that I’ve brought you through that wearisome journey, I bring you back to where we started, which is that weird stage we’re in where our pants are hooked on the barbed wire fence between youth and a front porch rocking chair. Because after I gave a little hoot at my discovery and promptly texted all my friends who have had to hear about this saga for weeks, I ran down the steps to tell my husband, who I found was in the middle of a shower. But the news couldn’t wait. I pulled open the door and chirped, “I have a very important announcement! Can you guess what it is?”

My husband stopped scrubbing the soap in his armpits and frantically searched the expression on my face through the steamy glass door. His heart sank to his stomach. He looked terrified. I paid it no mind. I was too happy.

“I found my suitcase!” I sang with delight and then went on to explain the whole ordeal you all just had to endure, totally oblivious to the fact that there could possibly be a more important, more heart-pounding declaration at this point in our very adult lives.

“Oh, Lord!” my husband replied with a big exhale. “I thought you were going to say you were pregnant!”

Increasingly forgetful with a small side of “I guess it’s still possible” … that’s where we’re at.

If you need me, I’m probably looking for my phone I put down around here somewhere.

Peace, love and Prevagen,
Jessie

My husband and I moved home to my family’s ranch almost 10 years ago with a few little dreams that could live because of the big dream that came true when we decided to stay here forever.

Between then and now, it seems that we’ve learned most of our lessons the hard way (as if there’s any other way), maybe the most important one being that nothing happens in a straight line. Nothing is black and white. And sometimes we get there, short and sweet, but mostly it’s up and down and down further and further still and then up again and up again before we’re off shaky ground.

When you dream of your life as a little kid, do you dream of yourself at almost 40?

And then, if or when you marry the person you love, the vision is mostly of the wedding day and then hop, skip and jump to the two of you sitting side by side in rocking chairs, old and gray looking out into the sunset, reflecting on a beautiful highlight-reel history together.

That whole part where you wake up at 5:30 every morning to get yourself and the kids groomed and fed and out the door and then to school and then to gymnastics and then home and then supper and then bath and then bed and then up and at ‘em the next morning, that’s the less popular middle part of the dream-come-true.

The number of times you sweep the kitchen floor only to do it five minutes later after the kids spill the cereal or dump out the Play-Doh or your husband rushes in with muddy boots to grab the wallet he forgot. The flat tires and broken tail lights.

The stomach flu, the amount of grilled cheese you’ve charred on the stove because the kids are fighting over dolls or clothes, the arguments about closing cabinet doors that really aren’t about closing cabinet doors, the huffs and eye rolls, the little laughs, the banter, the leftovers that mold in the fridge — all of that we skip over in the planning and dreaming and the telling of our lives.

But the cancer diagnosis, the infertility, the loss of the people you love, the divorce, the firing and layoffs, the big epic failures, those things, those traumatic things, they stick in your guts, expanding sometimes to tug on your heart, to punch your ribs, to help keep you bruised and broken and human the same way we take all the good stuff and say we’re grateful, not giving proper credit to the hard stuff that likely deserves the accolade, too.

And I know what I’m trying to say here, but I guess I’m taking the long way. This month we lost a classmate. In my small junior high and high school, she was one of my favorites, who, upon graduation, became a person I hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years.

And as I sat in that pew in that church next to my high school boyfriend who became my husband, surrounded by individuals who have woven in and out of our lives throughout the years, I couldn’t help but feel robbed. Not personally really, but on her behalf. Because she left us smack dab in the middle of her middle part, in the mushy and complicated center of her dream, in the part that may be skipped over in the Cliffs Notes version but is, in reality, where all the best stuff lies — the characters, the mistakes, the complicated relationships and small and big wins building and brewing and growing and culminating to get us to that last chapter, you know, the one with the rocking chair…

She didn’t get her rocking chair, but then, it was never promised in the first place.

So I guess what I want to say is something that’s hard for me to recognize when the mundane or hectic tasks of the days overwhelm me. That task is part of the day is part of the little plan that is part of the big plan and maybe, if you take a breath, if you pull out the weeds and worries that want to convince you otherwise, you might find that right where you are, sweeping that dirty floor, or rolling your eyes, or losing an argument, is sorta right where you dreamed you’d be someday. You just forgot to give the middle part the credit it deserves.