Tonight I pulled out the smoked gouda to go with our crash supper of supermarket roast chicken and fresh bread with soup. I couldn't resist snitching a slice so I tried to be incognito as I helped myself but soon blew my cover: I bit down into my little slice of cheese onto something hard. I pulled out the offending occlusion and found it was a little, baby human tooth!?! It was so wierd, not to mention disturbingly disgusting. I toyed with the idea of a tooth somehow getting mixed into this particular block of cheese during processing but immediately dismissed the idea, especially since Eden had, just a few days before, lost a
similar tooth. While up in Pocatello over Thanksgiving one of Eden's teeth had come out and she carefully saved it in a ziploc bag. It must have been the same ziploc bag I inadvertently picked up to stash cheese in and the tooth just so happened to stick to the same little slice of cheese I inadvertently sank my teeth into. At least I didn't swallow it.A theme has been surfacing around here the last little while. It was first articulated in a post-bedtime talk with "mature" (read as much older than ourselves) neighbor friends. Their loving message for us was essentially to "get real". "Getting real" means letting go of impossibly inflated ideas or expectations, to deal with what's at hand instead of combating the mental idea of what is at hand. Here's a trivial example: last week I experimented with taking the jogging stroller to the mall(!) for exercise. I circled the little place with other walkers looking at the closed shops, ogling at the windows: new clothes, shiny posters with smiling seemingly flawless faces, petite mannequins of unhealthy proportions. At some point I caught myself in this world projected at me and realized it for what it is: totally fabricated, fake, fake, fake. The other bodies walking that mall, they were real. Real bodies and faces lined from burdens and laughter, real lives. The fact that I was walking right then and breathing, that was real. I looked at the people after that.
The idea keeps coming back to me in all kinds of contexts. I think the house ought to be incessantly tidy, clean (and I mean deep clean), in good repair, smooth and efficient. In reality, the never-ending laundry piles high, there are all kinds of odds and ends that need fixing, my front porch is messy, half of the flower bulbs never got planted, etc., etc., etc. And how about parenting? I always imagine doing really great things with my kids, outdoors or fun creative projects (paying my undivided attention to all of them at once of course). I imagine awesome conversations and effective, consistent discipline. The reality is that there is always more than I can do at any given moment. This requires constant monitoring of what should take precedence and making decisions--sometimes in triage fashion. There are other dimensions that need a reality check too but you get the idea.
So I don't have a clean house and I pack some extra pounds and my kids are sometimes neglected. That's real. I know when I sit down and list all of the things I want to/think I should be doing in my life the list is truly laughable and so blatantly ridiculous. But somehow I still hold on to all of the pieces of the list separately, holding them up in my mind as one "should" after another and rarely stop to put them together for the sheer insanity of it all. I would never tell you that I hold myself to all of these expectations at once but I operate that way nevertheless every time I come across something that needs attention, mentally scolding and chalking more to the "to do" list. I have met a few people who don't burden themselves with such unrealistic expectations and they are a breath of fresh air! I know I come by my ubermensch sensibilities naturally (you would too if you had shining star parents), but I'd rather shed them. "Get real" is my new motto to go hand in hand with "don't be in a rush" (a topic for a whole 'nuther post) and maybe the two are related? And here's another question: is it possible to get real without giving up on the idea of improving somewhat? "Striving" presupposes envisioning a different reality and somehow you have to reconcile the jarring incongruities, the snagging mental nails.
