New Homes and New Beginnings

Wednesday’s are usually my panic days. It is the day I often wake up and realize that I don’t have a post for Friday. I promised myself on January 1st this year, that I would post something every Friday to my blog, and on most weeks I wake up Wednesday mornings convinced I have no words to write and if you read my blog, with any regularity, you will know that I’m sure there are no more words left in my brain. I am here to tell you this Wednesday was no different.  

As I sat on my balcony Wednesday morning, drinking the first cup of coffee and listening to the sounds of the noisy city, I searched for words. I went to my usual places to spark something, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. There it was, a post from a page I love to read on Facebook, Suburban Shit Show: Tales from the Tree-Lined Trenches (you can find her on Facebook and Instagram. I promise you will not be sorry you started following her. Her posts are honest and raw). With a little help from my friend and her post today, I realized I did have some words.  You see, my youngest chicken, the one who would cry every Friday when it was time for her to go to her dad’s for the weekend, the one who we had to mute the tv whenever a trailer for a scary movie came on while she buried her head in my lap, the one whose voice was so squeaky when she was little it made me laugh every time she would talk, is closing on her first home today.  (That is her in that picture at the top taken in 1990 something where she is confidently rocking that headband. The other one I took, through my tears, on Wednesday, in front of her cute new home.)

Sitting on that balcony, I was trying to convince myself that it was not humid and too hot to be out there, wondering where the years went. I suppose when you are too busy living them, they sneak past you, and all you are stuck with are memories, and as you get older, those memories start to fade. There are a few memories of my sweet youngest chicken that will never fade from my mind, or at least I hope they don’t. Like every time I would drive her to soccer practice from the time she started at the local YMCA at the age of 4 to her travel soccer in High School we would have to pull the car over so she could throw up, now this little girl coaches the high school team at the school where she is a teacher. 

My sweet little chicken had a bumpy start this year, but today I will get dressed to take her to celebratory coffee before her closing.  I try to ignore the hot flashes and the weird back pain that I have these mornings when I get out of bed and tell myself; life will not pass me by. I refuse to feel like an old lady when there is most certainly one staring back at me when I look in the mirror, with her gray hair and wrinkles that seemingly sprouted overnight. 

When I was a single mom to those little chickens when they were just three and four years old, I was confident that they would spend all their money on a therapist’s couch, because of all the shit I dragged them through. There were two broken marriages, one with a controlling man who in the end, had me convinced I couldn’t even tie my shoes right. Then other marriage with a drug addict. I had to move so many times when they were little; I lost count. I was sure they would never find a sense of “home.” And who could forget the endless bowls of Cheerios for breakfast and fish sticks for dinner because it was all I could afford. But instead my little girl is buying a house, a whole house where she will start making her own home, and it is not hundreds of miles away from me, it is just a mere 10. 

So today my pride is bursting out of my wrinkly seams, and like always, I found some words to put down on paper.

Congratulations my sweet little Alison.