Hungry, Hungry Hippos

I have been writing blog posts while I drive, while I shower, while I sit in boring meetings… The only place I have not been writing them is here…. So, here we are again. I hope you will indulge me. I am hopeful that writing some of this down will make it more real, and less real, in the needed porportions to learn from the learning experiences, laugh at the laughing ones, cry at the… well, you are smart kids, you get the picture.

These past several weeks have been…well, growing pain is a real thing for grown ups as well as children. However, the pain is in the heart and spirit. Max’s third birthday combined with the difficult departure of our most recent foster baby seem to have centered my brain on the fact that I will not be birthing no more babies… And it is a brutal thing to wrap my mind around. Mostly, because it is not my choice, my body for whatever reason is simply not good that the whole conception thing. Now, the growing hair in places hair is not welcome, that it seems to have mastered. (I took that line out a few times, but I am hereby declaring this a no editing for appropriateness blog. You’ve been warned)

I think that this is less about the fact that no more bell/lewitt babies will be born with big blue eyes, no hair, and an already apparent adhesion to the motto “to thine own self be true”. It is about the fact that for the past 13 years, as a foster mom, then a dating woman, then a married woman, I have really been defined my my pursuit of the stability and joy of a family of my own. Self-defined, but nonetheless, if asked to describe my goals, wife and mommy would have been… well, high up. Maybe, if I am honest, number 2 and 1, respectively.

So, what to do after your dreams come true? And you realize that you are indeed a greedy bitch who is not going to be able to simply revel… And that WANTING MORE is indeed a state of being that you can occasionally hook out of for a bit, but in fact, it is simply who you are.

This blog is going to be a part of that… a part of wanting more and pursuing more.

I am so grateful for my life. I have not gotten here by chance. I had many incredible opportunities and people put in front of me and I grabbed them. If you look at life as a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos, I have grabbed some great marbles.

And, I am going to be making every effort to see my Life approaching in this same way… that image above, of all the marbles just waiting to be grabbed, is one that I am finding helpful in addressing my current feelings of…. out of sortedness. I know, not a phrase in common usage.

But, I think this is Life. There are bunches of opportunities and options. And there are other hippos out there, eager to grab them… And you have a choice: grab frantically and randomly, in order to assure no one else gets any that you *might* someday want, or grab more deliberately, looking at the marbles and choosing, taking that horrible chance that, when you go to grab it, that marble might have been grabbed by someone else.

Yep, I am officially now an adherent of the “Hungry Hungry Hippos Plan for Life Management”

Feel free to stick around and see how it goes…