Silence. The ticking of a clock. The bubbling of the fish tank. The glow from the muted television in my livingroom. My husbnad lays asleep in our room from a grueling day of commuting and working hard for his family. Further down my hallway you'll hear the gentle breathing of two little children. All their worries gone for the day. The giggles from the afternoon play hovering over their dreaming heads. A favorite stuffed animal tucked inside their blankets with them. This is my life and I love it!
I am just an average Mom trying to get through each day the best I can. I want to be the best wife I can be to my husband and the best Mom to my kids. I am SO not perfect though, and I don't want to be! If there is one thing I have learned in life is that no one is perfect, no matter how much they try to come off that way. We are all looking for approval whether we want to admit it or not. I know I do. I'm always worried about if I comforted my sad daughter enough or if I stood up for my son to a bully on the playground in a firm enough way to make him feel that Mom has his back.
It is because of all those worries, day in and day out, that I try to remind myself that I am only human. I need to live by the motto that my husband and I try to instill in our children. Do your best. So each day I try to tell myself that as long as I gave the Best of Me, than I've done all I can do. No right. No wrong. Just me.
I find myself in a place in life that I never expected to be. Well maybe not totally. I always knew I'd be a wife and mother. The part I never expected was to move from my home state of Nebraska to California. That was quite a twist. It was five years ago that my husband said he could get me home as a full-time Mom if I was willing to hit the road for his job. We did some soul searching and praying and decided it was the best thing for our family. The heartbreak of it was leaving our Family behind in Nebraska. So we cried, said our temporary goodbyes, and hoppped in the mini-van to California! So here I am living the west coast life with a Mid-West heart.
It's funny because you can plan your life away all you want, but you never know where it will really take you. I believe that things happen for a reason. We don't always know why they happen right away either. Some things happen that, at the time seem to be so horrible. One example I have is when I couldn't go to the college I wanted to go to. My parents had the sad task of trying to explain to me that they couldn't afford to send me to the college I wanted, which also happened to be the one a lot of my friends were going to. Oh I was so heart broken. I licked my wounds, sucked it up and went to a local college. Time went by and I got a job at a Bank in town. A few years later, one December day, a man walked into the bank where I worked and tried to sell me some self-inking stamps for the bank. He sent me flowers the next day asking me out to dinner. We were engaged six months later and married less than a year after that. That was almost 12 years ago! So, my point is that had I gone to the out of town college I would have NEVER gotten the job at the bank and my husband would have NEVER come in to sell me self-inking rubber stamps! It only took 4 years for me to learn why I wasn't meant to go out of town for college. Things happen for a reason!
I think of that day often and I always smile. I am thankful for the life we have and I think I'm doing the best I can. Oh there will be some stumbles and scrapes mixed in with the successes. But I have great cheerleaders in my life and it will all be okay. After all, as long as I give the Best of Me, I can't go wrong.
