“I think we need to get you some new shorts”, he said to me this morning while reading from the table. I was up in the kitchen in that half hour between waking up the boys and leaving to take them to school. I get dressed, or try to eat, or ask if everyone else has eaten or what they’ve put in their lunch or if they found enough to make their lunch or if anyone needs anything.

It sounds more hectic than it is. But I answered him something along the lines of, “Well, if you want to take me to the store to find some shorts, that’d be great.” I don’t like clothes shopping. I’ve already been out a few times this summer and I did already look for new shorts. I’m down to one pair, the one I’ve been wearing for the past three years, not counting the other pair I wear to the beach.

They are pretty beat up. They are fraying on the inseam and the once light aqua color has faded to what now looks more like white. They’ve had period stains including ones I gave up on and they are so worn and stretched out that they don’t even fit. I have to pull them up constantly, or at least wear a shirt long enough to cover the areas where everything droops off the waist.

Besides the pulling them up part they’re comfortable. It’s hard for me to get rid of these kinds of clothes, the ones I’ve worn and liked and have become like a layer of skin to my frame because of how much I’ve worn them. But I guess he was serious because later this morning he said something about going over to Scheels to get shorts before we picked up the boys. I would’ve never thought to go there.

Nor would I have taken time out of my day today to do it, but, if he was going to come, and since it really would be nice to have more than just that one pair of shorts, I went. Shorts are not cheap there, not even on the clearance racks where the picked over sizes of shorts are these days. Out of the pile I tried on I found three that fit. They weren’t perfect, but since he’d brought me…

Actually they were alright. I put them back on and tried to roll up the bottoms. That looked better. Something about the straight leg looked too boxy, and I wasn’t going to spend that much with my husband on anything that would leave me feeling less than at least average. The lights in these fitting rooms get you every time. It’s like anything that ever used to be smooth catches the bright fluorescent ray.

So then while I was there I went ahead and looked at the shoes. I’ve been wearing these strappy open sandals to my practicum site. The dress code there is business casual, and no one’s every said anything about my shoes, but I feel like I would look more the part in closed shoes, and more comfortable, and as the weather starts to get cooler it would be more fitting. I found some light pink ones.

Which then needed a few pairs of no show socks. I have the socks I kept from my oldest sons dresser, but those are too thick for those kinds of shoes. The other socks I do have are not the no show kind. “We can just go to Walmart”, I said, seeing the prices. But we found some that were not as expensive. After spending almost $300 we went to the uniform store to buy a school shirt for each of the younger boys.

We had time after that to walk in the park. “I still can’t figure out where I am in this place”, I said, or something like it. MacArthur is that way, and Chatham road that way. Before too long we were back in the car, and the boys were at the office door eager and waiting. I think they liked their shirts. They didn’t have much selection or color to choose from, but something new sometimes is nice to have.

This feels hard to write. Yesterday was Josh’s birthday and everyone was free in the evening to celebrate. I’d bought food to make his requested dinner and most of the stuff to make one of his favorite desserts. He’d taken the boys to visit his dad and I’d gone after resting and falling asleep. I made the first part of the dessert and started on the meal and a short while after my daughter came home I said, “Elianna, I am needing some help.”

“Yeah, I know”, she said, “I could tell the minute I walked in the door”. She was joking, I was joking, and I did the whole thing when I act proud of myself for doing something basic like making a birthday éclair crust. But I really did need help and was serious about that part, and she was serious about helping me. She finished the dessert after going down to camp and finding cream cheese in the main camp fridge. The boys set the table and we had a nice supper.

I guess Hobbits for their birthdays buy other people presents. Anyone who comes to their party gets a gift, so that’s what he’d planned to do for each person. We called Ethan over Facetime and were all outside on the picnic table with the last of the sun giving light to our gathering. We sang Happy Birthday and the “God’s blessings to you” verse like we have done for a long time now whenever it is somebody’s birthday.

After the singing I took the phone and we dispersed. I wanted to catch up on the latest college news since I’d heard last. My brain will fill in its own stories if I don’t have the facts, so I just plain out asked, is it going okay? Are you liking it there? He said it was alright, not the shrugging kind of alright, but the assuring yes, college is good kind. Sometimes you can read a person and other times it’s like I am crawling around in the dark waiting for somebody to give some kind of thought direction.

The last two posts I’ve written have got me triggered for some reason. It’s like this is all starting to get and feel a little bit too real. It’s one thing to go to school. It’s another to have to show up at a place where I am scheduled to be there and expected to be there. It’s one thing to talk about constellations and act all cutesy about liking the stars and yeah that’s one of my interests and a thing that makes me myself.

But it’s another thing to show up here and not be able to explain basic orbits after all of these years. It’s one thing to talk about being a student and writing papers but to never show a single one because they aren’t “good enough” in my eyes to seen by smarter people. But even if they were, average enough, would I show them? And this is what’s got me. This realization that the longer time goes, the more I can’t hide this, the more I am realizing who I am not.

I don’t know if it’s the hospital, or the being at my practicum site with these strangers, or my son going away, or my husband’s father facing down a terminal illness. But it’s like all of a sudden I am seeing who I wasn’t, who maybe I could have been but chose not to. And then there are things that you wanted to be but couldn’t be. Either that was not your gifting, or the genes you were dealt, or the choices you made for yourself, or God’s plan for your life.

And so no, I’m not going to be an Olympic gymnast. I’m not going to join the traveling circus as a trapeze artist or a clown. I am not going to be a journalist, or an orthopedic surgeon, or a scientist, and yes while I’ve kept my license up I’m not even really a nurse anymore. I don’t have almost decades of experience under my belt. I’m not the charge nurse of a unit or training new grads or working part-time at the local college as a clinical instructor.

The obsession with being great, I don’t know where it comes from. The arrogance, the hubris, I didn’t ask for these things and no one made me this way. My sisters don’t have this, my brothers don’t have it. It felt brave back then, defiant and large. To say no to “the world” and embrace my life as a wife and a mother. It was enough, and it’s all I wanted. But there were these parts you left along the way, that you had to leave behind, that you had to let go of.