living life as a real mom

The other night, we’re doing dishes and watching the baby on the monitor, listening to our favorite band’s new album, and I turn to AA: Is this how you thought you’d live your life? He snorted and kept scrubbing the few plastic dishes we use that I refuse to put in the high heat of the dishwasher for fear it will ignite their secret BPA ingredients and kill my kids. Then he asked me what I thought my life looked like in theory versus practice, which is a way better way of stating my same question. No surprise. He’s definitely the brainier of us. And I’m more rigid. I explained my present life in my mind looks like this: Homemade food eaten by children wearing all clothing that I’ve made or sourced organically, while they gently play with their wooden toys and share kindly as I look on, showered, clothed, and knitting from a very comfortable yoga position I’ve mastered. Maybe I’m reading aloud from A Child’s Garden of Verse and maybe we’re all doing crafts. He laughed so hard starting with the part where the kids are only wearing clothing I’ve made and going all the way through. I joined in and we moved on to the greener pastures of intellectual discussion like how many shirts I needed to iron for his week at work. This got me to thinking, how closely am I living to how I’d like to live? How far off am I and what’s holding me back from actually living…