So often when life hands us a big change (new school, new job, moving, pregnancy, babies, deaths… etc) we have trouble adjusting and think “when will my life get back to normal?!” The answer, I am finding, is NEVER. Your life will literally never be the same after these types of things. I kept thinking “wait until I’m not pregnant and I’m back to normal and things are REALLY gonna get done!” and “WickedGirl won’t know what hit her when normal Mama is back!”… Then it hit me the other day when I was talking to MY mother: There is no “back” to normal… There is only the discovery of a new normal. You can fight it all you want, and get frustrated when you can’t recreate the life you used to have, or you can accept it and create a new one that’s even better. In my case, I just had WickedBoy. (Maybe I should call him WickedBIGBoy – he’s HUMONGOUS! 12 lb 6 oz at 1 month old!), and I kept saying “when I feel better and can get back to normal…” How can I get “back” to a life when I only had one kid? In truth, since I had WickedGirl, there has been no normal. When she was 2.5 months old, WickedHubby deployed for 4 months, then he returned for a couple of months, only to deploy again for 4 months while I sold our house and moved in with my parents. Then he came back, flew to my parent’s house to pick us up, we drove across the country to our new location and moved into our new house. I got pregnant. I miscarried. I got pregnant again. I took 9 months getting used to my new location, and gestating WickedBoy. Then the wacky birth, and a short stay in the hospital. Then I got mastitis and was sick for another couple of days. How far back are we going here to find “normal”? LOL. I guess maybe 9 months before the birth of WickedGirl? So when I get back to the summer of 2007 when I was finishing my masters and working crazy hours training dogs all over a city where I don’t live anymore and I have no children at all, you just watch out because that’s going to be amazing. 🙂 Either that, or I can just realize that it’s 2010 (almost 2011 – super scary), and I have two awesome and healthy kids, live on the west coast, and have a whole new crop of friends to add to my besties from my past. Ya. Life’s pretty good. No going back… Driving into the sunset of the past knowing that everything from back then is what made me who I am today, and knowing that the future will rock too. Just have to be patient while I sort out the current chaos to prepare for my future chaos, I guess.

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