Desperately Seeking Simplicity

Remember that movie?  Desperately Seeking Susan?  With Rosanna Arquette, Madonna and Aidan Quinn?  Oh how it made me want to live in a squalid little apartment over a shop in downtown Long Beach.  I was working and going to CSULB at the time, still trying to break the chains of suburbia.

Guess what?  I'm back.  Well, I guess technically you'd call our town suburban sprawl, since the local big wigs have yet to lure any major industry (read employers) here.  So I guess I'll wait out my children's teen years watching the grass grow up around me.

I spent my early 20's sifting through my childhood and my young adulthood path of self-destruction to see what fit.  What I was going to carry into adulthood.  What I liked and what I didn't.  What seemed like the straightest path to a simple, peaceful, life.  Goodbye old baggage.  Hello shiny, bright, new world.  I fell in love with someone I had loved as a friend for many years.  We finished school.  We got married.  We both finally had careers instead of jobs and classes.  There was a sweet spot there.  A profound lack of complications.  We knew who we were, who our friends were, and our time was ours to luxuriate in.  We were pretty damn blissed out.  And maybe a little bored.


My problem, I think, is that I confused simplicity with lack of activity.  For a long time, my wise husband just said I needed a certain amount of chaos in my life to feel comfortable in my own skin.  But I disagree.  I do not like chaos.  I revel in harmony and laughter.  In understanding and tears.  In being sure of the people around me.  I have little tolerance for people who aren't really getting it.  But I love my good friends and desperately wish we all lived within a 2 mile radius of  each other.  I prefer pets that like to lounge around and get fat as butter.  I love having a house full of people, but hate when a party ends in a fist fight.  (I'm too old for that.  Memo to the teenagers.)

Today I live in a house full of 5 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats and a handful of fish.  Our family has a dynamic of its own.  Sometimes we are funny and supportive.  Sometimes we are grumpy and unkind and have to make our apologies.  And there is a lot of activity.  Numerous complications.  It is not a simple, peaceful life.  But neither is it boring. 

xoxo
~S