Living the Dream
We're back in parent’s corner! We might think we’re all grown up, but every so often its worth looking to our elders - sometimes they have things to say! These wisdoms are brought to you by Lela Managadze
“You are living The Dream!” – tells me yet another casual acquaintance, who I encounter in yet another State park campsite, in yet another state of the USA.
I smile and nod. Sure, I AM living The Dream. I work full-time from home, home being a motorhome that my husband, my dog and I have been living in for the last 8 months traveling around US and Canada. I am relatively young (48), an empty nester, and with sufficient income to afford a traveling lifestyle (it’s not exactly as cheap as one would imagine).
The day is young. We are parked in a beautiful campground near the ocean in Florida. Being Florida, it’s warm already. I am walking the dog before going back to my camper to dive into my daily work of cancer clinical research data management. Hubby is already online talking to his colleagues in another one of his frequent work meetings (he’s a senior scientist in a Silicon Valley company – living The Dream, right?).
The dog is now 12 years old and does not walk long distances – not that he ever liked walking much, but lately he walks less and less. He is as cute as ever, and you wouldn’t guess he is so old as he still looks and acts as if he’s a puppy.
My husband and I bought our dog when he was only three months old and INDEED a puppy. At the time, our son was 14 and daughter 7. We wanted our kids to grow up with a dog in their lives. And you can say we achieved it successfully. But now the situation has reversed itself: our kids have grown and left the nest, and our four-legged freind doesn’t have them in his life anymore.
And neither do my husband and I.
Whilst we walk, I see a young family from afar: mother, father, and two kids, a boy and a little girl, skipping happily next to her parents. I smile at them both. The boy chooses to ignore me while the girl hides behind her Mom who apologetically looks at me.
“She’s so cute”, - I tell the Mom, - “I miss my kids’ childhood”.
Gosh, I miss my kids. Period.
My life has been anything but predictable. I won’t bore you with details of it but the point is, I had kids TOO EARLY in life and now miss them dearly.
But I AM living The Dream, right?
RIGHT?
Yes, I am. To have a (relative, but isn’t everything relative in this life?) freedom to go wherever your heart desires is not to be taken lightly. And to have means to do so in addition to said freedom – now that’s The Dream.
My husband and I spent this past winter in Florida. We were sweating and complaining of heat while the rest of the USA was under snow, rain, mud and flood. Oh it’s too hot over here. Oh there are bugs and alligators over here. Surrrrre, sweetie. You have such a hard life. In sunny Florida. In 28-degree (celsius for you Europeans) heat. In January.
At this very moment I am sitting in my camper in northern Florida near one of the most beautiful beaches in the entire US. In a week we will be in Atlanta, Georgia – we will finally visit the US state that shares the name with our home country (country Georgia). Then it’ll be the Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks before leaving our camper in storage, our dog with friends, jumping on a plane, and flying to Europe for six weeks. Rome, Athens, Prague, Amsterdam and then some more Italian cities are waiting for us. My husband will attend his photography workshop in Tuscany while I will see my girlfriend in Rome, then we will meet up with my parents in Athens, visit my husband’s satellite office in Prague and at last - our daughter in Amsterdam before going back to Italy for roaming around Cinque Terre before flying back home to the US.
The Dream, right?
But many times during a day, every day, I wish I could go back in time when I had neither so much free time, nor high income or freedom to go wherever I wanted. The time when my kids were at home. I used to say “I know I will miss my kids’ childhood one day”, but I did NOT know how much I would miss it. And what’s the point of missing it now? There’s no going back. (Our gracious Editor inserts Hemingway reference here*).
Still, sometimes at night, when I watch a movie about some magic or read a story how someone won many millions of dollars, I can’t help but think: “I don’t want anything but to spend a day with my kids again, say ten years ago when they were little and lived with me at home”.
Not happening. Never again.
So what dream exactly am I living?
You tell me.
*“We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the “old kick” out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.”
