Despair

 Last week, I was sitting in the teacher's lounge at a middle school where I was substituting. The teachers sitting around me started talking about how the teachers at the high school were going to turn over in the next one to three years because so many teachers were going to retire. My ears perked up because I am still hoping to get a teaching job. Then I started to realize that the people they were talking about were all only about five years older than I am. 

I wonder if it's time to give up. 

I am 44 years old. I'm to old to start over. I am too old to try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. 

Do I regret the years I spent as a full time mom? ... Nooo? I mean, I don't think so. 

Do I resent the fact that spending those years with my kids somehow took me off the track to ever do anything else with my life ever again? Yeeeees. 

How many times when my kids were little did I tell myself that I couldn't do everything at the same time but life is long? How many times did I convince myself that it was all going to be okay, that I was going to have time to find myself again, that when my kids weren't little anymore there would be plenty of time to do all the other things I wanted to do again? 

And now I'm 44 and it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel like there's any time left to do things. I know there's a lot of life left, but it really doesn't feel like life thinks there's enough of me left. 

There's no happy ending today. There's no moral. There's no twist. Today there's just despair.