In Between- A Five Minute Friday Post

Daddy in between his girls on Father's Day!

(This post is part of 5-Minute Fridays...a space where Lisa-Jo Baker offers a prompt and hundreds of lovely ladies write for 5 minutes about that word(s). Here goes!)



In Between...

So I sit here, in the nursery, clicking away on computer keys.

The baby is in my bedroom sleeping. Her bedroom, which is mostly unused right now because she is sleeping in a bassinet in ours, is the only "safe", clean, quiet place in the house these days. 

And so when I was looking for a bit of respite this morning, a quiet place to call my own, a place where I could drink coffee, read a few pages in a book, and write a very short blog post, this was the only place in the house suitable for such "activity". 

The rest of the house is cluttered and the older girls are running rampant with sheets, which they are using to make tents, and prompting each other with noisy voices. The kitchen is still in its beautiful Saturday morning breakfast shambles...

Our lives feel a bit like the "in-between" right now...The baby is just eight weeks old and so it feels as if we are in-between a lot...there is no new "rhythm" quite yet...There is little time for writing or running (the two things that keep me sane!), much less the daily house tasks. The hubby and I share rigid words at tired hours and are in much need of some fun together.  

If you read my last blog post you also know I recently turned 35...a very IN-BETWEEN number indeed. In between 30, which seemed kind of young and 40, which seems...ahem...very MATURE. 

I'm in-between my old self...the young gal working at a publishing company in Boston and taking weekend trips with my boyfriend (now hubby) to places like New Hampshire and the Cape...and the new self...Momma to three girls who is working to etch out a full life for her family while still finding snippets of time to do the things she enjoys...in a rocking chair, in the corner of a nursery, while the baby sleeps and the girls thud around below. 

It seems that much of life is "in-between." It reminds me of my high school math teacher's telling me to  "show our work", or the steps we took to arrive at the answers to our homework problems. The "work" was what lie between the questions and the answers...in many ways it was actually more important than the answer itself. 

 I'm realizing that those math problems might have had implications for my life after all.  We live most of our lives in the middle space- in between the questions and the answers. 

The real goal then might not be to arrive at the answer but to be content doing the "work" in the middle.

(STOP)