This weekend didn’t quite go as expected. I didn’t know I was standing on the edge of a precipice about to fall in as fast as possible. I’m ready for my life to be different. I’m ready to go find some new dreams. I realized a while ago that I was feeling frustrated by the limited scope of my life, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. We are stuck, right? We have these little kids and we made agreements about how we wanted them raised so now I am stuck with those decisions (and this situation) forever. Or at least till the kids are older.

But isn’t life dynamic? This situation is untenable. Something–or, rather, a whole lot of things need to change. So we got to talking. We got to talking about what our lives could look like if we were luckier, or richer, or more determined. We talked about the extremes of what we would each like to have. We tried to figure out how our separate passions and interests can work together. The odd part has always been that we have tremendously different focii in life, yet we manage to be obsessed with one another and we get along far better than I’ve ever gotten along with anyone. Ok, if we are going to be very different people on very different paths, we need to find a way to hold hands at least from our separate paths. I can do it! I can reach out and hold on to the most important man I’ve ever had in my life.

Noah’s dreams are his to share, so I’ll let that rest for the time being. But as for myself, I need a change. I need to be more than a lactating, cleaning, cooking machine. No thanks. I want to have things that I do that are interesting to me. I want to *complete* projects. I want to grow and develop ambitions of my own. Some of the ways I want to grow do actually involve working–but not necessarily for someone else and not necessarily for money. I have to learn how to value me and my time appropriately. I’ve had good reason to think about that lately.

So I’ve been trying to determine what my dreams/goals can be. In what areas of my life do I want to stretch my wings and fly? The first and most important thing to me is realizing that it’s ok to be weird. That must sound odd to anyone who knows me. I experience a lot of anxiety around being odd. Especially in some particular ways. I’m totally ok with making financial choices and living with the results of those decisions. Unless the results make me look like my vision of poor white trash. There, I said it. I have class issues. I grew up being driven around in ugly, old trucks–often that had been “modified” with a blow torch (like my uncle’s truck that had been an RV and he used a blow torch somehow to take most of the RV shell off and leave a weird almost pick up truck from the RV shell). No thanks. I have to discover the difference between having shit because you can’t afford any better and having shit because you want to fly to Europe instead. Not that any part of my house actually qualifies as “shit” and I sold Noah’s ugly truck already.

I live in a small, not especially nice home. There isn’t much I can do about that other than change my attitude and possibly my decor so that I actually like my house. There are always going to be limitations to living here–it really is a small home and the layout is not the best–but I can work on changing things about this house so that I like it here. I am in this house at least 16/24 hours 7 days a week. Lately, much much more time than that. Why shouldn’t my house be someplace that makes me happy? So I am going to change things. I’m nervous about where I will find the money. I think that house projects need to become my big ‘entertainment’ budget and I should stop buying my children clothing to fund it. I’m kidding. Mostly. It is lucky that we are set for clothes for pretty much the rest of the year.

Right this exact minute we are nearly in a financial place that gives me hives. We are running out our buffer. We are doing so for quite a few good reasons and the money will be replaced this year–but I’m scared. I can feel the terror of being poor. It’s hard to convince my lizard brain that we are not on the verge of poverty. This would be because of vehicle maintenance and property taxes. Ugh. But it is temporary because the checks to fix it are on their way. I’m just over-sensitive. You see, I have panic attacks if we drop below three months of salary in savings. And Noah makes a lot of money. But! It’ll be ok. It’s probably a good thing for me to be cautious with money. Noah does want us to get rich.