“And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.”

As I write this we are going on hour 2 of the bedtime joust.  Milk, water, cuddles, Pete the Cat and his stupid white shoes, and about 7 tuck-ins later and I am currently being pushed, pulled, and body slammed in every direction to go to my bed for a cuddle.  Screaming, tears streaming down Thing 1’s face, my mounting desire to run out the front door and hide under the nearest bush.  Beat into submission, I pull her into my bed, my sacred space: off limits to those who are not strictly invited, namely to Thing 1 and Thing 2.
Then I see it there, my public transportation card.  The one I had just topped up on Friday, cleanly broken into two pieces, lying on the floor.  All of a sudden, I am in desperate need of an exorcism. My head starts spinning in circles, fire shoots out of my ears and a voice from the Hell Mouth echoes from the depths of my soul WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? 
Cue more sobbing, hyperventilation from Thing 1 and tears of guilt and frustration from me.  I’m beyond tempted to throw a few F-bombs in my pleas, but I’ve made that mistake before (for those of you who heed unsolicited advice, don’t do it.  Toddlers have an uncanny ability to use it in the most inopportune, not to mention inappropriate, of places).

Finally she dozes off, and as I look at her, I am overwhelmed by her.  She is so peaceful lying there and I remember all of the sweet things she has said to me all day, making cupcakes, her sweet thank yous and hugs.  I think about how this little person has totally and completely altered my life forever; about all the things I want for her, don’t want for her; about how I can bring her and thing 2 the moon and the stars.  I wonder how my choices will affect them, if they will ever understand why I did it.  I hope they will forgive me for bringing them into an irreparable family, and that I can, against all odds, be a successful career woman, mom, role model for them.

But then I guess that's just life on a smaller scale, if you can forgive me the metaphor.  You fight it and fight it and fight it, try to make it do something it doesn't have any intention of doing and when you finally wrestle it down and get it to submit, there is this all consuming sense of nostalgia and you look back at all of that inner torment and say hot damn, look at that.  Which is quickly erased by the guilt of taking all of it for granted because that moment will never exist again.

I totally whole heartedly believe the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies about living in the present and following the natural path of life. But when you can't seem to fumble your way down the path and when living in the present is more maddening than living in the past is painful and living in the future is discouraging, then what do you do? And here my friends, we come full circle. Perhaps Thing 1 and I have more in common than we think we do.

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet