Between now and happiness

I had a dream last night that we lived in an old black steam train and that Shaune and I had begun to leave the kids alone for up two hours at a time while we went to run errands. On one of my outings I returned to the station and boarded a train but had the nagging feeling it was the wrong one. Once the train started moving, I realized the kids weren't there and I was in a panic. STOP THE TRAIN!!! I yelled but no one seemed to hear me. Then trying to get the conductor's attention, I started kicking the side of the old train while crying and screaming that my kids were on a different train. Just then Naveen stirred beside me and I woke up realizing it was a dream. Relief washed over me. What did it all mean? I don't know and I'm pretty sure dreams are just subconscious fears or yearnings and this was definitely the former. And if you ask anyone who really knows me they'd roll their eyes because they know it took forever before I would even leave Deaglan with his own grandparents to run a few errands. But what it made me think about (and I'm not sure how it's connected) was how we all forego the feeling of happiness until some imaginary goal is accomplished. I do it all the time. It goes like this: Once the baby is born I'll feel better. Once Naveen sleeps through the night, things will improve. Once I lose this pregnancy weight, I'll feel better about my body. When we get through this next eight months we can breathe easy again. And on and on.

I don't know why I wish my life away like this.

I stopped myself a few weeks ago when I saw this thinking. I've been feeling terrible about my body not so much because I have about 15 pounds to go before reaching my pre-pregnancy weight but because I have no non-maternity clothes that fit me. I've been walking around in either my maternity jeans or pants that are cutting off all my circulation because they're too small, telling myself that I'll only go shopping as a reward for losing all the weight.

After everything that this beautiful body has done for me, I couldn't believe that I could be so relentless. I thought about that for a while. My body has been unwavering in its reliability, not only growing two beautiful kids, but putting up with years of mediocre diets, lapses in regular excercise, a ten year period of smoking and so many years of other minor abuses without so much as two days of sickness. And here I was refusing to accept it in this postpartum state and denying it the dignity it deserves to be housed properly.

So I went shopping. I bought jeans that fit and tops that were sizes that made me uncomfortable. I did it in a quest to be happy today. And I asked Shaune to watch the kids while I was gone.