Wishing I Were Someplace Else

This article inspired me today, because I can emphathize with wondering why I feel more alive when I am alone than with my family. The author of this article had taken a few days away from her family to spend alone at a spa (how I wish I could do that!) "Why do I feel more alive when I am running in an empty field or climbing rocks at dawn?" the author asks herself. I have asked myself similar questions many times.

She writes, "I realize that for the first time in a long time I feel...alive, and I ask God, 'How can a person who wants to climb mountains stand in a kitchen and make scrambled eggs? How can a person who longs to run for miles and miles sit in the living room and help with homework, clean up spilled milk and change endless, dirty diapers? How can a person who graduated from an Ivy League university, who wanted to save the world, who spoke in front of hundreds of people, how can she spend most of the evening packing lunches, setting up outfits, reading bed time stories, saying Shema, reading another story, getting another cup of water, and just one more story and....now the baby is up. What do you do when you would rather go sky diving than wake up sleepy children, make breakfast, brush wayward hair and walk to the kindergarten on the corner?'"

After more reflection, she finds her answer: "The same energy I use to reach the top of a mountain, I can use to listen to my child. The same way I can run until I am one with the wind, I can stretch my soul until I am one with His Will. Using the same mind I used to get an 'A' on an Organic Chemistry exam, I can manage my household as if it's one of the Fortune 500s companies."

She meets a 65 year old woman at the spa, and they begin to talk. The woman wishes she could do it all over again. "Do what again?" The older woman answers: "'Raise my children again. I spent all those years wishing I was somewhere else and now that I'm somewhere else, I would give everything I have to go back and be a better mother. We wish away those years, only to beg for them back.'"

I want to save my best energy for my family. It's so hard, but when I'm 65 I want to look back and say that I gave them by best. I gave them 100%. I'm not there yet. But I will keep trying.


Read the author's complete article here: http://www.aish.com/societyWork/women/Date_with_Myself.asp