…actually, i don’t have ‘em, those blues. what i have is something…unfamiliar.

(ducks, peers about waiting for rotten tomatoes to materialize from the wings. gazes earnestly at audience).

i feel like i’ve had the blues…baby blues…for four years now. or maybe fourteen, if we’re counting the general standard-issue blues…maybe twenty. the low-grade depressive feeling that all is about to go wrong, or at the very best is happening somewhere else and will never happen to me. the sense that the world is a zero-sum economy, and that i am lacking in capital and agency. i’ve spent my whole adolescent and adult life waiting for the next thing to happen; straining to be older, more credentialed, more experienced, more travelled, more…whatever. i’ve tried, worked hard, but seldom felt fully satisfied, content. i’ve always been looking ahead, nursing hopes close to my heart, hopes tied tight to old wounds and disappointments. i have been happy, plenty, but True Happiness has always seemed either a fiction or a destination still around the corner.

except suddenly, i’ve arrived. in the last place i expected. in the sanctuary of this house these past few days, stumbling about bleary and leaking milk like a firehose, i feel complete. saturated with grace as with bodily fluids…full up with all i could really ask out of life. i am, inexplicably, Truly Happy for the first time i can remember…content in the exact right now. i wipe faces and bums and sing the alphabet song and lullabies and try to catch sleep in the corners of the day and they look at me, these two little faces, and i catch my breath. mine, runs the small refrain lilting in the back of my brain, mine. they are mine. and they are precious to me, and for now, for just right now, they are here with me and i am at peace.

i’ve had wilder times, and more restful ones, sure. but this bounty…these two healthy children, after all the grieving and the longing and the coming to terms with the reality that fortune is a capricious bitch sometimes…this tastes like winning the lottery. this partner and this stable life i long thought would stifle and then thought would escape me is suddenly mine…four of us and a cat. i feel like frigging June Cleaver, and it feels weird. and simple. and good.

there are still plenty of things i want to do, sure. there are still sorrows knit to me, part of who i am…we had three children, four pregnancies, lost multiple dreams and cherished illusions along the way to where we are. but the old, familiar ache of something missing - something desperately wanted but likely just out of reach forever - is gone, wiped away. i have all i could ask for. and to my surprise - me who has always been hungry for more - it feels like enough.

this is a sea change, a self i do not know. in change there is usually loss, and i usually mourn, turn blue, keen and moan with the recognition of things past and gone forever. but this time, i just stand here watching, swaying with weariness…content and bemused and spilling gratitude like milk, wondering what the hell i do now, and watching the skies for shoes to drop.