Edgy Mama

I Heart Between

This summer I’ll have five anniversaries: five years married, fifteen years post-major life change, twenty years in Atlanta, thirty-five years since my dad died, and fifty years since I began time on this earth. Now those are all nifty numbers, each being divisible by five and all (and you’ll notice how I just swept right past the birthday), but I’ve been asked to write on the topic of /between/, so here goes.

Once I was between being born and losing my dad. Now I wish I’d paid more attention during those 15 years. I wish I’d done more, and been more. But I was just a kid.

Then I was between losing dad and finding myself. After college, jobs, and more college, I moved 500 miles from home and started a career. At 35, I turned over not just a new leaf, but a good sized forest. Then I was between finding myself and growing up. When I got married five years ago, I think I’d completed a sizeable chunk of the growing up.

Now I’m between fifty and…who knows what? I have hopes and dreams, and lots bigger shoes to grow into, shoes to fill with self-confidence and banishment of fear and doing the thing that I don’t believe I can do.
(Thank you, Eleanor Roosevelt!)

Aren’t we all between somewhere and someplace else? We keep reaching out, for the future, for friends and loved ones, for our dreams, for what we believe in. Between is where we spend most of our time. Between is all there is.

How can we think of in-between times as anything but a holding cell, filled with impatience, filled with wishing? It’s such a challenge to stay in the present moment. But I think I’ll start taking a few extra seconds to look around, notice more, see and hear and touch and taste and smell more. Maybe I’ll look for other patterns of five, like five bluebirds or five rose bushes. (Er…maybe not.) More opportunities may be ripe for the plucking if I just pay attention. (As a side benefit, I might remember whether I locked the door every time I leave the house.) The anniversaries might stop clamoring for attention every five years, and instead, I may start to really live while I’m between.