One of Those Moments

Do you ever have one of those moments where everything just sort of stands still? Where something you see, or something you smell, or something you touch just makes the world stand still and suddenly you step outside yourself for a moment and look in?

I had one of those moments last night.

I should say that it was a particularly busy Sunday in which I literally ran around ALL.DAY.LONG. I was texting with a friend and tried to recall the last time during the day where I sat down (besides nursing The Girl) and I honestly could not remember. I don't think I sat down and took a breath all day long. Nothing horrible...just a busy Sunday for a single mom with two kids. Laundry. Food. Making baby food. Cleaning the house. Setting The Boy up with his paints. Changing a diaper. Making dinner for the next night...speaking of that, I HAVE to digress for a moment, sorry.

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I went out for lunch on a particularly lovely fall afternoon and decide to order some butternut squash soup. It was delicious. So delicious that I decided that I should make it for my family. The following day when I went to the store to buy the ingredients, I noticed that the lovely little pre-packaged chopped up pieces of butternut squash was not at the store that day. Then I saw these beautiful, large butternut squashes in the organic section. Can't be that hard to cut one up, I thought to myself. And I bought it. Then yesterday, during nap time I decided that I would cut up the squash so it could cook in the crock pot all day the following day (today). Holy shit people. Don't ever do that. If you can at all avoid it, do NOT buy a whole squash and commit to cutting it up yourself. It is HARD and big and very pumpkin-like and can I just tell you that it took the entire two hour nap time to cut it up and I ended up with blisters on my hands. I am not exaggerating. It was horrible. Don't ever do it. Currently my soup is cooking away so I cannot yet tell you whether it was worth it or not, but I can venture a guess. It was NOT worth it. No way that damn soup can be good enough to warrant that kind of work. Jesus...

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Okay digression over.

So after a very LONG day yesterday I was finally going to bed around 10:00pm. I stood in my room and looked up at my wall to see one of the holiday pictures we just recently had taken hanging in a frame in front of me.

And it hit me. Those are MY kids. I have kids. Two of them.

And I flashed back to when I was 12 and started babysitting and immediately decided that I would be a Mom. Not only that, I was going to be a great mom. The best mom. And I had a little slide show of my life. Going through High School, all the while babysitting. During college and after college and figuring out that I was gay. And the hardest part of that being that I wasn't sure how I was going to manage having kids while being gay. Then moving past that and knowing that I would have kids, gay or not. And then the road to getting there.

Meeting The Ex. Dating and talking about our future and the naivete of thinking we would just have a kid when we decided we wanted one. And then the long three year journey to getting our son. And then the breakup when he was 6 months old and how devastating that was and trying to come to terms with him being an only child. And then decided that damnit, he wasn't going to BE an only child. And then the journey of getting to my daughter. By myself. Just The Boy and me against the world. We fought to bring him a sibling. And we did it.

And they are here. And they are amazing. And they came from ME. They are MY kids. And I have dreamt about them for as long as I can remember. And they are here. And they are perfect.