Deliberating Iowa While GQ Plays With a Fake Strawberry

When I was in highschool, I went to New York with my ballet studio. While we spent a lot of time dancing, we also visited some art museums. I came home with this print in my luggage:

Since I am not much of an art person, I cannot tell you why I feel the way I do about this painting. I simply always loved this painting. It held in it a kind of yearning that I felt inside of me.

What that yearning might be is completely beyond me.

Does it seem ironic that I might be moving someplace that looks like this? Okay, I think that it is supposed to be much greener in Iowa in the summer, but cover all that brown and yellow paint up with white, and put some mittens on the woman and I think you might have it about right.

Sometimes I am excited for that. Sometimes I am scared.

Perhaps that is what this woman is feeling.

I look at housing daily to get an idea of what is out there for whenever we make our decisions. There are lots of apartment complexes in the city in our price range, but it is hard for me to imagine living on the third floor without a washer and dryer with my three children.

Today I saw a "country house" in our price range with the kind of space I would really like. In my completely ridiculous way I imagined myself in this place.

Being able to let my kids out to play without worrying whether they were going to be hit by a car.

Trying a small garden.

Watching snow fall outside from the window. Oh, it definitely seemed poetic.

But then, wait. Watching snow fall outside from the window?

Watching snow fall outside the window. Watching it pile up, and lock me in my house, from the window?

Hmmmmm. Maybe this is not such a good idea.

But maybe it is.

I can hardly tell anymore.

Just like I can't decide if I would send E to kindergarten. In Iowa she is eligible, but only by days. And they have full day kindergarten. School from eight to three-thirty.

Other than the fact that M might die of boredom and loneliness, this does seem a little scary.

My little E, gone all day? Who would talk my ear off for the majority of the day?

Oh, I am feeling some angst. It's not teenage angst. It's mother angst. It's when did I grow up and have to make real decision angst.

It is what I see in that picture. It is in my heart.