What would you say to that girl?

My mind has been a maelstrom of regrets, dread, and frustration today because of my revelation that I won't be able to travel with my band...pretty much ever. In fact I fell into a bit of a depression about it. I drove up to Target again with the intention of having lunch and then cruising around the store just to get the hell out of the house with all the construction going on. But when I was in the restaurant I went to sit at a table for just a minute while waiting for my takeout food, and the man sitting at the table next to me took one look at my stroller, picked up his food and moved all the way to the other end of the place. I felt like walking over to him and saying, "I get it, you hate my kid." After that I didn't so much feel like shopping, so I of course got a drive through Krispy Kreme (and by "a" I mean "two"), ate them in the Men's Wearhouse parking lot in a shame spiral, and then drove home.

I knew some friends would be at a dance place tonight so I threw caution to the wind and went, despite keeping B out late, despite the bitter cold. And boy am I glad I went. I told a friend who has a grown son about my woes, and she said when her boy was young she had to miss out on a lot of dance teaching jobs for him, and it bothered her at the time, but she said she never regretted it, and actually feels all the better for it now because she feels she has been able to maintain balance in her life. And this is very true, she has. I always envied her back in the day having this nice home life when the dance world was so all-consuming and I had nothing else. She even said that when I sit at home watching all the pictures pop up on Facebook of some other singer with my band and all the awesome people looking like they're having an incredible time, to remember that most of them really want to be doing what I'm doing.

I often envy women who had their children young, because then they're still young when the kids are grown up, and then they're free to live out the rest of their lives, and never have to deal with the terror of never having kids, fertility issues, etc. But those women feel like they missed out on the best years of their lives. What would I say to that young girl with two kids? I would say thank your lucky stars you did this when you were young, when you had the physical energy to keep up with small children, that you'll never know the pinch of a needle with some fertility drug in it, or the worry of wondering what your genetic tests will reveal about the health of your "advanced maternal age" baby.

So along those lines, what would I say to myself, this 40-year-old new mother, depressed about missing out on some fun and lucrative opportunities, worried about disappointing people? I would tell that girl this: that your relationship with your son is the most important relationship in your life, that nothing matters but his well-being. That some day today's concerns will seem so petty and unimportant that I won't even care anymore. That I am so frigging lucky I got to have him at all. That I had twenty plus years of gadding about before I had him and I know damned well I'm not missing out on squat.

Today when I got home, before the workers knew I was back, I overheard this youngish guy with an ironic mustache up in the attic saying, "yeah man, this would be a SICK space for a little kid." All at once my bitterness fell away as I thought about how happy B will be to have his room up there, all the good times he'll have, and how fondly he'll look back on his childhood. And how I can show him pictures some day and tell him, "when you were just a little baby, I built this for you." Somehow going to Sweden next December just doesn't seem so frickin' important compared to that.