The Family To Be Day 28 SOLSC

Day 28 of the SOLSC writing challenge. Join us at Two Writing Teachers and share in the story and conversation. 

I remember sitting back as a young teen and wondering who I would marry. How many kids would I have? Would they be girls or boys? What would I name them? Where would this family to be live? What jobs would they trudge off to each day as my parents had for so many years? These questions seemed so distant, removed, and impossible to answer.

I can still see my teen self-sitting on the white canopy bed. The light blue bedspread with ruffles falling over the side as the colors faded into a dark navy and the bed became one with the carpet below. I would gaze at the yellow walls of my room as I practiced writing the names of my daughters to be, they were always girls in these dreams. Jennifer, Jenny, Faith, Hope, and names I have long forgotten. I wrote in my fancy cursive with colored pens, on colored notebook paper. I can see the pages scattered across my bed and hear the Stairway to Heaven playing on the eight-track.

That family to be has become, and we live in a home that we adore in the town where both my husband and I grew up. We have two beautiful girls who have none of the names above and a cat, which was never part of my family to be, but I wouldn't give her up for a second.  No one trudges off to a job. I leave the house each day to go to school where I am the teacher now, and my husband leaves the house every day to go to work as a cardiovascular perfusionist, a job I didn't even know existed back in the day of the family to be.

Now, I sit in my office, on my leather chair, writing about the family that came to be, listening to Acoustic African music on Spotify trying to remember that young teen. I can see her; I can feel the feelings she felt, but I am not her anymore. As the family to be became the family that is, the young girl became a mere memory.

As I type this, it sounds sad, but I want to end with saying, I am happy, happy as can be! In all my long afternoons of dreaming family dreams I never knew how complete a family would make me feel, and I wouldn't change a thing!

I love you Tim, Lexi and Olivia!