Forgetful Jones and the Extra Post About Nesting

[mousme]

It occurs to me that I may have to find myself a "Forgetful Jones" icon from Sesame Street. So many icons, so little space and time. *sigh*


I am not sure whether I should be writing about this. It seems, well, kind of premature. Not to mention it feels a little bit like I'm exposing part of myself that I've always kept a little sheltered from the cold wide world. But then again, I think that may just be my paranoia talking.

I had a little bit of a crisis in May of 2005, directly after coming back from the Rural Wastelands, better known as the home of prolixfootle (*waves* Miss you, sweetie! Start posting again!), and detouring by the Godforsaken Howling Wilderness to visit with wultabat and looking4wings. It wasn't a bad crisis. Nothing crazy-making or anything like that. Just a... I don't know. A panicky realization that I was 26 years old and was nowhere near doing anything with my life that made sense.

While I was out there, I remembered quite suddenly a whole lot of things that were important to me: my friends, my family, and being out in nature. It's not that I didn't know any of these things before, it's just that I had let all of my priorities get out of whack for, oh, three or four years while I sorted out the crazy in my head. Once that was sorted out, everything else came swooshing back in with a vengeance.

I have to admit to wanting to be involved in social and ecological activism for purely selfish reasons. I've always, since I was a little girl, wanted to live in the country. The city, for all that I love it in its own way, makes me feel trapped and claustrophobic after a while. So I want the whole world to collaborate so that I can live my little dream in a small house, unencumbered by pollution and socio-political wank.

In essence, for the past two years, I've been fighting off an ever-growing nesting instinct. I want to have a house, and I want to fill it with pets and children. Two years ago I had no money. I was in debt, in a dead-end job with no prospects of anything ever getting better. Things have changed since then, obviously. I'm still not well off, but I'm better off than I was. Still, at best I will have to be content with delayed gratification when it comes to having a house. At worst, and this is what I see on bad days, I will be stuck renting a three-room apartment for the rest of my life.

I know things could be much, much worse. I am grateful for what I do have. But occasionally I do feel the lack of a home filled with family and friends, quite keenly. It's a gnawing, aching void, and there are moments when I wonder if it isn't going to tear me apart.

Comments

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

Ah, the quarter-life crisis. I remember it well. :-P

These days, it's apparently pretty common.

[pasley.livejournal.com]

Would that it were simply a quarter-life crisis! I am close to ten years older than mouseme, I have a partner and a child and am very happy with my family. . . but not owning a house and a garden ("by a lake or river or ocean!" she dreams) gnaws at me frequently.

It doesn't help that, at my age and stage of life, I'm pretty much expected to have a house. I have even had individuals reproach me for raising my daughter in an apartment! (That's when I'm not being chastised for raising her as an only child.)

Mouseme, I hear ya, and I sympathize. There's a reason why Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is my favorite poem, especially the final stanza: "I will arise and go now, for always night and day/ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,/ I hear it in the deep heart's core." I love the city, but . . .

[conscioussoul.livejournal.com]

What about being 34 and not having a family? A woman I really want to share my life with? Children? Sadly, it seems i'll be able to reach the house goal faster than the familly goal. What's broken with me?

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Nothing's broken, sweetie. I know lots and lots of people (men especially) who didn't get married until their late thirties and who are now happily ensconced in family life. :)