Twenty Years

This morning.  How can I get up at 6:30am and not have enough time to do everything that getting ready for school and kindy entails?  I only have to get myself showered and dressed, feed four mouths, pack two lunches, oversee personal grooming, the packing of bags, morning chores, and get up to the walking bus by 8:25.  It's not like I'm running a marathon or anything.   But could I do it?  No.  We finally got in the car at 8:28 (I thought it was five minutes earlier than that) and raced up to the walking bus, yanked the buggy out of the car, popped the baby and Greer in the seats and dashed across the road to lead the waiting group down the hill to school.  We were embarrassingly late.

The problem is that we are often late by at least a moment.  Mornings are a mission. I've tried tick charts, motivational sticker charts, showering in the evening, changing the order by which I do things... and some of those things help some of the time, but I've found no magic formula.  Every morning is just so different.

I saw Isobella off to her classroom and walked back up the hill with a heavy heart.  I was wracking my brains, trying to lay the blame somewhere.  Was it just my slackness?  Was lateness somehow tied up with one of the seven deadly sins and should I be going to confession?   Should I abandon the walking school bus, even though it allows me just to drop Isobella off most mornings, and usually only walk it once.  Or should we just pack up and sell our house and move nearer the school, right next door preferably, ideally on the side her classroom is on so I can just hoist her over the fence in the mornings....

On the drive back home I got thinking about a news item I saw last night.   A woman who has been partially disabled for twenty years following a brain haemorrhage and appears to be confined flat in her bed, has been refusing to eat for eleven days.  Her estranged husband was shown tearfully expressing his grief that the rest home she is in seems to be supporting her death wish.  As I was driving it suddenly dawned on me that this woman, who was once an attractive woman, full of life (we saw a photo of her in her thirties, perhaps), has for the last twenty years been lying in a bed barely even able to communicate.  For her, every day of the last twenty years has been identical. 

In the last twenty years I have finished secondary school, completed two lots of tertiary education, travelled overseas several times, worked in three completely different jobs, got married, had three children, bought two houses and sold one, been a landlord, started writing a novel, dreamed, longed for, wished, and made many things happen, and mostly, grown up.  From sixteen to thirty-six.  While this woman has done not much more than exist.

I am so grateful for this life.  This life with its crazy unpredictable-ness and with all its responsibilities and the rewards that follow.   How lucky I am to have things to be late for...  to have a (mostly!) sound mind and a very able body that can coral children and buggies at high speeds, that can walk down steep hills breathing in crisp nearly autumn air and then bend to kiss my daughter as she enters her classroom.  Not one day of the last twenty years has been the same.   Every day a new day, each one full of possibilities and challenges.   But who has faced the greater challenge, in those twenty years?  Me, with my jobs to do, deadlines to meet, events to arrive on time to, relationships to negotiate and children to care for, or that woman, lying in her bed, living in that strange, unknown space between this world and the next, not fully in this one, and yet not released to enter the next?  She is the hero.