Nobody Said It Was Easy

Sometimes I wish my life was more like an episode of 7th Heaven. That way everyone in my life would be dealing with the same problem at the same time and we would all have them fixed within an hour. Jessica Biel would suck for an older sister, though.

Timing life is tough. With cell phones, e-mail, facebook, and skype – the amount of contact I have with the Midwest Motherland is ridiculous. It is just that stuff has gone down recently back in Kansas that, for the first time, made me feel really far away. Right now all I want to do is go grab a beer with my people and talk it out, but I cannot, because I’m 1,700 miles away. Contact, people. Actual, real, physical contact – technology cannot give me that (yet). It can give me Tupac, but it cannot give me a hug.

Everybody knows it sucks to grow up, but then I watch this and I feel better.

Part of my stupor can be credited to my extra busy work schedule the past two weeks. In the last 120 hours (5 days) I have worked 63 of them (2.625 days).

I have officially worked more this week than not. Working the majority of my time and being too far from loved ones = being grown up? Boo.

There have been many questions about my job from many people. I have been purposefully vague and non-detailly about it for various reasons. A huge part is that it is not that exciting. I am just a nanny. I care for two great kids. A boy, R, who is 4 and a girl, W, who is 7.

It is a good job, but it is demanding. You probably gathered from the working all of the time part. Sometime it kicks butt, other times it kicks my butt, but since kicking butt is on my Life Resume I am keeping it together.

Recently a particularly difficult day presented itself. 11 hours into my 13 hour day, a 1/2 an hour 4 year old melt down occurred. The crying boy in my arms sang “Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be so hard” again and again (the kid loves Coldplay. Who can blame him?).

It broke my heart a little.

His sad lyric summoning was spurred by being refused pasta for dinner, which trivializes his application in some cases, but the music resonated with him. Someday pasta will be replaced by a girl, but for now dinner is what is important. It resonated with him. It resonates with me.

“Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be so hard.”

My mother always said that life would not be so difficult if we just stopped expecting it to be so easy. Well. I do not expect it to be easy. I have not for a long time. That does not mean I would not give a great many things to just be back home for awhile.