Midnight

On this border between, this winding down of our Life In North Carolina, I am out of sorts.  I wonder if we’ll ever be settled.  An investment in my future, this law school – a worthwhile endeavor, this moving/uprooting once again.  And I think to myself, yes – but when is future?  Will I know it when I get there?  We’ve been working hard, it’s been years.  I keep thinking we’ve landed on the life choice that leaves us working smart as well as hard, but it seems the answer is always no.  There’s the hard, and the work, but nothing gets easier.  When will I be able to enjoy a beer at a bar with my husband without calculating the credit card interest on the bill?  Thirty one years old, I’ll be, in a handful of months.  Thirty three, when out of law school.  Thirty four, once I pass the bar and can practice as a lawyer.  That used to sound so old.  Now I wish . . . I wonder what I would do differently about my career choices, if I could.  I wonder if my choices ever could have made a difference.

I feel breathless.  On the cusp.  But I know that change is always the same.  There is home, and hard work, and family, and comfort, and reward.  The particulars can vary from time to time.  The elements are static.

The first year of law school is supposed to be brutal.  We march toward it, we three – I drag my boys after me, determined.  I hope I have chosen a worthy home for us.  I am determined to prevail.  It is worrisome to me that I think in the vocabulary of war.

Unsettled, I wish that I could sleep.