where I want to be

In college, I suppose I felt as though I would pursue a PH. D. and teach at the collegiate level.  After college, I surmised that I would attend graduate school and become a writer, a journalist or an interior designer.  Now that I am a mother and wife, I am perplexed.  I am unsure of what to dream.

I have a friend from college who followed her dreams; she met with limited success and is now scraping by.  I've lived well, married well and have two beautiful, well adjusted children and yet when I encounter this friend, I feel a failure.

It is not as though she is outwardly judgmental.  She does not rebuke me for my choices.  Yet, she asks what I have been doing and I watch as her eyes turn to a dull black when I explain my life.  I bore her.  She is careful, political with her inquiries.  I am dull.  I am patent.  I have not lived.

Do I feel this sting because secretly, latently I believe the same about myself?

What is it I would've chosen to do?  Act?  Write?  Legislate?  Am I smart enough to have made it on The Hill?  Persuasive enough to have made a living writing?  Believable enough to have acted?  I don't know.  Did any of those professions hold enough intrigue for me to follow them?  I am here.  THIS is what I do... I raise children and cook meals and love a man and drive to and fro and tend house... and occasionally write this blog.  Is that enough?  Is it enough for my friends?  For me?

This is not Sex And the City.  I am not Julie from Julie and Julia.  I don't have a following and I am not making money from what I am writing.  I am doing this for me.  I am writing because I need to, because I have something to say, a story to tell, something....because  I feel compelled to do so.

I didn't venture to Hollywood or New York.  I didn't attend casting calls or send out manuscripts.  I was too busy loving the people in my life and working to support myself.  I will never walk a red carpet or win a Pulitzer Prize.  Do my friends and loved ones think less of me because of that and if they do should they be friends or loved ones?

I am here.  As the Talking Heads so eloquently put it, Home is where I want to be but I guess I'm already there.  I'm here.  Luck, good fortune, coincidence, happenstance... whatever you call it.  I love and am loved.  And thats good enough for me.