The Park
Every Friday I take my son to the park after school before we make our usual trip to the grocery store. Mostly we go to my son's favorite park in our old home town that is a few miles from our new hometown. Not that he remembers the old home town since we moved from there a few months after his first birthday. But, nonetheless, this park has become his favorite park because of the big slide he says.
So, lately on our Friday afternoon visits the park has become overrun with toddlers and their father's. I am guessing that they are stay at home dads although I could be wrong but that is my best guess. Usually, I am one of the few, two or three mom's there. So, while pushing my son on the swing one day and encouraging him to pump his legs so I could sit down and just watch for a change I started to think as I sometimes do while we are there in the park. I think about a lot of things mainly because I rarely have a chance to just relax and think during the rest of the week.
So, I am sitting there thinking and I am thinking about family. I am thinking about the family that I had fantasied about when I was 10 sitting on the front porch in the summertime with my sister and cousin who would come and spend the summers at our house. We would talk about what we were going to be and do when we grew up. My cousin who was the oldest of four kids and was the one to always have to babysit in her family would say that when she grew up she was going to get a car with only two seats, a sports car, so she wouldn't have room in to take anyone but her husband, none of her brothers and sisters. We would laugh thinking of her driving a red sports car in the next 10 years in the future. My sister wanted 4 kids, all girls. She had 3 kids, all boys. All of us wanted to be married and have these children with our husbands and stay married for 50 years like our grandparents.
Our futures didn't come out exactly like we had planned. My sister didn't get married to the father of her children. She married someone else when she was in her late 30's and my cousin, had 3 kids also and for a brief period of time she married the father of her youngest two. She never got that sports car but later in life she did manage to get a car. That car could fit all of her kids plus two extra people.
So, as I was sitting there in that park that day just watching my son swing and laugh as he got higher and higher and as I looked around at all the dad's and their kids running around laughing and screaming and the dads sitting at the picnic table exchanging stories about their kids, I was thinking about how my life would have been if I had gotten married to my son's father and how different it would be, if it would be the 3 of us in the park watching our son swing and laugh. Then I thought how lucky I am to be the one to sit there at that very moment and watch his swing, pump his legs and laugh the higher he went on the swing trying to touch the sky. Would I change the way things turned out for me? Maybe. Then again I don't think so.
So, lately on our Friday afternoon visits the park has become overrun with toddlers and their father's. I am guessing that they are stay at home dads although I could be wrong but that is my best guess. Usually, I am one of the few, two or three mom's there. So, while pushing my son on the swing one day and encouraging him to pump his legs so I could sit down and just watch for a change I started to think as I sometimes do while we are there in the park. I think about a lot of things mainly because I rarely have a chance to just relax and think during the rest of the week.
So, I am sitting there thinking and I am thinking about family. I am thinking about the family that I had fantasied about when I was 10 sitting on the front porch in the summertime with my sister and cousin who would come and spend the summers at our house. We would talk about what we were going to be and do when we grew up. My cousin who was the oldest of four kids and was the one to always have to babysit in her family would say that when she grew up she was going to get a car with only two seats, a sports car, so she wouldn't have room in to take anyone but her husband, none of her brothers and sisters. We would laugh thinking of her driving a red sports car in the next 10 years in the future. My sister wanted 4 kids, all girls. She had 3 kids, all boys. All of us wanted to be married and have these children with our husbands and stay married for 50 years like our grandparents.
Our futures didn't come out exactly like we had planned. My sister didn't get married to the father of her children. She married someone else when she was in her late 30's and my cousin, had 3 kids also and for a brief period of time she married the father of her youngest two. She never got that sports car but later in life she did manage to get a car. That car could fit all of her kids plus two extra people.
So, as I was sitting there in that park that day just watching my son swing and laugh as he got higher and higher and as I looked around at all the dad's and their kids running around laughing and screaming and the dads sitting at the picnic table exchanging stories about their kids, I was thinking about how my life would have been if I had gotten married to my son's father and how different it would be, if it would be the 3 of us in the park watching our son swing and laugh. Then I thought how lucky I am to be the one to sit there at that very moment and watch his swing, pump his legs and laugh the higher he went on the swing trying to touch the sky. Would I change the way things turned out for me? Maybe. Then again I don't think so.
