Living a Still Life

I've been wanting to write a post about the title of this blog for a while. Still Life With Roses. The truth is, the meaning behind the title is a little cheesy, in an inspirational-poster-with-a-soaring-eagle sort of way. Or a monkey hanging on to a fraying rope. "Hang in there" and all that. The thing is, I feel like I've been living sort of a still life. Stagnant would really be a better word, but then it doesn't have the cute double entendre that "still life" does, and thus the title of the blog wouldn't really work. Although it could be "Stagnant Pond with Lilies" or something. Anyway.

I live a perfectly adequate, somewhat respectable, existence. I'm married to someone I truly love, and that's nothing to scoff at. We own a fairly successful business, we live in a cute little house with a big front deck, my sister and brother-in-law come over on Sundays for barbecues, my brother and I go kayaking together on weekends. Really, I have nothing to complain about...except that I feel like I'm living someone else's life. Or rather, my own life, but a life that should have expired, or grown or transformed or something a long time ago. Nothing happens for me. I've been trying to continue with my post-graduate education (I won't go into the specifics of it just yet) for years, literally years, but something--starting a business, completing surprise prerequisites, bureaucratic red tape--always comes up to postpone it. From the outside I'm a well-educated, world-at-my-doorstep young business owner. From the inside I'm someone unqualified for anything relating to what I really want to do, helping with a business that was my husband's dream. I feel like I have no more of a career than I did when I was a twenty-year-old waitress who slept in until noon and rolled into work at six o'clock in the evening. This isn't me.

Of course, the biggest roadblock in my life, the one that hurts so much that I have to pretend like it doesn't exist in order think about my life a year from now, five years from now, twenty years from now. I have no children, and it becomes increasingly clear to me each passing month that babies are not anywhere in my near---or maybe even distant--future. This was bearable when only a few people we knew had children, but now, when even my six-years-younger and unmarried (at the time) sister is surprise! expecting, and when meeting your friend at the farmers market, or a couple you've known for years at a baseball game, now involves spending hours with the object of your most secret desires, it has become a dominant factor in my life. I pretend not to hear when people ask me when our little one will be coming. I try not to act insanely jealous when my mom talks about my sister's baby, everything she has saved for her first grandchild, the room at her house that she's fixing for it. I try not to think That baby should be mine. I wanted it first, I wanted it so much. But each month slips away, taking with it the likelihood that my sister's baby will have a cousin its own age. So I smile, and knit my niece or nephew all the baby things from patterns I've been saving for my own child, and go overboard planning the baby shower so that no one will suspect how resentful I am inside.

What does this have to do with the roses? After all, the name of this blog is Still Life With Roses, not Still Life with Whiny Barren Bitter Lady. Well, here comes the aforementioned cheesy part. I needed a project for this year. This yet another year where school has been postponed, where no baby is expected, where no fulfilling and high-paying career is being offered to me. Really, I need something to make me...well, get over myself. I mean who out there is living their dream life? (Please don't answer if you are.) So this blog is my project. Something to make me realize than even in a still life, there are roses. (Hey, I warned you about the cheesiness.) So I want to write about the roses in my own life: my husband, my family, my knitting and books and garden. Okay, not my garden, because I don't have one, but if I make one, I'd like to write about it.