Living in the Epilogue

I'm living in the epilogue.

What all the romance novels are built off the desire to have is what I have now.

I am happily married with a wonderful 2-year-old and another baby on the way. We live in our dream house that we built ourselves from nothing but studs (literally no water and only one electrical outlet with the eave open like a giant bird house). Our little moyen poodle is leaving the puppy stage and is almost completely trained (unless my grandma shows up, then she jumps all over her). I work in the job I dreamed about having since I was a child and get to watch young people fall in love with reading and writing every year.

As I type this via speech-to-text (the method through which I live my writing life these days), I'm standing in my kitchen slicing strawberries while supper cooks on the stove. The window over the sink is open to let in the warm spring breeze and with it comes the laughter of my daughter as my husband pushes her in the swing standing in the backyard.

The goal of every character I've ever written or read about is staring me in the face, and I couldn't be happier.

Sometimes it's hard to remind yourself that these everyday moments are exactly what you've always wanted. My two best friends are laughing and playing in the backyard while I grow my next best friend in my stomach and slice strawberries that will turn into splashes of red and pink on my daughter's chin and shirt front. When the day is over, I'll spray stain remover on the clothes and wash away the evidence of today.

When my grandkids ask me, decades from now, what my favorite memories are, I hope I remember to mention these moments. The mundane tasks and joys of each day. Not because they are anything significant or super powerful, but because enjoying and acknowledging them is essential to surviving the less than epilogue-like days.

Don't mistake this post as bragging about my life. There are certainly days when my 2-year-old is God sending me a little ounce of payback for the attitude I gave my own parents as a small person. Some days my husband drives me absolutely bananas and makes me want to throw a tantrum like the ones my daughter is beginning to grace us with. And let's be clear as crystal here: working as a middle and high school English teacher in a public school is no walk in the park.

What I'm trying to get at here is that when I close the romance novel I've just finished reading where the main characters are smiling down at the child their love has created in the house of their dreams and look around my own world, I want to remember that I am living in my own personal epilogue.

This is my Happily Ever After.