What Plans?

Memory Lane is a slippery slope that I usually choose not to travel. I try to remind myself that at 55 years of age most people are struggling with the notion that they are getting older and their body is starting to do funny things compared to what their young body used to do. I will often find my friends trying to laugh off their sudden need for depends. Sometimes they are just surprised at their body having aches and pains in places they never knew existed. Their back aches or their hip aches or their hands become stiff with use. I don't deny that any of these people's aches and pains are real. I especially don't intend to trivialize what they are going through in comparison to an MS victim. But it does make me pause in my thoughts to wonder what is MS versus what is old age.

I said I wasn't going to travel that slippery slope that just ends up bringing me to tears, but I can't help pondering the what could've and would've been. What kind of person would I have been at age 55? I see commercials on TV for things to make house cleaning easier. Gadgets to make baking or cooking easier. I wonder if I would buy them, but then I remember that I wouldn't have all this time to watch TV and see the commercials because I would probably be working. And then I wonder, if I was still working, where I would be working? Would I still be an optician at Nashua Eye? If I was, I would be a senior optician, and I would be at the top of the pay scale at that practice. I would get four weeks vacation, and I would have wonderful benefits including healthcare and a retirement fund. But I was getting tired of that place, so maybe I would have moved on. Maybe I would just be working part time at a store because that's where my experience lies, but I had envisioned myself working in an office doing clerical work. Chris and I always said that we would work through our 50s and in our 60s we would travel. But first, still in my 50s I would go with him on his business trips. We would have that together time that we dreamed of.. We did everything right having our children when we were still young so we could be active at a still relatively young age. That was the plan

Also included in that plan in my mind I would do so much with my adult children. I would cook and clean for them still, but at their homes. I would buy them pots and pans and gizmos and gadgets. We would go to concerts and shop quaint shops on excursions and adventures. Chris and I would include them on some of our adventures, and they, in turn, would include us in their's. Oh the dreams I had and the plans I had made in my mind.

There would be weddings that I would plan with them. There would be babies that I would play with and help care for. We would take our grandchildren on adventures too. We would have toys in my house. I even had a plan that would change the configuration of my house to turn my walk-in closet into a playroom. Oh the plans that I had.

But now, as I sometimes always say "we plan and G-d laughs".

Just pondering what could've been, here alone in my Shalom Babayit.