The Fantasy

Oh, hi. Sorry I've been so gone here. Suddenly it's been over a week, just like that - POOF! - it's gone, and I haven't blogged even once. In that week we drove back to pick up my suddenly huge eldest son, and drove home, and dove head-first into a week of VBS, and Sophia learned to blow raspberries, and Tre turned 14 (!), and the boys had a piano recital (piano parents, back me up here - that alone was seven hours of forced labor, can I get an amen?), and all of this happened against the backdrop of baseball, the endless practice and games and my appreciation for the sport has officially gotten to the level that can best be described as white-hot hate.

Too much. I know for certain it's too much stuff in my life, and do you want to know HOW I know?

I'm having The Fantasy.

It's not "a fantasy" or even "the fantasy." It's The Fantasy. I'll be driving somewhere and stop at a red light, and the next thing I know, the light is green and the car behind me is honking like some madly maladjusted goose, because I am sitting there, lost in The Fantasy. Or I'll be chopping carrots for dinner, and I am lost in the images, a soft-focus slide show of the beauty that is The Fantasy, and I come to and discover I have reduced a perfectly respectable carrot into a pile of juicy orange shavings. Such is the power of The Fantasy.

Should I share it with you? It's rather personal...and sort of embarrassing...

Oh well, it would hardly be a blog without the personal and embarrassing, now would it? Fine then, it goes like this: *cue wavy lines and mystical music*

I have a pendant that I wear all the time. It's a heavy, ornately detailed golden locket. When people ask me about it, I smile enigmatically and shrug their questions away. Because only I can know the truth of the pendant. Every so often, when I'm all alone, I carefully click open my locket to reveal a gleaming mother-of-pearl button. All I have to do is sneak away, for just a moment, and press this button, and in an instant...everything stops.

The world goes instantly still, no wind, no traffic, no voices, no cars. Birds freeze and hang in midair, the dog barking incessantly two yards down stops mid-bark. The whole world has been put on pause, and the only moving thing is me. I take a deep breath, and curl up for a nap that will not be interrupted. When I awake (not a moment before I want to), I roll over and pick up the book that has been being  neglected beside my bed. I read and read and read, stopping only to pad out to the kitchen and gather snacks that I won't have to share.When I've finished the book, and not a moment before, I push out of bed, ready to engage in some sort of invigorating activity. I wander out to the yard, where I pull weeds for a while. The mosquitoes that dot the air around me, in suspended animation, can't bother me, and for once I don't feel like the weeds are growing faster than they can be pulled. When I'm done, with that happy sweaty soreness of satisfying achievement, I dump all the weeds in a bin, dust off my hands, and move back into the house...

It's at about this point that I snap to, suddenly aware that I'm fantasizing about SLEEPING. And DOING YARD WORK. Y'all, sometimes, in The Fantasy, I get caught up on laundry. I am not even kidding about that. It is PITIFUL.

So that's where I am, people. Running thither and yon, spinning plates and listening to my baby blow raspberries, and mentally escaping to a bright world where no one interrupts me while I...uh...weed the garden.

It just makes you proud to know me, doesn't it?

Comments

[Em]

I hear you. This is also my Fantasy. In fact, every time I have been asked what superpower I would choose (I'm asked this surprisingly often on facebook), this is it. There used to be a sitcom in the 80's on Saturday afternoons called Out of This World where a half alien/half human girl was given this gift. She wasted it! She hardly ever used it to sleep or get everything done in order to appreciate watching her children grow without a monkey on her back whispering "Laundry! Cluttered basement! Car inspection!". Granted, she was 13 and had no children but if she were a smart girl, she would have been practicing. Though to be honest, I think I would have to be convinced to start time backup again.

[Mir]

Totally. ;)

[Maggie]

huh. My child is 17 and doesn't steal my snacks or even talk to me much anymore and your Fantasy pretty much describes my perfect Saturday if you replace the nap with floatin in the pool while reading, and let me start the day with a cup of tea, harvesting veggies from the garden that will later be cooked up for dinner.

[Aimee]

You wild woman, you!

[Groovecatmom]

I was with you right up until the pulling weeds part. At least if I were dreaming it, I wouldn't get a backache from pulling weeds.

[erin]

There used to be a show on tv when we were little (early 80's) called Amazing Stories. It was a Twilight Zone wannabe, but had some pretty good episodes (or I thought so when I was SIX).

One of them was EXACTLY THIS. This woman had the ability to stop time by shouting something (can't remember, but it might have been "stop it!" or "shut up!" or something really creative like that). She's wander around the frozen-in-time world, doing a few things, arranging events & circumstances.

I think about it a lot.

[liz]

Hi, my name is Liz and I have a Fantasy problem.
I fantasize about sleep WHILE I'm going to sleep. About a bed that doesn't have clean, yet unfolded, clothes on the floor next to it, or dust on the nightstand next to it, or any amount of preschooler detritus lying around.
So, yeah, sometimes I fantasize about a hotel room.
Makes you feel better, doesn't it?

[Shelley]

I want one of those buttons.

Oddly enough, while commentors so far seem to have seized upon "The Fantasy", the line that caught my eye and kept me reading was the one about developing a white-hot hate for baseball.

I kept waiting for "The Fantasy" to get to the point where Little League was outlawed and we all got to eat dinner at 5:30 p.m. and then kick back with some TV after like normal people instead of inhaling our food at 4, packing the cooler, loading up the car, searching frantically for a single orange sock, driving across town hoping we wouldn't "hit" the 5 p.m. train, only to sit and watch 14 batters in a row walk to first base. In the first inning.

And I got news for ya, honey - they don't outgrow the baseball. No, they turn into older teenagers who coach, but still like Mom to come to all their games.

I suppose it could be worse - I hear hockey is a "cold" sport.