Floating

When she thought of all the jobs she had worked in her life, it amazed her how she had wasted so much time, how so much effort could add up to so much nothing. At 25 she held her eclectic, free-spirit resume as a badge of honor, a sign of her anti-establishment, populist leanings. Now it felt debilitating, and each day of her third pregnancy brought with it the continued growth of a vague, queasy fear that she could end up, after years of allowing her children's needs to walk all over her dreams, with grey hair and a job unpacking socks in a backroom of Nordstroms.

Stop. Focus on the dream, she thought. What dream? another part of her replied seamlessly. So many, so scattered, started and explored to the point of fear, then abandoned as too ambitious, too marginal, too irrelevant, too expensive, too boring, too risky, too inconvenient. Too difficult. Ouch. That was the key, wasn't it? The avoidance, it all came down to a fear of failure, a desperate hope that maybe in her next life, she'd learn better earlier faster more completely how to be a good person mother artist. But what if this is it?

Before she could begin to address the terrifying nature of that thought, the light changed and she cursed inwardly, realizing that she had just missed the turn-off for the preschool. Late again. She sighed and swung the car around.