I love you because you often take me in the wrong direction….

It begins at an early age, very early. Which stuffed, silent friend is lucky enough to grace the pillow next to my head tonight? If I go downstairs in shorts, will mom let me all to school even though it’s snowing? Which shirt matches these pants and shoes? Which perfume should I wear? What will happen if I say no? What classes should I take? Should I say yes to him? What should we name her? It goes on. Our entire lives are made of choice after choice. Like a road that has a split in it every 5 feet, sometimes every 2. The direction and destination it could go is limitless, based on the choices we make every day. The big ones are usually noticeable and some even have trouble picking one over the other. They are the ones we consider to have the largest impact on our lives. Should I take this job? Should we move here? Should I have a baby? Those usually require some real independent thought. Maybe even some outside perspective, if that’s something you do to assist in your choice. You can usually look back in the big ones and see more clearly if what you chose was your ‘right’ answer or If the other road would have been better. Then there’s the choices that you make that lead you to a road that only has one fork here and there, and even those options are few and far between. How do you turn around and go back to a less restrictive road? Or the times when the road is chosen for you? Or when you feel like you have to choose the nicely paved road because those riding with you couldn’t handle the rough, bumpy, under construction road? What about the little choices, the ones that you make without thinking? The ones that long ago have become second nature, automatic. You choose what you have chosen over and over again because it’s familiar, you know what’s over the hill, or around the corner. When you come to the fork in the road and the big tree at the split has a tire swing on it, you don’t have to think about it, you know you’re going to turn right. When did those choices become so… Automated, brainless, subconscious making choice after choice based on what someone else wanted me to do, or the least resistant path. I’m a mom, so many of those choices have been and will be with my many passengers in mind, but… What if every time I turn right without thinking it’s actually taking me further and further from the destination I have been trying to reach on the left? The destination that I know I want to get to, but still am not sure what it looks like or where the road beyond it leads. What if I make some of those small, insignificant choices differently? It will be unfamiliar, and I’m sure uncomfortable. But as of now, I have made many, many choices that have made things unfamiliar and definitely uncomfortable. What kind of adventure could I go on, if I started choosing the directions based on my own thoughts and feelings? I made a series of choices that have led me to this point. A fork, more than a fork. A split in the road with hundreds or choices, all unknown, equally exciting, equally terrifying. I am who I am because I chose the green shirt instead of the blue, and pigtails instead of a ponytail years ago. Since then I have made a countless number of “harder than they should have been choices” and a few ok ones. I’ve often wondered looking back if I had chosen differently, what would I be like now, who would I be. Would I be faced with the same hundreds of options as I am now? Some of these roads will lead to happiness for the rest of my life. Some, I’m sure, are detours, just like many of the ones behind me have been. Also, what if I only have a certain number of choices left, and when I reach the number, that’s the destination, whether I like it or not? Why is making decisions so stressful? Eenie meenie miney mo is starting to look better and better…