I Wanna Go Back

Lately I've been reminiscing about the best of times and conducting a nostalgia campaign on my husband's Facebook wall, with posts like:

Let's go back to Guatemala.

Let’s go back to Italy.

Let's go back to Croatia.

It's not so much that I have the travel bug. Although I do… I've always had the travel bug. Obviously. But it's more that I want to go back to a different time….a time when life was easier.

I want to go back to a time when there wasn't so much laundry. A time when going to the bathroom didn't mean I’d come back to a box of raisins emptied all over the kitchen floor. A time when I didn't discover moldy fruit in the storage ottoman. A time when I could have a conversation with my husband without having to pay someone $15 an hour. A time before sleep deprivation, sleep training, toddler tantrums, breast pumping, diaper pail emptying, positive discipline, potty learning, mommy guilt, mommy fear, separation anxiety, screen time battles, school lunch packing and so on. A time when I wasn't perpetually exhausted and chronically overwhelmed.

Dan and I were together for 7 years before we started breeding. And we had a lot adventures during that time. On one of our trips, I remember talking to a relatively new dad who described his life as being “in the trenches." I naively thought he had a bad attitude. But now I get it. These early years are a kind of domestic war, a daily battle to obtain some semblance of order amidst all the chaos, a constant struggle toward achieving just a shred of balance. Yes, there are good moments, but the majority of it is work, plain and simple—physical, mental and emotional work with next to zero downtime. It will probably get easier at some point and I'll be able to see all the bad as worth it for the good. But for now.…

I just want to go back. I want to go back to Nicaragua.

I want to go back to Poland.

I want to go back to Oahu.

Maybe parenting wouldn't seem so hard if we hadn't had so much damn fun before hand!

Or maybe I am looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Of course I am. I’m focusing on the best of the best. I know there were hardships and challenges before I had kids, but they weren’t documented in the photographs, so it's easy to pretend they didn’t exit.

But still… can we please just go back to Bali?

Then again, Bali may have been what got us into this mess.

Back to Bosnia might be a safer choice.

(Yeah, that's really Bosnia.)

What about you... what do you want to go back to?