Ordinary moments

Lately I’ve been after an ordinary life. Dinner at In-N-Out (as ordinary as a burger nestled within twin leaves of romaine instead of a bun can be). 

Alright, it was Five Guys for their no-preservative fries. There I go again, optimizing. 

The point is I’d never taken my four-year-old son to eat fast food at the end of a day, him in finger-painted school clothes and me without a rush to complete our evening routine (that’s driven by a visual star chart I designed and laminated...).

He’s gone with us to plenty of restaurants: Ethiopian, Thai, Burmese, so much Mexican. It’s the Bay Area – his palate is vast, and how can’t I love that about living here? I find this especially true as someone who’d never tried sushi until making friends with kids from New Jersey in college. But no fast food? I’ve been (almost) missing these most ordinary of moments. And I know why. 

Everything in my elder-millennial life is optimized. I avoid fast food in lieu of higher quality fare that’s better for us. I streamline our evenings so our week driven by two working parents and our son’s full week of preschool and late-day care runs smoothly. I curate experiences that are additive to his life and ours – and fast food joints continuously don’t make the cut. Visits to science museums and steam train rides in the redwoods have. He’s done amazing things.  

But what about the unrushed joy of my son asking me to juggle salt packets? I want to make music with those tiny, paper maracas, tatting them across the linoleum tabletop purely for his entertainment – and I want the time to teach him how to squirt Heinz 57 into miniature hot tubs for our fries. 

What about buying new socks in a real store rather than having them appear on our doorstep, my son not any the wiser of how they came to be on his feet the next day? 

I’ve been feeling this lack of ordinary life has been my ultimate missed mark. I don’t want to optimize everything anymore. 

I don’t want to keep online-ordering a case of raspberry electrolyte pouches from a microbrand targeting thirsty mothers on Instagram. 

I want to just pluck a few Meyer lemons from a pot on the patio of our backyard and have enough time to notice when they tender on the kitchen counter so I’m signaled to slice and squeeze them into our waters. 

I want to design a life with enough room to buy those socks in person and eat from a paper bag of hamburger remnants and over-salted fries – and have the space and time to notice that the toasty golden color of the center of my son’s irises is the same hungry shade as mine.