You Might Pass This Way Again

Today I had a strange experience.  Okay, I often have strange experiences because, well, that's life surrounded by boys in their varying states.  Today's strange experience, for once, didn't have anything to do with them, Angry Birds, or the stupid Internet connection.

In my other life--the one where I'm not writing and yelling and endlessly picking up socks and Legos, etc.--I am a birth worker.  People actually pay me to come watch them give birth.  I mean, I'm supposed to be calming them down and stuff, but if I didn't already do this for a living, I'd probably not believe it, either.  But I digress...

This morning I was called to do a home visit with one of the midwives I work with.  At a home visit we are checking out the lay of the land and what supplies the family has gathered to welcome their little bundle of joy in the comfort of their own casa.  Shoelaces?  Check!  Boiling water?  Check!  When the midwife told me where this family was located, I was elated.  Almost literally a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Ohboyohboyohboyohboy house.  That like NEVER happens.  Literally, everything is 30 minutes away from me, if not more like an hour.  There's not much more irritating to me than when someone complains about having to drive somewhere 15 minutes away.  It practically takes me 15 minutes to get to the end of my street! I have to trek everywhere, and I'm pretty ticked off that I've seem to have misplaced my sherpa somewhere along the way.  I guess even he was getting tired of all the driving....  But, again, I digress.

So, I drive to this house.  I already know exactly where it is based on the street name, even though I've never been there before or even heard of the street.  It's like a really, really identifying name--like if you lived in the middle of an apple orchard and you lived on "Orchard Lane".  This particular subdivision was built in an old stone quarry, so you can do the math on this one.

I pulled into the drive and looked across the street to a big pond.  That's when the deja vu hit, big-time.  As a bratty teenager, I'd ridden one of my horses here.  It was still a stone quarry then (and, honestly, way cooler than the subdivision, no offense suburbanites!), and the water used to collect right about where the pond is now.  A good friend and I had bravely waded our horses into this water, somehow, and lived to tell the tale.  Now that I think of it, I am pretty sure that was the one and only time I've been able to take a horse in water deeper than a couple of inches.  If I tried that with my horses now, I'm pretty sure I'd be the one wading and the horse would be clinging to my back.  Yeah, it's like that.

I remember going home that evening and telling my mom about our riding adventure.  Her eyes widened in horror and she shrieked, "That's so dangerous!  Those quarries can be hundreds of feet deep!  You could've been sucked all the way to the bottom!  Doom and gloom!  DOOOOOM AND GLOOOOOOOOM!"  That's my mom, Mrs. Worst-Case-Scenario.  I love her, I do.  And now I always wear my riding helmet and worry about liability releases.  I'd say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but falling is dangerous and someone could sue.

Anyway, coming across this place again felt so significant, especially on the heels of a day where I was feeling like it was all wrong, wrong, wrong.   The quiver in my tummy made me feel like I was on some kind of sacred ground taken over by minivans and landscapers.  Maybe I'm in an odd place in my life where I'm looking for a deeper meaning in things that really don't have one.  I dunno.  What I do know is that in a few weeks I will be part of a birth team welcoming a baby into this world in a place I remember so vividly from such a different time in my life.

Part of me wishes I could go back, like some kind of weird time warp that only happens when a lady has a baby surrounded by hoodoo witch doctors (that's me, right????).  I'd like, again, to sit astride the horse that I never really knew how to care for or even appreciate as a kid.  I'd like to hug my friend one more time, knowing I'd probably see her and her spirited grey mare in a day or two.  I'd like to tell myself that things all work out in the end, and not to waste my energy on the people who weren't wasting their energy on me.  I'd like to be reborn.

But I can't be reborn--not in the way I wish I could--and I guess that it's okay.  I'll live, though some days it feels a lot less likely than others.  In the end, I know that's just my overactive imagination and jumpy nerves from a house full of whiny ohboys talking.
If you could go back, would you?  If so, what time would you relive if you could?