Contentment or resignation?

You have to love the Canadian winter... no lasting sunlight, no reason to linger outdoors, just lots of shades of grey and plenty of time to think.

Shades of grey and time to think are a dangerous combination, I've decided. I've been giving lots of consideration to my living arrangements - not in a bad way, but I've been thinking about them all the same. Having a military spouse means I'm a de facto single parent quite often, and I sometimes wonder if he sees our arrangement as a sort of nice, comfortable hotel where the landlady knows how he takes his coffee. He stays here long enough to fuel up, then he's off somewhere else interesting, doing interesting things with interesting people, while I hold the fort. It's unsettling, to me.

I know he loves me, and I love him too, and our arrangement is far better than what a lot of couples have, no question. The upside of occasionally being a single parent is that I can serve the kids dessert for dinner (like I did on Valentine's Day) and there's no one to tut-tut me. There's no debate over discipline, there's no overreaction when the cat (accidentally, they swear) gets painted pink - that sort of thing. The down side is that I never really stop doing all the household heavy lifting - the scheduling, house maintenance, and living-being maintenance all fall to me all the time, and I find myself having to (unattractively) nag other people to pitch in.

So surprise, surprise - I'm smack in the middle of a traditional female role. The larger part of my brain knows this is typical and not undesirable, but the younger, less responsible part wonders if this is as good as it gets.

I am fairly certain it is - I am not a supermodel or Nobel physicist. I have medium-sized dreams and goals, and as far as those go I'm doing alright. (Apart from not having a real job, but that may yet come.) But some people are shocked to hear that I'm not going for the gusto, dropping everything in search of something greater... and I guess a part of me is shocked by that, too.

Then again, I wonder if I would know happy if it bit me. I think I'm happy now - actually I'm quite sure I'm what I'll call baseline-happy, but there will always be stresses and strains that operate outside of the normal range of happiness. And it doesn't take much to put me into Snoopy-happy territory, so I think that's a good sign too.

... I just kind of hoped that baseline-happy wouldn't also feel like baseline-60 years old.

Bah. That's the end of my first-world-problem rant.