Every Other Week
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
THOUGHTS OUTSIDE THE OFFICE
My phone has apparently decided that I am not emotionally unstable enough on my own, so every few days it creates one of those little memory videos for me. I will be looking for a screenshot of something completely unrelated and suddenly my phone is playing sad music over pictures of my children, a sunset, somebody laughing in the car, a plate of pasta, and one of my daughters sitting inside a dog crate. Which, to be clear, was voluntary. I feel like that needs to be stated for both legal and parenting purposes.
And somehow, when all of those completely random pictures start rolling together, they look important. Almost cinematic. My phone takes what felt like a completely ordinary Tuesday and turns it into evidence that I was living a life I probably did not appreciate enough while I was standing in the middle of it. There are approximately nine thousand pictures of sunsets because apparently I believe each North Louisiana sunset may be the final sunset ever produced. There are car rides. There are blurry pictures taken through windows. There are kids piled around my kitchen table eating dinner off paper plates because, despite everything I have accomplished in my adult life, apparently matching dinnerware remains beyond my reach.
There are backpacks dumped everywhere. Cups that have somehow migrated into rooms where cups have no business being. Somebody is always missing a shoe. Somebody is always touching somebody else. Somebody is yelling that somebody looked at them. And there is me, usually somewhere nearby, saying something profound like, “I swear to God, if y’all do not stop.” These are not the moments I would have imagined framing, but lately they are the ones that scare me the most.
Because life did not turn out the way I thought it would. There. That is the sentence I usually try to make prettier. I could dress it up. I could say life changed direction, or this season looks different, or sometimes the path changes. But the truth is that some things broke. Some things disappeared. Some things I was absolutely certain would be part of the rest of my life are not part of it anymore. There are days when I can accept that with something resembling maturity, and there are days when I would very much like to file a formal objection with God and request reconsideration.
There was a version of my future that existed in my head for years. I knew what the house looked like. I knew who was sitting around the table. I knew what Christmas morning looked like. I knew where everybody would be on a random Wednesday night. Except I didn’t. None of us do. We spend so much time preparing for the life we think is coming that we can completely miss the one already happening.
Mine happens differently now. For me, motherhood has a strange rhythm these days: every other week. And I hate how much weight three little words can carry. Every other week means there are weeks when my house is full of noise and wet towels and arguments and questions and people asking me for food five minutes after they ate food. Then there are the other weeks, the quiet ones, when the house stays strangely clean and nothing seems to move unless I move it.
I used to think a clean, quiet house sounded luxurious. Turns out it is occasionally creepy as hell. There is no backpack in the floor to step over. Nobody is yelling “Mama” from another room with the urgency of someone reporting a major structural fire only to ask where the charger is. Nobody climbs into my bed. Nobody needs help finding something that is literally in their hand. Sometimes I stand there in all that glorious peace and quiet and would give anything for somebody to spill something.
That is the dangerous part of loving people, I guess. They become woven into the background noise of your life until one day the noise stops and you realize it was never noise at all. It was the soundtrack. So when they are here, I am trying harder to notice. Not perform gratitude. Not manufacture some Hallmark version of motherhood where everybody wears linen and we bake bread together while sunlight pours through the kitchen windows. Absolutely not. Half the time somebody is feral.
I mean notice the real thing. The kid across from me eating pasta off a paper plate. The ridiculous conversation happening in my car. The child who apparently looked at a dog kennel and thought, yes, this seems like a reasonable place to sit. The hand reaching across the center console. The wet hair after a bath. The sibling hug that will probably be followed within twelve minutes by a criminal accusation. The sunset outside the windshield while we are driving somewhere ordinary.
Because I know something now that I did not understand when my life felt more permanent: nothing is permanent. Not the bad parts, and unfortunately, not the good ones either. Children grow up. Houses empty. Relationships change. People leave. People die. Plans collapse. New people arrive. Sometimes you wake up inside a life you never would have chosen and discover that there are still pieces of it you desperately love.
That has probably been the biggest surprise. I can grieve what I lost and still love what remains. Those things do not cancel each other out. I can be angry that my children are not under my roof every night and still laugh until I cry when they are. I can hate every other week and also understand that every other week is not nothing. Every other week is mine. Those are my mornings, my car rides, my dinners, my ridiculous photographs, my sunsets, my “stop touching your sister,” my “where are your shoes,” my “why are you in the dog crate,” and my memories.
And I am becoming fiercely protective of them, because somewhere in the future there is a version of me who would sell a kidney to come back and sit at that messy kitchen table for one completely ordinary dinner. She would not care about the paper plates. She would not care about the laundry. She would not care that somebody left a cup in the bathroom or that the house was loud or that she was tired. She would just want everybody there.
So I am trying to remember her now, before the memory video, before the photographs become old, before the kids get taller, before the little voices change, before “every other week” eventually becomes something else too. I am trying to look around at the life I actually have instead of spending so much time staring at the empty spaces where something else used to be.
Look around your own life, not the one you planned and not the one you think you should have by now, but the one currently making a mess in your kitchen. Take the picture. Take the stupid video. Photograph the sunset again even though you already have 8,742 pictures of sunsets. Stay in the car for another minute. Listen when somebody tells you a story that takes approximately six years to reach the point. Let the kitchen be messy. Laugh.
Because sometimes the life you would never have chosen still contains moments you would choose again in a heartbeat. Mine does. Mine comes every other week now, and God help me, I am not going to miss it while it is here.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney At Law
Hampton Law Firm
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