Snowball Effect

As I turned on my computer today I realized that it had been a while since I had been on Pinterest. (Because Pinterest is totally lame these days.)

So I logged on to Pinterest and the first thing I saw was a picture of a hamburger that someone recently pinned.

I clicked on picture of said burger because, well, it's a picture of a delicious hamburger. Of course I am going to click on it.

But do you know who eats hamburgers? People do, that's who.

Consequently, clicking on the picture of a hamburger then led to pictures of people eating hamburgers.

But since eating a hamburger is the quintessential family gathering food of choice, I was then led to pictures of families eating hamburgers together.

Then it happened. I innocently enough clicked on a picture of a dad putting ketchup on his child's hamburger.

Then boom.

My screen is filled with pictures of fathers playing with their children and holding their babies. Oh my god the babies.

So. Many. Babies.

So many dads holding their babies. Picture after picture of fathers playing with their kids and spending time with their daughters and fishing with their sons.

So many sweet moments.

And then my ovaries exploded.

Seriously. I don't know what it is. Maybe it is part of being a girl. Maybe it is my age. Maybe it is just me. (It's not just me. It's not just me, right??) But I can scroll through picture after picture of babies for a solid 40 minutes. That's a really long time. But they're just so damn adorable. It's more than that, though. It's the fact that I now find joy in shopping for tupperware. Like, all things dishes and tupperware related just excites the hell out of me. I don't know if it's normal to find joy in buying plastic containers. But I do.

As I was thinking about this today, I realized that maybe it's about what the tupperware represents.

Because you see, when I look at tupperware, I don't see square plastic containers. I see organization and order. I visualize where these containers would be stored in the kitchen of my adorable future house. Then I think about what I would be putting in the containers. And obviously that would be the food I would be buying and cooking for my family. Oh, did you say family? Well let me just take that thought and run an emotional marathon with it. Family…ok, so that would be my husband and two kids. The kids would be about six and three years old at this point. Boy and girl, obviously. And I would put their lunches for school in the smaller square tupperware…. Wait, kids going to school? Packing lunches? Doing mom-ish type things? Having my life feel like it has some sort of purpose and rhythm and order and…oh…order.

That is what I am longing for.

Order is what I am longing for during this season of life where everything seems to be up in the air. When nothing is set in stone. When it is still just me trying to figure out what the heck I am doing or supposed to be doing and when I'm not sure what my role in life is right now. When I don't know if I am being productive enough in my day-to-day life or living with enough purpose. When I can't visualize what the next ten years (heck, the next ten days) might look like because when I look into the future and it is all…just very blank.

Tupperware represents the idea of a future that I am hoping for. It represents having something known, something concrete and solid. It represents having someone that you're navigating the unknowns of life with. It represents the hope of having little kids with sticky fingers and lunch boxes that have to be bleached for the 20th time because it has a funny smell (again) because the tupperware container leaked or just because there has never been a lunch box that didn't have a funky smell.

So when I see tupperware, I see life. I see a future. And I think that maybe if I buy that container…maybe I'll get that life too.