I Have Lost Easter

I have lost Easter. It feels like it happened fast. Easter is Sunday and today, Wednesday, as I was vacuuming the couch (I vacuum our couch a lot now that I don't work full time, which is odd because for 25 years I worked full time and never vacuumed our couch and we survived just fine, but now I vacuum it with an alarming frequency)  it hit me...I have lost Easter.

In reality I guess I've been loosing it since last Easter and also in reality, I guess I knew that I was loosing it, but today it hit me.

Ever since my married life, Easter has always been a chaotic holiday for me. Years of small children, Easter Bunny responsibilities, Easter Day travel, church responsibilities, and full time work the Friday before Easter, as well as the Monday after.

Easter was my first holiday with my husband's family when we were dating. Huge family. Huge get together. Cousins and aunts and uncles and, and, and...huge! My previous Easter holiday celebrations consisted of maybe 6 people, 10 on a big year. I don't know if he warned me or not, in reality there was probably no way to warn me. I maybe spent some time in the back bedroom or bathroom trying to breathe a little. But it quickly and happily became my norm.

Easter was our first married holiday together, falling a week after our wedding and one year we would take a week old baby to Easter. This is a great memory of church with my husband's parents in the morning and then pictures of a great, great aunt holding the baby.

As the girls grew up and we kept adding children to our family there were years of finding and buying coordinating Easter dresses, finding and buying basket goodies, preparing and dying Easter eggs, and the list goes on. Lots of fabulous pictures of it all with the girls in the dresses (in teen years the dresses are replaced by jeans and shorts that I begged not to be too tight or show butt cheeks, often to no avail)  hunting for the eggs. Pictures with their cousins, pictures with aunties, pictures with uncles, pictures with grandma and grandpa and family pictures of the 6 of us where I look a little tired (and by tired I mean exhausted).

College senior, our San Diego girl, didn't come home last year and isn't coming this year. There is a job and a boyfriend now. College freshman, our New York girl, isn't coming home either. Too far and she loves being in New York at all times. The high school Jr. (looking at out of state colleges) is on limited time for sure and the five years I have left with the 8th grader will fly by.

I'm not sad. I raised them this way. I wanted them all to have a big world view away from their small town. And when you raise them that way...you are going to lose some things. This year, I lost Easter.
I am hanging on to Thanksgiving by a thread, but only because we have started rotating traveling to where the college girls live. I still have Christmas.

I know what kind of day Saturday before Easter is for lots of Moms. You are busy putting together everyone's Easter outfits (all but yours, because you didn't have time for you, so about 10 tonight you are going to be in your closet dealing with the fact that you have nothing or that what you do have doesn't fit from last year, or it is black). You are trying to get the baskets finished and yelling at your husband to please run out and get just a couple of things (he will return triumphantly 4 hours later after a "quick" stop at his office with the Hershey bunny and a bag of ice feeling that his contribution is equal to the 52 hours of prep work you have put into getting ready for Sunday). You are boiling eggs and setting out a nice display of egg dye for your children to color the eggs (I have pulled the same egg dye out two years in a row, no one even notices it). They will be grateful, not ask any questions about why you did not buy a different type of dye kit or when will this be over so they can return to Youtube watching. You are taking phones away so that there can be actual focus on Easter play lines that need to be learned for church the next morning. You are cooking at least one side dish, probably your husbands favorite while he says things like, "should that have more salt?" Even though he himself has never made the food item. You are doing all this and a million more things.

You will do all this and then, it will be lost. This year the Easter bunny here got a basket of goodies delivered to the dorms in New York, the bunny will venmo something down to San Diego and he has two baskets almost ready to go for the residents here (maybe new baskets because he was too lazy to go to storage for the ones he kept for years that he may have thrown away in disgust...he just isn't sure). I am making side dishes, in my kitchen, as opposed to buying something and sticking it in our own dishes like, say a a subway salad that we may or may not have stopped to buy on our way to Easter some years.

So we will only be a family of four for the picture I force everyone to take this year. The upside...I won't look tired and our couches are very lent free!