Nothing out of the ordinary here…

There was a time when I dreamed of a normal life…

I dreamed of a normal family, with a husband, 3 kids and a dog, a two-story house with a garden and a white picket fence around a lush green grass lawn…  I dreamed of living a comfortable life as a stay-at-home mother to calm, respectful, intelligent children.  I dreamed of family vacations full of laughter and excitement, and of sharing a love-seat with my husband as we watched our grandchildren crawl around on our living-room carpet. Now, I wasn’t naive.  I knew I wouldn’t get exactly what I dreamed of.  For a while though, I felt like I was on the way.  I married a good man and we started a family.  Life being as it is however, things changed and I eventually found myself a single mother to a teenager, a pre-teen, and an infant.

I am a firm believer that God has a plan for each of us, and everything we encounter happens for a reason.  Often those reasons are camouflaged in ambiguity, and sometimes they are revealed with a fair dose of confusion and shock.  My path has led me all over the world and left a wake of friends and family who are all cherished, despite what their current status in my life may be.  In the end, I am here, further from normal than I ever could have imagined.

What is normal anyhow?  In our world today there are so many ‘new’ normals that it is impossible to truly identify any one state or status as such.  Even so, I am convinced that my life truly defies any acceptable categorization within the modern wide range of normal existence.

So what is it that makes my life so distinctly abnormal?

I am the product of a Japanese father and a Caucasian mother, but I was raised by a Japanese mother and a Caucasian father.  I married a Japanese man and share 3 children and a surname with him but we are amicably divorced and living on opposite sides of the globe.  I found my soul-mate and true love through an online strategic war-game and learned that love has no physical boundaries.  My 3 kids and I joined her and her teenage daughter in their apartment that quickly went from ‘spacious’ to ‘cozy’.  Within months of the creation of our new family, we opened our home to another preschooler and his infant brother through an emergency family foster-care situation.   Not long after that, my middle son moved back to Japan to live with his father, and our two teenagers announced that they were now a couple.  So here we are, a multicultural, multinational, same-sex, blended, foster/adoptive family who will potentially become our own inlaws…  Did I miss anything?  …wait, yes I did…  Just in case our life wasn’t chaotic enough, we recently acquired a puppy…

If normal is ordinary, is abnormal then extraordinary?