These past few days Eva has had her friends over for various activities. There was the soccer party on Saturday and then on Sunday I taught a craft class in my art studio for a bunch of Eva’s friends. On both occasions I got to eavesdrop on the girls’ conversations as if I were a fly on the wall and they had forgotten that I was there. I learned all about the girls who dress like sluts, how much they like/hate school. How much they like/hate boys. And how much they like/hate just about everything else. And of course, they all love Zak Efron and some other music CD that Eva says she will love for all of eternity. (I can’t remember that one.)

Most of this talk I kind of tune out as adolescent chatter and let go in one ear and out  the other. ( I do, however, draw the line when I hear mean things said about other girls. I don’t care  how slutty they dress.) My ears perked up though when I heard Eva’s friends gushing over how much they liked our house. “You’re sooo lucky. You’ve got such a cool room. I wish I had a trampoline. Wow, what a cool art studio!”  Eva’s friends oohed and awed as they walked through the house.

And it’s true. Thanks to my handy engineer do-it-yourself husband with his passion for renovation, we do have an awesome house. There’s a gigantic great room with a large wall for projecting movies. An outdoor fireplace, a carport/game room complete with ping pong table and pool table, a hot tub, a trampoline and a separate art/craft studio (with radiant floor heating) that my husband built for me when we got married. Do my kids appreciate any of this? Not to my knowledge.

You see, I had to drag them kicking and screaming into this house. They. Did. Not. Want. To. Move. Period. The divorce was no where near as upsetting as the trauma of the remarriage and subsequent move. They missed their old house. We were a family there. Their dad had built them a play house in the back yard and they had chosen the colors for their rooms. They mourned the loss of what used to be and romanticized something that was never really that great. Mommy and Daddy weren’t very happy there. The standing water under the house made it moldy, the pastel pink that looked great on the paint chips looked like Pepto- Bismol on the walls,  and they never actually played in the play house because it was too hot and too small. Can I tell them that? Nope.

I think, I hope, that Eva got a different perspective when she heard how much her friends envied her. Sometimes that’s all it takes, a different point of view to make you realize just how lucky you are.