“Hodge Podge Life”

A few months ago, I was thinking about how my life has become so different than what I’d imagined it would be. I thought I would get married, graduate from college a year later, work for a few years, and decide to have a baby or four. I thought…well, I don’t know if I know what I thought. I don’t quite remember.

Things happened differently than what I’d imagined, irregardless. I got pregnant immediately after Dan and I married. And I think everything has been in a bit of a tizzy since, to be honest. A beautiful, chaotic, lovely, scary, tizzy.

Or a Hodge Podge. I don’t quite remember how or when that word came to me (to be clear: the correct spelling is “hodgepodge”, but because I like it broken up into two words”Hodge” and “Podge” and because I create all grammatical rules on my blog, it shall hereby stand as “Hodge Podge”). Anyways, I googled “Hodge Podge” to find out just exactly what the meaning of the phrase was, and this was the first definition I found: “A heterogeneous mixture of dissimilar items.”

Bingo. That’s me.

If you’ll harken back to 5th grade life science, you’ll recall that a “heterogeneous mixture” is a mixture inwhich items retain their own specific shape and properties. Think of a tin full of nuts and bolts. It’s a mixture, for sure, but all the bolts and each of the nuts keep their unique shape and being. A “homogeneous mixture”, on the other hand, would be like taking your favorite sunscreen and squirting it into your favorite hand lotion and then shaking vigorously (after replacing the cap, of course…just in case you’re a hands-on learner who is attempting this as you read). The lotions would lose their individuality and combine into one mixture.

And my life, truth be told, feels quite a bit like the former. There are things that I love and things in which I struggle to find my place. They are more dissimilar than alike.

So there’s going to be a lot of Hodge Podge on this site. Just want to be up front about that. It reflects, celebrates even, the twists and turns that have made this heterogeneous mixture of dissimilar items I call “me”.

I’m glad you’re here in the mix. I’d like to hear your Hodge Podge, too. I’d like for us to remind each other that life doesn’t have to be perfect or even always make sense to be…quite beautiful.

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