Photo Credit: Crooked Pinkie Photography

A few years ago, we were your stereotypical Mormon family: a husband, a wife, and four kids born in a span of six years. Our youngest was five, old enough that we could vacation without a stroller, and starting a PhD program or going back to work were definitely part of my five-year plan.

Then we stepped onto the road not taken.

I was pushed onto it by a force I hardly recognized, and within little more than a year, we had adopted two babies from China.

We are not the kind of people who do things like traveling around the world to adopt orphans. We’re a little selfish. We’re introverts at heart; the kind of people who like quiet, who need down time, who crave creature comforts, like sleeping in on Sunday mornings, and urinating without company. But when the little voice in the back of my mind told me that we should adopt, it didn’t stop pestering me until we had both of our kids safely home.

Today, they’re three, and instead of sitting in an ivory tower, teaching or studying, I spend most days managing chaos. This morning as I emptied the dishwasher, they raced plasma cars around the kitchen, squeaky dog toys in their hands. The dog started barking. The older kids were watching YouTube videos at full volume to be heard. I had one of those moments that comes with guilt-inducing frequency around these parts– I started to imagine how nice it would be if we had no plasma cars, no puppy, no wild kids raising a ruckus.

I underestimated how hard it would be. “It will be like starting over,” I said, failing to recognize that there were still four older kids to care for. “They’ll always have each other to entertain them,” I said, failing to realize that entertainment would sometimes come in the form of cutting hair, painting their toenails while sitting on the couch, or painting each other with acrylic paints.

It’s not about regret. I do regret buying the plasma cars. They’re loud enough to wake the dead on our wood floors, and I always feel in danger of losing my Achilles tendon when the kids race them around. Some days I even regret the puppy, who adds one more layer of chaos and responsibility onto my already-over-full life. I don’t regret the choice to adopt– these babies are the greatest blessing I never thought I’d have.

But sometimes, I find it nearly impossible not to see the road not taken. My chaotic life with six kids, including two toddlers with a full complement of medical, emotional and developmental needs, feels superimposed over the idyllic, enviable life I have deluded myself into thinking I used to lead. Sometimes, when the little ones are in bed, and we gather with our four older kids on the couch, I think, “this is how things could be all the time.” Of course, it isn’t, because most of the busy in my life, at least between the hours of 3-10pm, comes from driving the older kids places. But when I see friends who go skiing with all of their kids, or who go on vacations in tree houses eighty feet up in the air, it’s hard not to see what could have been (but probably wouldn’t, because I don’t think my husband would ever want to sleep with monkeys). Instead of writing the novels I imagined I would have published by now when I started my MFA, I write a sentence at a time between interruptions, go back and find even that small effort riddled with errors.

The question for me, and for any of us who are on the road not taken (which I think is all of us, in some way), is whether it’s healthy to occasionally take a look down the other path, and imagine what could have been, or whether it’s better to cast oneself headlong down the new path, trying our best to never look back. What do you think?