What We Wish For

From time to time, my eldest child wishes for an older sibling. It is an impossibility, and she knows it, but what you know and what you wish for can be two very different things.
 
As I find myself wishing for the comfort and security that comes with long-term work, I am suddenly beginning to understand how she feels. I can't make long-term work overnight any more than I can deliver her an older sibling. Short of one of my previous workplaces being recreated (a virtually impossible scenario), I have to go through the first steps--the aim to please, don't know what to expect, prove yourself stages--that come with anyplace new. Like my daughter, I simply can't have what would have had to have been created long ago.
 
So, just as my eldest manages with her younger siblings and finds older influences and companions elsewhere, I manage the challenges of new work and find new ways to feel comfortable and secure. We may not be able to have everything we wish for, but we both have learned to adapt to what is.
 
And sometimes, the ability to make what you have into perhaps not what you wished for, but what you can live with, is the greatest comfort and security of all.