Imagine wanting what you already have.”

Her words stop me cold, freeze my deep and purposeful breathing.

“What,” I think, “did that crazy hippie lady just say?”

I try to resume the assigned task, mindfully inhaling the chilled air of the fitness center and balancing my sharp sitz bones on a borrowed blue cushion. I will my swirling mind to settle softly like a leaf to the ground. But Mary Love continues to hijack my piss-poor attempts at being in the now.

We were waitresses, all of us, with different stash spots for tips. Mine was a tattered old envelope in my underwear drawer. I kept the amount written on the front, scratched out and rewritten over and over, to keep myself in the know and to protect from unlikely thievery.

When we were engaged to be married, back in the halcyon days of early 2001, my husband and I participated in an elaborate mating ritual that has taken hold deep within American culture. We registered for gifts. Daily cutlery, heavy silver forks, All-Clad pots in several different sizes, formal china for all those state dinners we would be serving, gravy boats, nesting mixing bowls and a much-longed-for salad spinner that retailed for $25.99. Among this orgy of conspicuous consumption was a set of everyday dinnerware from Villeroy and Boch.

high school began to feel as musty and claustrophobic as an old broom closet. I wasn’t the type to cut classes intentionally, so I signed on for a community work/study program which allowed me to leave the campus most afternoons by lunchtime to help teach at a local elementary school. But every other aspect of the school routine was boring or frustrating, even my boyfriend was beginning to drive me up the wall. I was sick of climbing into his secondhand brown station wagon, despite his willingness to drive me anywhere I cared to go. I was tired of his Pall Malls, his grimy basketball jacket, his dumb jokes and the way he guffawed after reciting them for the third or fourth time. I was sick of the corner coffee shop where my girlfriends and I met to share hot fudge ice cream cake. Each week I felt more miserable and disconnected from geometry homework, blue gym suits, football games I no longer bothered to attend and gossip. The only class I still liked was Drama, presided over by a gaunt, unkempt teacher, Mr. Wilder, who bore a passing resemblance to Ichabod Crane.

"The clothes we select for ourselves are a better indicator of who we think we are than our faces or our bodies, which we didn't choose. Clothes are our one chance to right whatever physical wrongs God has imposed on us. They can be a mirror of what's inside, a veneer of camouflage, or a map of your aspirations." --Amy M. Spindler, New York Times Magazine

When I first read the above words as printed in the "Points to Ponder" section of Readers' Digest, I tore the page out, folded it and tucked into my journal for keeps. It was a profound truth -- one that rocked my fifteen year-old unsure and yet emerging confidence. There were countless things I stewed over that I couldn't do to alter my exterior. No matter how many crunches I did, I would never have the iron-board Demi Moore stomach I hungered after. No matter how many Pilates classes I completed faithfully, I simply would not grow to the lanky height of the video instructor and her skinny sidekicks. But, I could choose the outward expression of my interior. I could, I can always choose my clothes.

The kitchen was the largest room in the house, but in 800 square feet, that ain’t saying much. It was bisected by a hideous plastic countertop fanned with scratches and stains left by decades of previous tenants, and I could cook, serve and eat a meal without moving a step. When it was time for dinner, my son and husband would clamber around the other side, and I’d pull up the high chair for the baby and a stool for myself. Afterwards, I’d shuffle two feet over to wash the dishes.

Yes, there were many things wrong with this picture. As the stay-at-home parent, most of the domestic duties were my responsibility. He made the money, I did everything else. As centuries of wives and mothers will attest, this is a screwed up division of labor. However, since I got to be home with my babies and write, and he cleaned the bathroom regularly, it mostly worked.

Except for the counter that ran through the middle of the kitchen.

“We need a table,” I would tell my husband while I spooned quinoa from the stove to his plate. “Like a real family.”

“I know, but where?” He’d pick off pieces of roast chicken and put it on the baby’s tray then scan the room, trying to find a corner we’d perhaps missed in the five years we’d rented this tiny house.

­M­y son recently spotted a family traipsing around Disneyworld in matching teeshirts. He turned to me with envy and complained, “Look! That should be us.” “Over my dead body,” I replied, and then suddenly it occurred to me that we could both have what we wanted.

Over my dead body. I could do that. You see, I come from a family who loves to plan their own funerals. It’s a tradition. I don’t want to say that we are control freaks, but some of us have actually been buried with remote controls clasped in our bossy little hands.

I made fun of my mom when she showed me her funeral journal, complete with sketches of caskets, color theme ideas, music suggestions (“Those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d never end…”), who was to be invited, who was to be black-balled. Now, here I sit, just a decade later, my laptop humming, planning my last party. And here’s what I have so far—

­I am an introvert in an extroverted society. My dad likes to remind me of when I was in pre-school and would sit by myself “watching the other kids play.” Irritated, I tell him I’ve changed, but last weekend at a two-year-old’s birthday party, I stood in the corner watching the other parents talk. Everyone else seems to have so much more to say, and I’d rather listen. Sooner or later, the questions come my way, and I find myself struggling to answer.

When I was in my twenties and single, the question I was most often asked was, “When are you getting married?” Once I was married, the question became, “When are you having children?” After the birth of my first child the question was, “When are you having another?” And now with two children, the question has become, “Are you done?”

I am asked this question by the checkout person at the grocery store as one child methodically pulls candy bars from the display, placing them neatly in a row on the floor, while the other leaps for a balloon from the free display in the middle of the aisle.

First time?” A woman with platinum blond hair and a wide smile looks up at us from where she was getting her fingernails elaborately manicured as we walked into the nail salon, which was decorated with red hearts on the windows and miniature cupids hanging from the ceiling. My husband has this idea that we should give experiences to our children instead of presents, so here we were: at the beauty salon to celebrate Valentine’s Day, just us three girls. My daughters, ages six and four, are practically bursting out of their skin with excitement. But they know they have to be on “indoor behavior” so they make an exaggerated show of acting lady-like. The result is two grinning girls who wriggle rather than walk towards the manicure chairs.

“Can you tell?” I smile back at her.

The woman looks at me approvingly. “My mother would never have taken me into a place like this,” she says a little wistfully. A college-aged client with her toes soaking in a basin of soapy water looks up from her magazine and nods.

“Neither would mine,” I admit. “To tell you the truth, I’m not very girly. This isn’t really my thing...but my girls love this kind of stuff.”

For every flight of fancy, emotional entanglement, and success or failure, my friend Malika and I have always stood sentry for one another, sometimes with raised eyebrows, our concern only thinly veiled, but always, in the end, evangelical in our devotion. It hasn’t always been easy. When I learned she was heading to Iraq to report on the war in the spring of 2008, an opportunity she fought hard for, and one that ultimately came only months after she gave birth to her third child, I mulled the risks, hands-on-hips, my concern painfully obvious. It would take months before I would be able to applaud her valor or brag shamelessly to anyone who would listen. The risks were significant. New mothers weren’t supposed to travel to war zones. Were they?

Sunday afternoon and both kids are at the playground with the sitter. I've orchestrated this hour with a wedding planner's attention to detail and timing. Bedroom shades are drawn. Playlist #3, also know as "Romantic Grown-up Music," serenades us from the iPod dock. Finally, mood established, doors locked, black thong hitched in place, I yank my husband Mark down on rumpled sheets and, in my best husky voice, whisper in his ear, "A whole hour to ourselves, baby." He responds appropriately, I think, but I can't really hear him. The doorbell is ringing.

Sometimes I see sex and parenthood as a failed Venn diagram with two side-by-side circles and none of that overlapping space known as intersection. Or inter-anything. Like now, as I roll over and reach for my jeans.

"You're answering it?" Mark asks, incredulously. He looks ready to blockade the door with the nightstand.

"You know the rule," I say, "It could be one of the kids."

"Doing what? Going AWOL from the playground?"

"I'll let you know."

And as I straightened to a full stand and saw the orange and yellow lilies and happy zinnias and Tessie’s bright shoes and a swing set and a little red plastic chair on the deck outside—all in just the right light, that bold rounded yellow kind of light like the good people of Cadiz so often enjoy, it hit me in a rush of physical sensation: I have everything I need. I don’t need anything else, ever.

The "glow people," the ones who beam their way through life lightly touching the earth, seem to know how to wear their gifts like a feather-handed stroke of blush.  Natural, healthy, and appealing.  When luminaries are interviewed about their success, they invariably reply, "I just had to do what I do. I couldn't have been or done anything else." So why is it that most of the human race never felt like we "just had to" do something significant? The only activities I ever “just had to” do typically involved overindulgence in something rich and gooey or started with kissing rather than contributions to humanity. And yet I believe that every one of us is born with gifts, and  most of our joys and struggles in life involve discovering them, wrestling with them, denying them, embracing them, muffling them, profiting from them, flaunting them, and suffering from them, all to varying mixed-up degrees.