The house is quiet. I sit here accompanied by the clicking of the keyboard and the white noise of the monitor which tells me all is okay upstairs. Mixed in with the static is the rhythmic and unending ticking of a clock, so I know the device is not just repeating chaos over and over. Once in a while I hear a foot shifting under a blanket or a hint of a snore.

The boy fell asleep early as I read to him from Harold and the Purple Crayon in a voice intentionally monotone. The girl is now sleeping in bed after some dinner, some games, a book, six songs and a prayer.

The wife is down the street at a birthday party for someone she doesn’t even know that well. But you have to realize that the sorority of stay-at-home-mothers needs little excuse to gather and behave like grown-ups.

Things are changing. And always will. I’m moving in a new direction career wise. And it is a change that I can tell will stretch me – will change who I am. Not in some radical way, but in the sense that it will bring growth. In some ways it feels like a path that has been fore-ordained for me to walk down. But at the same time, I feel like I choose to make this path happen. There was a way that I could see that I could go, but like an overgrown track in the woods, I needed a machete to clear the route. And I feel responsible. I could have stayed where I was, but I didn’t and that has created opportunity and more than a little hardship (mostly for other people).

I’m not sure free will is entirely a genuine concept. I think instead life, or God, or karma tricks us into volunteering before we are drafted. Maybe what we do and who we become is largely out of our hands, but we are involved enough that we can be convicted of the crime and serve as a scapegoat while fate remains the unindicted co-conspirator.