I do not believe in coincidence. It brings me great comfort in the worst of times to feel as if everything happens for a reason. Along with this, I also believe that everyone we encounter is brought to us with a lesson to be learned.
I took the girls to the library tonight for story time. It lasts an hour, give or take a few minutes, but tonight we had to go an hour early and leave 45 minutes late because we were waiting on mom to finish with her volunteer tax gig.
There I was, t-shirt on with the neck cut out of it, non-matching flannel shirt as a coat, and a pair of sweat pants. It's a well-known fact by now, here and in my "real" world, that I am not one of "those mothers:" the crisp and clean and looking as if I own rights to a nanny kind of mother. I was a bit embarrassed about the way I looked because of my girls. I mean, I suppose that sometime in the near future I should probably consider putting a stop to my just rolled out of the trailer park look for their sakes.
But anyway....All I have to say about the other parents there was that it took about a total of five minutes to realize that just because they dressed the part didn't mean they had mastered their roles. By this I mean that I would have to say, at risk of sounding totally egotistical and being a turn-off, that I was the most with it mama in the room. And this was made evident by my girls' behavior, period.
The other parents made me feel better about myself simply by the way they and their children behaved. But they weren't the interesting part of my evening.
After we had spent as much time as Mak deemed fit cruising through the aisles of books, we headed downstairs to see how long mom was going to be. She was finishing her last return for the night so the girls and I went into the adjoining room to basically get out of the way.
The woman working as the receptionist came in to give me the report on how long mom would be and what she was doing. I wasn't paying much attention to her at first because I was tired and busy entertaining Mak with her game of I wonder how many times I can drop this toy in the floor and mama will pick it up while responding to the gazillion calls of "Hey, mama, watch this" that were coming from Grace.
Not seeming to mind that I wasn't all into the story, or either being too overzealous from hearing herself speak to a new audience, the woman was rambling on and on about her husband. I found out that he is an epilecticwho spends too much time playing games on the computer. These games have the tendency of sending him into a seizure, which I know to be true with other people with whom I am acquainted, so she's cancelled their internet access and, thanks to me, is considering going to the children's section to pick up some fun books in an attempt to get him to read.
I also learned that she loves to read about history and is currently reading about the Mayans. She and her husband own a pop-up style camper and headed out on the road last April. They toured the Mall of America, which I learned tonight had amusement park type rides available for adults and children alike. I also learned that they camped only "right down the road" from the Mall and that she didn't want to go there because it was a mall but rather because it was *the* Mall of America.
After leaving there they headed through the top part of Wisconsin and eventually ended up in Washington D.C. to catch the cherry blossoms. They left again on July 5th of last year to tour New England. 
It was somewhere between the top of Wisconsin and peninsula of Michigan that the little voice in my head whispered, "She's here to teach you something so pay attention to her."
It was at that exact moment that she began interacting with my girls. She encouraged Grace to run across the room and talked to Mak, who had nothing but smiles for the woman. She then said to me, "A lot of people I know wish they could go back and relive their lives but not me. I'm happy. I've lived. And I don't think I would want to do it again. I don't want to go back to school and all that kind of stuff." I agreed because I have no desire to go back through the gutt-aching years of high school.
She then went on to tell me that she has had a full life thanks to her father. He had raised her alone since the age of three, though she didn't mention why, and because of him she was able to travel extensively through Europe "when (she) was with him."
"He was in the military. I lived with him when he was here in this country, you know. There was a lot of travel. I lived in Seattle, Washington for a time and loved it. When he was overseas I lived in the orphanage *insert the city landmark that used to be an orphanage that many years ago here in this town, which is something I have never heard/known before*.  I would get to travel to whereeverhe was at the time and spend Christmas and Easter with him, but I lived at the orphanage until he came back."
That was when mom walked out and we were given our cue that it was finally time to end the almost three hour trip to the library. I told her that it was nice talking to her. She had a genuine smile on her face and I wondered if she would later realize that I hadn't talked to her at all but merely listened to her stories. And I walked away wondering what it was exactly that the woman had been brought to me to teach.
Granted, the whole military thing stuck out to me because I am living that now. And the whole orphanage thing really stuck out to me because of my girls. Or maybe it was simply the bit of info about the amusement park rides in the Mall of America. Who's to say?
It could even have been the fact that I used to draw people to me all the time; everyone had a story for me, regardless of the fact that we were strangers who would probably never see each other again. And it's been a very long time since I had been approached like that. I would like to think that *that* was the message she was bringing to me: to open myself back up and allow myself to experience everything again because it's been quite a while. Maybe she needed to use the military and orphanage as her means of getting my attention. If so, it worked.