Just because I'm losing,
Doesn't mean I'm lost.
Doesn't mean I'll stop.
~Coldplay
I was at a holiday party last month, mingling, chatting, and surprisingly having a great time. It had been a while since I had enjoyed myself among my peers and it felt good (thanks, Mom, for the motherly pressure to attend. "Go!! We're watching The Dude!! Get out of here!!!"). While sipping my water and chatting with a friend, she asked if I had started dating yet. The answer was a polite "no" while inside I envisioned myself at a hypothetical quiet bistro with an innocent man victim, my boot lodged squarely on his neck as he writhed on the floor. No, I'm not ready to date.
But it did beg the question. If I can move past my voracious anger and soul sucking bitterness, what would a date look like? Last time I dated was in college and it consisted of drinking from a keg and talking bohemian fantasies with your friend's friend's friend at the duplex party. I'm an unemployed mother of three now. What in the name of diaper duty would I talk about?
So I did that thing that we all do and went on the first ten minutes of a date in my head. "So, tell me about yourself" he says. And so I did. Kind of like preparing for a job interview. "Hmm, I can talk about where I'm from, skim over my childhood, college, jobs I hated, stuff I love, delete the part about how I can't cook and bring home stray dogs". And so on.
Sadly, at this point my hypothetical date was beginning to glaze over but I didn't care. I asked for the hypothetical check and hypothetically excused myself. Because in this silly exercise I had stumbled on something quite . . . disturbing? Important? Enlightening? In going over my life in my mind's eye, in quick chunks, I could feel a deep connection with myself again. I felt it when I went to my childhood, in college, in graduate school, and when I worked certain jobs.
I didn't feel it in certain other jobs. I didn't feel it when I was married. I didn't feel it when I was a mother.
Now, hold your horses!! Don't call CPS just yet!! As anybody knows, I adore my children in an over-the-top somewhat obsessive monkey grooming kind of way. "Are you okay? Do you need anything? Can you please do whatever you're doing in the same room I'm in? I love you. I love you. I think I'm going to eat you."
I love the look of my kids. The smell of my kids. The sound of my kids. Watching my kids do anything. Watching my kids do nothing. I find my kids so engrossing that I tilt my rearview mirror down in my car so I can glance at them just staring out the window while I'm driving. What are they thinking? They're so beautiful.
I'm not alone in these parental feelings. Me and most every other parent feels this way.
But, when I think of myself over the past seven years, I see a body doing chores for other's lives. A shadow in khaki shorts and t-shirt floating from task to task.
When I think about other times in my life, I feel in my gut an excitement. A buzz. When I studied for my exams in college I loved my classes so much, I would pace the floor unable to sit still. When I pulled into the barn for the five hundredth time to jump mine or anybody else's horse, my hiney would tingle. On the five hundredth time. When I drove to work in graduate school, I would sometimes tear up in joyous disbelief that I had found a paying job I would do for free. In all these places, I had to restrain myself from grabbing the next person I saw by the lapels and screaming, "I love my life!!" I felt alive.
But I got lost.
I got married and fell into the role of following my husband around, deferring to his life, his interests, and his career. I still managed to slip myself in a little. Then I had children and that was all she wrote.
I'm not blaming my ex (for this. small. detail.). Or my kids. Or even myself. I didn't know any better.
But now I do. This is so, so, so cliche, but the people you sacrifice yourself for -- and I mean sacrifice in the sense you kill yourself to serve them -- don't want you to. My kids might complain as I'm walking out the door leaving them with a sitter, but in the end, they want a mom who feels alive. They want a role model. They want to be inspired.
For Christmas this year, my six year-old asked Santa for a list of stuff. On the list was for "Mommy to be happy." Wow.
After fifteen years of a toxic relationship. And seven years of falling into the oh, so common, mommy quicksand. I'm going to find my way back to my path and grant her that wish.
As I sit here thinking about it, my hiney is tingling:)
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