I Guess This Blog’s a Parenting Blog.
/Originally posted on February 23, 2013
I can hear my son talking downstairs. He’s talking to his daddy. The way he talks now, it’s not little kid style anymore – he’s constructing conversations, asking real questions, making clear and abstract observations about the things around him.
Hearing him from up here, it’s making me think.
:::
About a year ago I bristled when a good friend commented that my blog was a parenting blog.
“What!? No it’s not! My life is about so much, the things I’m working through on the blog are about me, don’t you see that!?” That’s an in-my-head quote, but my actual response wasn’t much more edited.
See, when Isla was three and Osi was about six months old, I broke. I’d put our spirited girl to bed every night of her life for three years, and stayed home after doing so for the inevitable wake-up screams, FOR THREE YEARS. It was a completely self-inflicted situation, me not being able to handle the thought of my girl screaming (which she could do like a champion), about the chaos I saw in my mind if I wasn’t at home, available.
It was some weeknight, some evening, and I sat down on the couch in the playroom in a daze. Crying, missing, trampled. ”I can’t do it tonight. I can not do it,” I said to Tim.
“Go,” he said.
I went, and after much this-way-and-that, birthed myself new, decided that I was so much more than a Mama, that while my kids were clearly the most significant thing I had going on, that I needed to define myself as a woman.
:::
We went to Maine this week, to The Special House. Where my dad is buried. Where I got to marry Tim.
“If you took snapshots of every time we’ve come here together, you’d get a really clear idea of what our relationship is,” he said, eating breakfast at the red lacquered kitchen table.
“I like that,” I said.
There’s no phone, no television, no Wi-Fi at the cabin. The kids have no technological expectations, and are thus completely happy and satisfied with the box of coloring supplies, paper, and fort-worthy couch that live there full-time. They played together, mostly happily, for four days, with little more than their bountiful imaginations. Isla made collages and practiced writing letters and numbers while Osiah walked around the house singing “Hard Way Home” with a spoon-microphone.
I read a book. Tim fixed the damper on the fireplace.
We held back tears as we pulled out of the yard on Thursday.
:::
My quest for more-ness is bringing me back around, as quests seem to do.
When I set out to prove that I was more than just a mother, I was a tight ball of imbalance, a girl lost in responsibilities. I sense now that I was grieving the real loss of my old life, a completely valid and healthy thing to grieve.
I’ve for so long been an all-or-nothing kind of gal. I became all mama in ways that don’t, now, surprise me.
And then, when all became too much, I tried to become all something else.
Which is clearly impossible since you can’t undefine yourself as a mother, nor would I ever want to.
Picking pieces from then and now and rolling them up, into the moment.
I think that’s it.
For now.
*E