Every January and then again every August, I daydream about a fresh start, about how different life is going to be in the new year/new school year. I get new calendars and new colored pens. I organize my purse, purging the 8,231 receipts and gum wrappers and forgotten Chapsticks and coffee punch cards I never remember to use. I call to set up my mammogram and my dental cleaning (and this year, my colonoscopy – lucky me!). I vow to get on a decent sleep schedule. I sort Georgia’s uniforms; donate what no longer fits; and finally give up on salvaging the white shirts that lost the battle to spaghetti sauce, marker ink and chocolate.
This year will be even more of a fresh start. One kid is 1,226 miles away, newly settled into her freshman dorm in Bronxville, New York. The other is an official teen in her last year of middle school and suddenly too cool to say more than five words to me between waking up and bedtime. The dogs are confused. The house is quiet. And I, in my empty kitchen, am finally alone with all the things I claimed to want over the past 18 years: time, space, silence.
And now here we are. So why do I feel like I’m walking around in someone else’s life?
For 18 years, my identity has been built around mothering 24/7. I’ve been tracking developmental milestones, changing diapers, researching the best time to start solid food. I’ve been packing lunches, making snacks, buying little treats at the grocery store. Leaving work to pick up a sick kid, waking up in the middle of the night to treat a croupy cough, memorizing the phone number to the pediatrician. Checking homework, drilling math facts on flash cards, scheduling teacher conferences. Making class favors for Halloween and assembling handmade cards for Valentine’s Day and collecting money for teacher gifts at the holidays. Keeping track of track practice and play rehearsal and field trips and library day and speech tournaments and the dates for spring break at two different schools.
For so long, being a mom hasn’t been just what I did; it’s been who I was.
I am still a mom, of course. But the daily tactile work of it – the mess and the magic and the minding of the details – is slipping out of my hands. One bedroom is empty. The other might as well have a “Keep Out” sign hung on the door. And I’m left blinking in the kitchen wondering: What now?
Do I take up needlepoint? I feel like someone who might like needlepoint. With all of this new free time, I feel like I need to become a Person With Hobbies, even though I’ve never really been a Person With Hobbies, even pre-kids. Not that I really remember what I was like pre-kids.
I went to a bookstore last weekend with a vague plan to browse for something intellectual and affirming, like self-help but not obnoxious or maybe a biography of some inspiring woman who managed to survive her children growing up and moving away. I came home with a candle for Georgia, a feminist sticker I plan to mail to Rowan, and a tube of hand cream I didn’t need. I also signed up for a yoga class and then immediately canceled it when I remembered how much I hate yoga.
It turns out that rediscovering who you are after nearly two decades of intense parenting is not like flipping a switch. Some of the things I loved in my early 20s – pre-kids – I still love: reading bad mystery novels, taking long walks, aimlessly driving while listening to music and drinking a Diet Coke with the good ice. Some things I used to love are just not for me anymore: elaborate dinner parties, late nights at loud clubs, tequila shots. Much like most of my pre-kid clothes, a lot of my old hobbies and habits just don’t fit right anymore. And the routines I depended on for so long are gone or dwindling, replaced by wide-open hours that feel less like freedom and more like open water.
But I’m trying. I’m walking again, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend, not for fitness or step-counting but just because I like walking and seeing how the world looks when I’m not rushing somewhere. I’m working with a local group to provide home-cooked meals to food-insecure families via the community fridges. I even took a weekend trip with a friend where we did touristy things and attempted to talk about things other than our kids.
I still feel the tug of old habits. I still reflexively check the school portal before realizing my kid isn’t in PowerSchool anymore, and I still look for fun new vegetarian items at Trader Joe’s for Rowan, even though she obviously won’t be raiding my refrigerator and pantry on a daily basis. And I still cry sometimes, for no obvious reason other than the fact that everything is changing.
But I’m also remembering something I sort of forgot back in 2006: the quiet joy of doing something – anything – just for me. Maybe I’m not trying to go back to who I was then, which is impossible even if I wanted to, so much as moving forward to who I am going to be now, in this next phase of my life. I’m not reclaiming who I was; I’m discovering who I am now. Older, wiser, kinder, and softer (physically and mentally).
And maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll even figure out how to do needlepoint.
