May 17, 2005
but enough about everyone else–let’s talk about ME
When I was at home in March, my mother’s friend was teasing me about how thin I am. Ha ha ha, I said, as I always do when people talk about my weight, you’ve obviously never met my children! And then my mother told this story:
When we moved to Albuquerque–how old were you? she asked me.
Almost four, I said, and Johnny was two.
That first year we lived here, she said, I lost a lot of weight. The doctor ran all kinds of tests because he was concerned about how thin I was. He didn’t find anything. I remember saying to him, in thirty years I’ll be in here complaining about how much weight I’ve gained!
That was all. But I was struck by the story because in the past couple of years, since Charlie’s first birthday, I have also lost a lot of weight. I was the thinest early last spring; Leslie described me one day as ‘waiflike’, which was funny as that’s not a word I would ever use to describe myself. I’m less waifish now, but still much thinner than before I had either of my children, which of course sounds so wonderful.
Except for this: what keeps me thin is the huge rock of stress sitting in the pit of my stomach. What keeps me thin is the constant feeling that I’m not doing everything I should be doing, that I’m not doing any of this well, that I’m constantly on the verge of failure. I am not trying to be thin (unlike all those years in my teens and twenties, when my whole life was organized around my weight or clothing sizes). I like to joke that my children are so energetic because they suck all of my energy away, but it’s not such a joke. Recently I’ve begun to feel like I have literally lost part of myself in this enterprise, that parenting has taken away something essential. I read about the identity crisis of women who left rewarding careers to stay home with children–one day you’re an attorney or doctor or engineer or whatever and the next you have no paycheck and no consistent adult conversation–but I’m not sure that’s it for me. At least, not entirely. I am worn down by the mind-numbing repetition of life with small children, at the same time that I am almost constantly overwhelmed by problems bigger than my experience. I am trying to potty train one child at the same time that I am trying to understand the other child’s complicated and quirky behavior. It’s exhausting.
I know I am not the only one who feels this way, but I am truly startled–still–by how hard this is. After both the boys were born, I had no postpartum depression, not even the ‘baby blues.’ But now, five years on, I am worn out. I feel like I have almost entirely lost sight of the person I was before my uterus expanded to 400 times its normal size. And what makes me the saddest is that I am certain that if I could find that person again, she would be so much better at this mommy thing than I am.
I’ve said before that I am not sure what I want this web site to be. I am not really interested in either detailing the minutia of my day (although I have done that recently) or baring my soul (ditto), but I am beginning to think that doing both may help me to find that other person. The one who is not so waifish, and not so stressed out.
Posted by Susan @ 12:11 pm • Uncategorized
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June 14th, 2006 at 1:38 pm, bubandpie Says:
I think one thing that makes staying at home so difficult is that it requires really superhuman amounts of self-discipline. There’s no boss, no external structure of rewards and punishments - just a gradual slide into chaos if you don’t keep up. I’m a person who thrives on that sense of completion when I complete something, so it’s hard to be constantly confronted with my lack of self-discipline.
June 14th, 2006 at 1:39 pm, bubandpie Says:
P.S. If you ever find these comments, I hope you don’t feel like I’m stalking you! But when I read a post as thoughtful and articulate as this one and see no comments on it, I can’t resist.