A little after motherhood is when I noticed that me had left. Now I’m trapped in this parallel universe somewhere between the life I have and the life I feel I should have. Claustrophobia isn’t an issue because the space between the two lives is immense. How does one stray so far off the path? I imagine it’s like an excessive weight gain, one day you’re average, two years and a hundred pounds later you wonder how you got to that point. That’s how my life feels.
One day I was single living exactly the life I wanted and the next thing you know, I’m married with kids and not at all the person I was. The thing is I love my family but how did I get so far from me? Is it a trade game? You get the husband and kids, but you have to trade in everything you loved doing? I can’t help but wonder if my husband is going to wake up one day and start to ask where the woman he married went. I like myself, but I want to LOVE myself. It’s time for a change. The year to rebuild is upon me.
The rebuilding comes after a major earthquake in the land of me. Life as it existed collapsed on me and nothing is the same. Everything I learned to be true I now know is a lie. Questions are the food I’ve recently been living on, a nice change from the bullshit I was being fed.
I don’t want to know how this particular situation got to be this way but there is a sense of eeriness when you realize that you think you know someone for your entire life and you have been completely wrong. Everyone has secrets. But being protected from someone that had lived a semi double life was something I never expected to find out.
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It was interesting becoming a mother. My mother and I haven’t ever been close. In fact there are pictures of us when I was a toddler hugging and laughing and I often think that must have been photo shopped. She yelled a lot and told everyone all the time she didn’t like kids. If you’re wondering why she had any, well I wonder that too.
When it came to the birds and the bees my friend and I asked my dad. If you want to see a grown man turn about 100 shades of red, have his teenage daughter ask him what foreplay is. Along with the redness you’ll also get more stutters than someone suffering from a bad cell phone signal.
I learned about my period from my girlfriend’s mother. (For some reason some classmates and I got skipped when they were making sure everyone took sex Ed.) My mother did save me a little on the period situation. The day I got it, THANKFULLY it was before school, I mentioned it to her, which was embarrassing. She asked me if I knew what to do and I said I did. I had gone into the bathroom and found a panty liner and put it on, just like my friend’s mom had said. What I didn’t realize is they came in different sizes and I put the smallest one possible on. She asked me about that before I left for school and made sure I had supplies to last me through the day. Luckily she told me because I only had the mini pads with and well isn’t it every girls nightmare to have bloodstains on their outfits?
When I wanted to wear makeup she freaked out on me yelling for hours about how I didn’t need it. Trying to reason with her I let her know that I could buy it myself and hide it but I want to be open about it. She didn’t see things my way. Gratefully she has girlfriends that wear makeup (my mother does not) and they must have reasoned in a way I couldn’t because a week or two later I came home from school to find some powder, eyeliner and mascara on my vanity.
She’s kicked my bedroom door in after refusing to give her some information on a guy that asked me out on a date. She wanted ALL of his information including his drivers license number. How can I ask for that when I barely know him? If I had asked he probably would have said he didn’t want to go out with me! We were meeting at a golf course and I told her she could follow me there but instead she kicked my door in when I tried to escape the yelling by being a rebellious guitar-playing teenager. In hindsight, I should have turned my amp up as loud as it could go and really get the distortion going.
I realize there are people out there with much worse histories than I have. I’m related to a lot of people that have worse mother – daughter/son situations than me, but this is my story. This is my rebuilding. I’ve had some really influential women in my life that in itself has shown me that what I went through is not normal. I don’t have to parent like that.
If I want to I can change and I want to. Inner peace is something that is very valuable to me and right now I am SO far from being there. The only thing I know is yelling, yelling and more YELLING. It’s not me, but I’m slipping into that because it’s what I know, it’s comfortable. But I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to be comfortable in knowing that.
My entire life I’ve struggled not wanting to be like my mother. Her name literally rhymes with bitch and she likes that. She was a kid having kids; I intentionally waited until I was older to conceive. She’s a heavy drinker, while most of my friends were experimenting with that in high school I didn’t want to have that in common with my mom so I hardly partook in that activity. I could name a billion ways on how we are different, but as I got older things started to get scary for me. I found myself more and more like her.
The earthquake in the land of me put everything into perspective. I am not like her and I will never be her. We are very far from being similar and that is such a good thing. Now that I know this I can start to find out who I am. Tear down the walls I’ve built and rebuild a stronger foundation out of love instead of the fear of becoming someone I didn’t want to become. This is going to be a slow process making sure the concrete dries before building another layer; after all it’s a delicate process becoming me.
Welcome to the journey of me pursing within.
<3 Jes