As I contemplate what is next for me after over a decade of staying home and raising my children – the baby years, the preschool years, the part time homeschooling elementary years, the intensive pandemic parenting years -- I don’t regret the beautiful life I was able to live. The moments with them. All the naps upon my body my voice steady in background with the read aloud. All the baking, the mixing. They were days that turned to years. And how rich they were.
We spend a lot of time sat with our morning coffee talking, talking about what matters to us. Lately for me, it’s my parsing through the weight and value of what I have done with my life so far in a society that measures worth by production for capitalism or success on a resume, degrees, letters after a name, years slogged in an office. I’m trying to envision verbally what is next. Where do I fit if I’m not caring for chubby babies? The decision I made to stay home with my children was one of value, personally, for me. I valued that time with my children more than much else. I know that was influenced by my religious past. By having a homeschooling stay at home mother who didn’t pursue her other talents and interests much while I was watching. But also because of my background, I longed for those mama years -- baking with them, making a home with them -- as the pinnacle of purpose. Being their anchor while we wandered on the free-spirited highway of childhood. I wanted warmth and coziness and expression and the world through their eyes. I wanted folk songs with cups of tea and warm scones. And finger paints and dress up. Magical stories where our imaginations soared. Feet on the grass, wonder at each dragon fly. It wasn’t so much the childhood I had; it was the ideal I dreamed of. And here, as I sit in the summer getting ready to send my youngest to kindergarten and my oldest to high school, I look back and realize I lived that. I really did. I gave them that. I gave myself that. And now, where? What? How do I fit in?
I recognize not everyone gives much credence to astrology. That’s ok. I wasn’t permitted to learn about it, and it took me until my mid-thirties to learn my astrological sign: Pisces. A highly creative water sign. Learning that about myself confirmed something about me. Like I could see myself. I am, whether by product of my unusual childhood or just my borne nature, unconventional. I do see it is a combination of all of it. My transient childhood. The global citizenship. Parents who were nonconformist to the norms around us. My education at home. But also, I am that fish that defies being contained, deeply feeling and seeing art and expression everywhere. I am unconcerned with competitive earnings, money in general, accolades. I read a little blurb on Instagram about Piscean folks last year and it talked about how many of us struggle in regular jobs and careers where we must climb or perform and will tend toward eclectic types of vocations. My goodness, I have lived this. I am coming to terms with the fact that my educational preparation for college and perhaps my personal brain wiring may have set me up to “fail” by regular standards. But here’s my story.
I attended college with the goal of becoming a nurse, my childhood career goal. Because I loved taking care of people, I wanted to care for people. But as I was exposed to the humanities courses that are a requirement in American universities for general education requisites, I fell in love; sociology and literature and writing and art. I switched majors a few times. I dropped out to work and live on my own. I was working 2 jobs to pay for rent in a quirky character filled apartment: a barista & an office assistant. That office job just about killed my mental health. I would sit in front of the computer screen having to do a little of everything: web design and finances and mass mailings. I literally felt like the air was being squeezed right out of me, like I would struggle to breathe with the weight on me. I loved my artsy co-workers (it was a nonprofit with an art gallery) and interacting with people, but I wasn’t skilled at tech and spreadsheets. I would have horrible anxiety attacks (but I didn’t know what they were) coming home waiting for the bus in the cold. I had this great apartment. An amazing boyfriend who I later married. I liked my eccentric little life busing here and there with my notebook and working the opening shift at the coffee shop downtown. It was free-spirited and looking back on it I was in the prime of my youth, but I would cry so much. I felt this heavy awful debilitating weight on myself at that job because I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was supposed to know, and I felt I had to pretend I did. It was self-loathing anger at my failures and inadequacies. I quit right before our wedding because my mental health was struggling, and I’d have assistance with rent with my husband moving in. It was poor timing, handing in my resignation, and character accusations were flung at me. I carried them for a long, long time. A depression set in.
I tried to find my place again after that. Newly married, working my barista job, floating along trying to define what being a wife meant (coming from Christian circles that had the roles very defined but having a marriage that didn’t quite fit the norm I’d been taught was Biblical). I struggled. Sometimes working felt like a pointless endeavor to no end. I found if I stayed at about 32 hours of work a week, I was ok. But I struggled to find meaning with what I was doing. I tried to read and write and express. I took a class here or there at college. But when our first baby was born, life finally made sense, it had such purpose. I loved it. I said at the time (and still do) that she was the best thing that ever happened to me. We went on this journey of discovery together as she grew, and I just let myself express myself. The boho mama who took her on long walks, to the market, and library story time. We cooked together. I read her poems. We listened to public radio. I had her smell each jar of spice when we cooked. I wore flowy dresses and skirts. I attempted to go back to school for that writing degree the spring she turned 2. I felt so alive writing, truly feeling like a writer not an imposter. But I didn’t return in the fall because I couldn’t make peace with missing out on caring for her. I know now that a lot of that was because I had no framework for how to be the kind of mama I wanted to be AND pursue my own interests and skills.
Instead, I fell into a decade of babymaking and childrearing; birthing four children and miscarrying two; part time homeschooling; and a more defined role as a mother/woman. It was all encompassing and I truly gained so much fulfillment from it. I felt so rich in many ways. I was living the life I had dreamed of. But the mistake I made, I guess if you want to call it that, is that I couldn’t really see myself as anything else. Other than caregiving, which remember was ultimately my career goal as a child, what I loved about the kind of fulltime mothering I did was how varied it was. It was expressive, Artistic. When I was homeschooling, I pieced together a feast of literature-based curriculum. I took great pains to match our history and science with literary books that made it all come alive. We baked along with it, we made art that kept with the theme, we studied nature on our picnic blanket. We read so much. It was all sorts of interesting and challenging. And exhausting too. I drove myself into deep, deep depletion and burnout. A hazard of so many pregnancies and all those years breastfeeding on my body but also how much we gave out alone with little to no support. And there was a hefty share of loss and mishap in there too. Coming out of that season I am counting, truly counting the cost of all of it. I don’t begrudge it —hear me — but I am doing an inventory of what is left. And also, recognizing, I don’t actually know how to fit in to regular life. Maybe I never have, and when I have tried it hasn’t gone well for me. I guess what I am trying to imagine for myself is a place for me in this season coming. I won’t be the boho mama in the layered skirt and the chubby toddler in the stroller. I lived and loved that time in my life. But where and how do I fit now?
Yesterday, I was sitting on my terracotta tile kitchen floor grounding, honestly. Just trying to find myself, to feel something solid beneath me as I contemplate the future. My littlest who just turned 5 and still has a little remnant toddler chubbiness laid down on me and fell asleep. The Wailin’ Jennys were singing One Voice and this line caught me, “Leave the rest behind it will turn to dust.” As I sat holding his warm sleeping body, I realized I have, when I look back on these years with my children, left the rest behind.
Between sips of our morning coffee, we talk a lot about how we should be living right now. In a time when the world feels like it is shaking, there are wars and scarcities looming, it’s easy to want to put all your efforts into guaranteed sources, industries that will survive, careers that are stable, to store up goods for your shelves, to bolster against whichever fear story is current. And I feel this as I try to decide what is next for me. But I’m left with this too: how I have spent these last years is connection. And that never turns to dust. We talk about this a lot. What we want for our lives and our home is not achievements and glitz. It’s connection. It’s what matters to us. Leave the rest behind, it will turn to dust. The line before that, as the Wailin’ Jennys sing of the sound of voices, is, “This is the sound of all of us, Singing with love and the will to trust.” Isn’t that it? Together? Trusting and loving together. As I try to imagine and define my place in this next coming season, I’m holding to that. I want to be left with something that doesn’t turn to dust. I don’t want to spend my life for anything less.