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Learning and trying to be kind and living my life as fully as I can stand it.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Waking thoughts

When I was nineteen or twenty years old I quit soccer. I cried in front of the coach when I did it which I hated doing--I didn't like that coach at all and I wanted to quit with my head held high, powerful. In those days tears flowed easily, especially when I said anything that scared me out loud.

Walking back to my dorm, Anne was with me. She was a year older and we were friendly with one another, although not really friends. I didn't really have real friends on that team which was quite a change from my past team where the friendships were equal to the soccer. I don't remember any parts of our conversation other than her saying to me "I don't know who I'd be without soccer. I've always been a soccer player. But you have so many other parts to who you are, you'll be ok."

That was a relief to me at the time and I've thought about it over the years to remind myself--this thing that you're doing, whatever it is, is not you. You are more than this one thing.

I pulled those words into my heart this morning as I woke up to motherhood changing, yet again, as it always does and always will. My son wasn't in bed with me--he was next door with his dad where he'd been since one in the morning. One of my daughters, she who used to be the only one who stayed in her own bed all night, was over there too. I was in my son's bottom bunk bed because another daughter had asked for me also around 1 a.m, which is how I'd noticed the other two were gone.

In the arrangement we currently have which will be ending in the next couple months, I often wake up to an open back door. In the dark the kids, especially my son, make their way from the big house to the in-law unit, walking the thirty yards surrounded by shadows. Sometimes I wake up alone. That never used to happen.

Motherhood is not the only thing that I am. It is a big part of who I am, though. Motherhood and wifehood have been two of the things that have changed me the most and now one is ending and the other is changing. But it will always change. So why am I gripping so tightly?

I remind myself that it is not my kids' job to love me enough to fill up the holes in my heart. It is their job--their joy and their opportunity and their hardship--to be kids. It is my job and my soon to be ex-husband's job to build the structure and the support in which their developing brains can grow and thrive. I tell them "You never have to choose between your dad and me."

And it is my job to make that always true.