Not waving, but drowning

That line from a poem read in a college poetry writing class, Not waving, but drowning, popped into my head this morning. I am not waving, but drowning. I'm a little lost. Or have lost myself. Or don't know who this new self is? I feel like my "life", my day to day has been put on the sacrificial altar of motherhood and is no longer mine. That sounds dramatic, and maybe a bit whiny for a life that I have consciously chosen. The counselor I saw to prepare for my son's birth said last week at our follow up appointment that I have postpartum depression, referred me to Kaiser's psych dept for more care, asked how I would feel about taking an anti-depressant. I don't want to take one, know that there is no magic happy pill, and just so wish this wasn't how I was feeling right now. In my mind, I am happy with my life - I set it up this way. I am married, living in a house in the town I grew up in near family and lifelong friends. I went to grad school and have a career that will be there to build when I am done with this young children stay at home mommy phase of life. I have two healthy kids, a girl and a boy. From the outside, from this list that all that time in college and mid-twenties soul searching put into place about what life should and will be, I would think I would be ecstatic to have finally arrived. But I was naive in my life planning, not knowing that you never get "there", that there will always be more, that even if you become the person you thought you wanted to be, or have the life you thought you wanted, that just opens up more possibilities, more dreams, more who am I? and more what if?. And this is both what is amazingly beautiful and rich about this human existence and what makes it sort of suck all wrapped into one messy burrito we call life. So where does that leave things - I just got of wave of self-consciousness, the self-inflicted shame that comes with saying I love my kids, love being a mom, know I am blessed to be able to be home with them, and yet there are days, moments, when it is so hard, or when it just is not enough, or when I wish I could for once finish an email uninterrupted, or go to the bathroom by myself. And my internal struggle feels a bit lame, because it is a privileged one to have when there are women in Iran being stoned for supposed extramarital affairs, and women in my very city who work 2 jobs and wish they were home for bedtime. I am not finding the words that will end this post all nice and clean like a good sitcom, so maybe it needs to be left here hanging, drowning, or waving....

Coronation

The younger sassier version of myself wanted to be Queen of the World. A naieve and optimistic cockiness that I somehow knew better and could solve the world's problems, big and small. I would even fill this out in the business name line of things like magazine subscriptions so that my mail would come to me this way. Not at all a flaming narcisscist, just a young idealist who got joy from happy mail. But now, a decade plus later into life and I no longer want that job - life has taught me a few things and God, that job sounds exhausting. And I am tired, and I can't figure out how to how to shop for groceries so that we actually have meals so I am pretty sure I am not close to qualified to run the world. It seems the older I get, the more I realize how much I don't know. The idealist college girl has grown into a mid-thirties mom and life is not what she thought it would be. In some ways better, in some ways so much harder than ever imagined. So the Queen - I am trying to find that spirit again, give it some life in this stage of life, reconnect with that vibrancy from this place. This place that has a little more wisdom, a lot more responsibility, and so little time.