Hey. Remember ME?
“Hey, Amanda,” said the man in line at the coffee shop, “I haven’t seen you in a while! What have you been up to?”
My answer was brief: “Oh you know, home with the kids, hating remote learning, faking it as a taxi driver, driving my kids around all over the place.” I laughed, said goodbye and walked out of the store. But when I got to my car, I couldn’t stop thinking about that simple question: what, exactly, HAVE I been up to all these months since I left my old job?
The question is both too easy and too difficult to answer. Practically, I’ve been doing the work to run a house: homework, drop-offs, pickups, coordinating activities, laundry, dinner, bedtime.
I’ve done home improvement projects, restoring an old table my husband and I have talked about for months, painting our house and landscaping our backyard. I’ve renewed my passion for books, reading more than half a dozen of them. I meditate, journal and do more yoga than I ever have before. I’ve tried to be present for my girls in a way that I never really was while I was working all the time.
We traveled once as a family, thrilled to relax in Florida, where the pandemic felt like a distant memory. I traveled once with girlfriends to the Hamptons, to laugh and drink wine and empower each other.
But it’s the work that isn’t so obvious that has haunted me all these months, the work healing from bad situations, the work figuring out what happens next and the lessons I’ve learned from all of it.
Because the truth is, much as I have enjoyed being home — I have hated it, too. The pandemic stripped me of most of my babysitters, so it has really been all me, all the time. I have hated hearing my daughter’s teacher on the zoom calls, urging her classmates to pay attention. I have hated being tethered to my house — unable to leave on a whim because she’s still logged on to school. I’ve hated being the only one to make dinner and do bed and showers and read books and all of it, because my husband works early morning hours and goes to bed early.
I have felt the weight of motherhood immensely, and while I’ve appreciated being around for all the soccer practices and dance classes and piano lessons…I feel like some part of ME has been lost in the process. The part of me that thinks about things OTHER than my children. The ME I lost when I left a career I loved and was really good at. Now my thoughts are so often only about making sure others are fulfilled. How are my girls doing? Are they liked? Are they annoying to other people? Are they smart enough? Kind enough? Likable? Have I done right by them?
The truth is — when I am at work, I think about them very little. When I leave the house, I am all about the task at hand. I know that sounds selfish and I don’t care. I love my girls immensely and they know it. But I am also very good at compartmentalizing my life — a skill that doesn’t always help me personally but has served me well professionally.
Sometimes I think I was a better mother before I was home all the time, because I had more patience and appreciation for the whims of my daughters. And I miss the days when I would walk in the front door and be greeted by eager faces happy to see me, instead of me staring longingly at the door and wondering when I can go out by myself for a few minutes.
But I also know my heart will ache for those girls — their fights and their nonsense and the car rides and all of it — the moment I am out of the house on a daily basis.
It’s the old refrain of motherhood: no matter what you do, you’re screwed. There’s guilt everywhere. It lies in wait under every decision, ready to pounce and remind you that you’re powerless even when you think you’re all-knowing, and that even when you think you’re taking your best considered action…you’re really just doing the best you can.
I am about to start a new, awesome job and I am excited. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t filled with some grief, too.
Grief, I’ve learned, isn’t just the physical loss of loved ones, though there has been plenty of that in these last two years. It’s also mourning all of the minuscule things we take for granted: routines, scenery, the people we used to be, the people we have been forced to become — times in our lives that, in hindsight, feel magical. And I can see that now, because mostly what I’ve been doing these last few months…is learning more about ME: understanding that I can be happy and sad at the same time; being comfortable with being uncomfortable; holding on and letting go.
This is scary stuff: there’s a lot of fear behind it, the not knowing what’s around the bend. The wondering how it’ll work out (reminder: it always does). And taking a leap of faith. I often think of an old running coach who once told me plainly, in order to run fast — you just have to run fast. A good metaphor perhaps: in order to do the hard thing, you just have to do the hard thing.
