I Love My Children But…

 

I have lost myself. Buried beneath piles of robotic motherly duties lay pieces of my former self. Some of those fragments are better kept submerged for fear of wreaking havoc on my ability to make rational decisions, however, most deserve to be resurfaced but never see the light of day.

     In nine years I have produced three children and they have produced a workload that has buried me nine-feet deep. Somewhere under afterschool activities, breaking up fights, patching the wounded and healing the sick is my energy, dreams and passions. Only in complete solitude can I feel them yearning to be recovered but I suppress them before guilt can set in. But recently, the moments of solitude have become more abundant since my youngest hopped on the academic bandwagon headed toward preschool, allowing those pieces to become a little louder, more persistent and gave them a boost to the surface. So, this leaves me with a question, can we be stay-at-home mothers and have our own individual identity? The answer – virtually impossible.

     Once a woman enters the world of the stay-at-home moms, she is unknowingly drafted into the Divine Silence of a Hush-Hush Motherhood. There isn’t a formal initiation and the secrets among the group are well kept – hidden deep within each member. Subjects like being unfulfilled, how mundane motherly duties can be and how we want to hide in a closet when we hear mom yelled yet again never pass our lips for fear of being judged or looked at as an unfit mother. It is an understood faux pas among the group to want something for ourselves. Of course we want our children to be happy, healthy and be successful but we should want the same for our own lives. To be examples to our daughters; show them that it is possible to be a mother and follow your dreams.

     If we broke the silence and spoke freely about how hard parenting really is there may be less episodes of Snapped and more mothers able to handle the tribulations of parenting. Now is the time and this is the place to unload, to reclaim our identity outside of being a mother, to make it acceptable to say, I love my children but I am unfulfilled. I love my children but I need to get away, I love my children but I think they may be out to kill me.

     In the memoir “Half Broke Horses”, Lily Casey Smith describes what is was like when both her children were finally in school and she began attending a local college: “I loved my time at the university and felt happier than I thought I had the right to be….I was learning about the world and improving my mind. I had no obligations to anyone but myself, and everything in my life was under mycontrol.”

      Let’s take control. The first step to finding ourselves again is to break the silence and fill in your blank; I love my children but…