Re-identifying your identity

                                NOT a tidying post

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

The past year and a half has been hard on everyone, especially mums and dads, and I expect I'm not the only who thinks that I am the only one who had a really, really, really hard year. After the bliss and magic sparkles of the newborn baby love bubble, (forgetting, of course, the holy shit-show that is breast feeding) shit starts getting real. There's worrying about whether they'll sit up. Then one day they sit up, beaming at you and you think you've died and gone to heaven. There's worrying whether or not they are ever going to crawl. Then one day they're crawling so fast you think they're training for the olympics. There's walking. Will they ever walk? Or are they doomed to all fours their entire life? Then they start walking, jumping, and RUNNING and you wish you were back at the stage where they couldn't sit up. 

Then there's the weaning. Eating at all. Illnesses they get from nursery, which is every illness that exists. Projectile vomiting every night and sometimes in the middle of the day when you are least expecting it. Panic buying everything on Amazon to keep them happy, stimulated, challenged, learning, aware, and then realising that every single item you bought is wrong in some way. They are either too young for it or too old for it. All they really want to play with is the cardboard box it came in, an empty plastic salmon container and daddy's shoes. Silly old mummy. 

The cleaning. Oh...my...good...god, the cleaning. I am inherently lazy, but since having Pickle, I have become a lot less lazy. There is no room for laziness. The absolute chaos that has replaced my life shows laziness the door and laughs churlishly as it slinks out. Here I must interject myself (is that a thing?) to say how lucky I am that my partner works himself to the bone at work all day, and in the evenings does a lot of the cleaning, especially if I'm flaked out on the couch like a war weary zombie after chasing my little screaming banshee all day long and trying to keep myself from becoming a big screaming banshee. He has a lot more energy than me and so on the weekends when I am taking care of Pickle, he whips around the house like a Tazmanian Devil, emptying bins and mowing the lawn and fixing a shelf to the wall and cleaning the car, while I watch him blearily and try not to feel too guilty. 

The cleaning is, nevertheless, pretty relentless. I keep having periods of time where I say "I won't clean anything until she's gone to bed for the night" or "I will put everything in the right box but I won't put the boxes away until she's gone to bed for the night" or "I'll clean while she's eating breakfast!" (Breakfast, incidentally, lasts less than 5 minutes these days. It doesn't afford me a lot of cleaning time but I'm sure Mary Poppins would have done it all, with 3 minutes to spare) None of these methods have worked, needless to say. She causes destruction faster than we can clean it up. One of my friends said to me recently, "you know all the things you swore you would do when you were pregnant and in the first days of babyhood? That's basically a list of all the stuff you will never do"  These days I sometimes put away a few blocks at the end of the day. If I can be arsed.  

And I know that there are houses out there with resident toddlers that look great. Ours is not one of them. As soon as I think I've finally finished cleaning the house, there is always something disgusting and squashed on the floor, grinning up at you, or behind the sofa, (I still haven't retrieved that baby tomato from three days ago that Pickle spat out of her mouth. I know it's there. I just choose to forget about it. This knowledge haunts me at night) or nestled happily between the piano keys, or sleeping peacefully underneath one of your pillows. We manage to clean the house to an almost acceptable level of viewing. Almost.

But the point of this post is not to complain, and it's definitely not about cleaning. I realise I've spent three entire paragraphs talking about cleaning! Maybe it should have been a separate post. Who posts about cleaning? How boring. 

No, the point of this post, is to explore the fact that most of this year I (along with most other people on the planet) felt pretty down in the dumps. There are other factors that I won't go into here, but it was when Pickle was about 8 months old that I realised that a big reason for this is that in becoming a mother, I had lost my identity. Before you jump around with rage at this statement, I believe this is absolutely right. I wanted this identity. I absolutely love being a mother, and I believe that the 97% of my waking life that I spend in this role is okay, but slowly, I started to realise that I can be a mother and still retain and develop a separate part of me that I love at the same time. 

Another interjection here: It is only my own personal need to nurture a part of myself separate from motherhood. I am not for a moment suggesting that every mother goes through this process or should go through this process, and I know there are mothers who desperately wish they could go through this process but cannot. I am only sharing that it was the case for my own journey, as I was suffering in a dark place and needed to find what it was that could help me climb out of it. 

I talked to many other mothers about this, did some research, and found out that there is a huge culture of supportiveness surrounding "taking care of yourself" as a mother. I have never met a  mother who will tell you "oh stop thinking about yourself and just get on with it!" 

Here's the odd bit. In true motherhood fashion, I actually started to panic and feel guilt around the fact that I wasn't taking care of myself, and that I hadn't yet carved out time for myself that would magically bring back my "identity". I felt like mothers on the yellow brick road to "finding our identity" should be like this gang of 20 something year old with purple hair extensions, Birkenstocks, and a golden sense of hope that we would "find ourselves" in Bali. I was working as a teacher part time, but my only my body was there, neither my soul nor spirit was in it.

From the moment I had this realisation, it took me another slow 12 months to actually do anything about it. I'm not going to say I've now found my identity, and I'm now always happy, and everything is perfect again, but I now am doing things regularly that bring me joy, like dancing, or gardening, or like writing and recording music, which has taken me to a very different place I thought it would when I was a shy, snaggle toothed teenager plunking out Bach's Goldberg Variations on Glen Gould's piano. Like starting this blog. I think these were there all along, standing shyly in the wings, waiting to be noticed. Yes, I've only really just begun, and yes, it's only taking up about 2% more of my life than it was before, but the point is, it's still there. 

                                                                

To all those mamas and papas out there who feel like you've lost yourself, trust me. You're still there. I'd love to hear from you if you've experienced something similar, and what you did to come back to yourself.

Thanks for reading x