Losing My Edge
Inner Momologue: there are days I question how I did it all and if I still have it in me to keep going.
Today is my youngest child Faith’s nineteenth birthday. We woke up together in a hotel in Brooklyn with a long talked about plan to run from the tippity top of Manhattan to the tippity bottom only to scratch it for coffee in bed. It was an idea inspired by a summer of binging Broad City combined with us training for the NYC marathon. I mean, what were we thinking? It’s a Birthday! Who wants to run 14 miles when they can order room service and have coffee in bed? Who am I kidding though? I’d cancel any morning run to lay in bed and drink coffee at this point in my life.
Sometimes it worries me… Am I getting lazy? Undisciplined? Over it? Am I reverting to the person I was pre-motherhood? Or am I just tired from 22 years of it all? And by all I mean, all. of. it. There is a sense of relief I get when we decide not to follow the plan. Which is where the worry comes in.
Am I losing my edge?
I’ve thought about it. Canceling doesn’t flood with me with the same high it used to. Now it’s more of a flicker of relief followed by knowing that I’ll be making up for this, we will call it a ‘delay’, eventually. This is a lesson I learned from years of ditching school that resulted in summer classes or calling in sick to work and not having money for whatever it I needed money for in my youth. Or as a parent counting the days until summer vacation, late nights and sleeping in, no car lines or homework, but managing kids at home while figuring out how to work.
The trade off is REAL.
For the most part, parenting means no ditching. No calling in sick. No ‘off’ days. There’s nothing like a hangover (thankfully those were limited in my parenting years since I removed drinking from the equation for 5+ years) or the flu and no one to drive the kids to school, to show you what you’re made of. How physically close to death you might feel and you somehow manage, despite all odds, to get dinner on the table. Not that I had much time to find out the discipline I had before motherhood, I can say I am and continue to be shocked by what I’ve been able to do, if only in contrast to who I was before.
There were decisions I made before graduating high school and the year following that, thanks to my therapist for giving me the awareness to see were not only pivotal, but a testament to my character. Unfortunately, it took me a long ass time and money in therapy to believe it, but hey… we arrive when we are ready.
Prior to getting pregnant I had already decided that I wanted to change the trajectory of my life. What had been up until that point, the longest drinking binge that became sustainable by drugs and over eating and then more drugs for the over eating to even more drugs, turned into me just wanting to die from drugs. At the young age of nineteen, I booked a one way ticket to Hawaii and was determined to get clean and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It would have been nice if someone told me at 40 I would still be wondering what I want to do with my life.
I decided I needed to move to Maui, HI
I remember being on the plane. My hair was just an inch or so longer than a pixie cut short and had been bleached with an ombre effect that bled orange to red. My lip and tongue ring were intact and I wore a large yellow hoodie. Why a hoodie to a tropical island? Your guess is as good as mine. I had on me a Navy Blue Jansen backpack that likely contained tapes of Modest Mouse and Lisa Germano and books like Geek Love. All around me were families, retired couples and honeymooners. When we landed and all stood to grab our overhead bags, a man in his mid twenties patted me on the shoulder and asked, ‘can I take your picture? I’ve never seen anyone like you come to Maui.’ I’m not sure if that was true, but based on my immediate surroundings, he didn’t appear to be wrong.
If you had told me then, when I was contemplating using needles to get high, dodging phone calls from my family insisting I move home, that I would become a mother just a little over a year later, two months before my twenty first birthday, I would have warned all of those around me - the messenger especially- that no child should enter into my life or one like mine. I would know… I was the child of alcoholics and addicts.
But there was something else in me. Twenty two years later I know that, but back then? No clue as to what I was capable of; I should have known based on the decisions that led me away from using to living in the most isolated place in the world; I should have known based on the pure tenacity I had to quit using without help or guidance; I should have based on the moment I was in a garage with a built in laundry room that housed my clothes, was trying everything on and then throwing it across the room enraged and engulfed in tears because I had gained so much weight and nothing fit, that a) I was detoxing and going through withdrawals and b) I chose to join a gym and start working out. I should have known six months later when I clean, eating well and in shape and found out I was pregnant because the pull out method is not the best form of birth control and some swimmers are strong and determined, that I would become even more disciplined, making more decisions that would show me I could and would show up.
For years I’ve said that motherhood made me who I am. That I had to die a thousand deaths to become the mother Nick and Faith needed, but I now know that this is who I always was. She was buried beneath a childhood of trauma. She continued to bury herself through her twenties in many ways. In her thirties in others. But she did not waiver on being the mother her children needed or on becoming who she needed to be.
There was always an edge.
This year, when my son turned twenty one I thought, okay I said to him, ‘I’m so happy you are not holding your baby at your twenty first birthday dinner like I was’. This statement, or any similar tone, does not make my kids question my love for them or my choice. They aren’t naive to what my life has been raising them.
Sitting with Faith today, having coffee, walking around NYC listening to her talk about the last year of living in the city, attending college stirs up those old comparisons and thoughts… ‘when I was your age’…
Thoughts I don’t have to say like, ‘I’m so glad you are not getting clean off drugs and trying to find your way.’ Instead, I get to praise her for how they’re choosing to live their life.
But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit seeing my kids determination and discipline didn’t threaten or cause me to question myself and behaviors; I used to be like that; pulling 12 hour work days; navigating school, social and dating schedules; getting up at 3:30am to run 20 miles with an ace bandage around my swollen milk filled breasts. I don’t have that in me anymore. I’m not referring to the breast milk, but the energy.
The edge.
I interrogate myself, questioning how am I going to go about doing things when there isn’t the ‘you have no choice’. I know without a doubt that regressing to who I was before motherhood, stands zero chances of a possibility. On a cellular level, she doesn’t exist. I can’t say for certain that I’m 100% confident I can revert back to the determination that fueled me to where I am now.
Maybe this is what you are supposed to experience after twenty two years of marriages, deaths, divorces, raising kids and building businesses.
Just typing that makes me think I don’t require that kind of energy anymore. My life does not demand from me the way that one did.
It’s like being back on that plane at nineteen without the ‘my life depends on it’ pressure. I’m at a place of change, independence and freedom.
What if there is no edge? Perhaps this isn’t me being lazy or lost, but instead just living in between the extremes…
Enjoying coffee in bed
… a run later in the day
Witnessing my kids thrive and evolve…
and me
just ‘being’ the person I’ve grown to be…
not so edgy.