Motherload

I was an overachiever in high school.  Athletics, marks, student government, friends.  You name it, I wanted to excel at it.  I grinded through University, ballooning my course load as I bounced from faculty to faculty.  Finally settling on a post-University designation, my first job demanded eighty work hours a week.  I tackled it, ignored my family, made good money and was promoted.  I even got engaged to a co-worker.  I was enroute to having it all, a little earlier than expected, but hey, I was an overachiever.  But when I graduated from the grunt work level position, I realized that I didn’t really want to ascend the ranks.  This coincided with my partner declaring he didn’t want kids.  Instead of having it all, I abruptly had nothing. 

I switched industries and started again, same salary as six years before, same hours.    As I crept into my mid-thirties, single for years, I wondered if I was going to have to do this kid thing on my own.  Fate intervened, I met my Beloved and had our daughter just under the wire of turning forty.

The year after her birth was idyllic.  I had one priority, my family.  As my maternity leave dwindled, I considered staying home permanently.  We couldn’t afford it, and I did miss adult interaction, so I stepped back into the stream of work.  Hoping I could wade in, I was thrust immediately back into the rapids.

I tried to prove I could still shoulder my pre-leave responsibilities, but now I had a daily 5 pm child-care deadline which felt like I was leaving mid-day.  I worked every night after bed-time.  My marriage suffered, my health suffered.  I had to admit I couldn’t keep up that pace.  My ego suffered.  I amped up my physical presence at home but my mind was elsewhere, my stomach churning from all the undones.  Stolen moments were spent hot-potatoing through my to-do list and never on attention to self-care. 

Inevitably, things came to a head and my life inverted itself, or rather I inverted my life.  I’ve slowed things down considerably, fortunately in time to see my daughter through high school.  I treasure our moments together.  When she comes home from school and tells me what teacher injustice she had to endure, or what cute boy she spied, or what executive decision she has made about her life, I revel in it. 

Whatever was so essential about those to-do lists has vanished.  I wasn’t saving lives.  Through some miracle, I made a life.  And that actually matters more to me than anything else. 

That girl in high school, that woman in her twenties, worked hard and had some lessons coming her way.  It’s impossible to know what life might have been had she known what she knows now.  From the vantage of the second half of life, there is no ‘having it all’, there is only choosing what you have, and finding peace in your choice.