Reel Life

I write a lot about the joys of motherhood. What I don’t share often are the struggles. Since I’m a real person, I do have challenges. As we use to say when I was 13, "Get real!" This blog wouldn’t be worth reading if I didn’t get real every once-in-awhile. So today I'm taking advice from 13-year-old me.

The last 6 months of motherhood have been filled with joy, laughter, and enough love to fill a lifetime. I’ve also shed tears… quietly, and mostly when no one was looking.

I was shocked by motherhood. It caught me off guard. I’m absolutely in love with Jackson, and would never take a “do over.”  But I have to admit it’s been difficult for me. Sometimes I look down at Jackson nursing or sleeping in my arms and I have an out of body experience. It’s the only way I know to describe what happens to me… It’s a flash, like I’m watching myself in a movie. The woman I see looks like me as I watch her feeding Jackson, bathing him, or rocking him to sleep. Listening to her sing lullabies, she even sounds like me. I see the woman in the movie, enjoying her baby and smiling. But I have this feeling that it’s not me. I have this feeling that the real me is watching the movie from somewhere else, like peering through a porch window to watch life happen in someone else’s living room.

It’s during those flashes, those out-of-body experiences that I’m faced with ongoing identity crisis. Whose life am I living? Motherhood happened when I least expected it. There are moments when I feel like I’ve lost hold of myself. Gone is the woman who woke up slowly, who washed her face religiously and made sure her hair was “just so”. Now she wakes to the sound of a crying baby. I look in the mirror and I see dark circles under her eyes, spit-up on her clothes, and hair that barely gets washed. Before: she loved going to work. After: she sits down at her desk every morning, fighting off the guilt of leaving her baby. Who is that woman in the movie? It’s just theater, life on a reel. It can’t be me.

But it is me. This is my life now. This tiny human being is totally dependent on me. He needs me to feed him, dress him, clean him, teach him, comfort him, provide for him. I am his mother. I’m the center of his universe. It’s terrifying.

Some days I stay inside my body, going through the routine of "sames" that I do every day. I devote my energy to being who people need me to be. Other days, it happens. Without warning, the movie starts to play... and I watch myself living someone else's life. Maybe someday my head will join my heart in understanding that the reel life is my real life. Maybe the movie will leave the theatre soon. Until then, I'm trying to enjoy the show.