finding ways
To go along with the Buffy-a-thon, my cousin has lent me the entire first season of Veronica Mars. Clearly I have a thing for tough blonde teenagers with a mission. Veronica is what I wished I was like, back when I was a teen. She lets stuff — really mean stuff — just roll off her back. She is smart, sassy, pretty and well-dressed. She likes who she likes and ignores those she doesn’t. She gets along with her dad who respects her. She has skills. She has integrity.
I was a pretty scattered teenager, too vulnerable to the slings and arrows of both fortune and my fellows. My mother was still a pretty strong influence in what I wore because she bought it and in her eyes, I was way more LLBean than I wanted to be. I was really shy, yet longed for the spotlight. I believed then that what I needed was to grow up. To find out who I was and then to be it, really hard, every day. And sometime in my late twenties I remember thinking — all right! I’m finally getting it. Hey, I’m not perfect but I have friends I like, clothes I like to wear, a job I like and a life I like. I look in the mirror and recognize myself. I still have a few things here and there to sort out but, yes! This is me. Hi there!
Then motherhood hit and things fell apart. I actually sat in bed on the day after I gave birth and sobbed because I felt certain my life had ended. That the movie “ME!” starring ME! had ended and I was now way down in the credits of a movie called “DANIEL!” without even a name. I was now, suddenly, “and supporting others.”
It’s been a very long road back to figuring out that I’m still in my own movie, as well as in the movies of my children (and my husband and friends for that matter). And what I realized just recently, partly by watching too much teen television, is that it’s a myth that there is one you to discover and be. This is a very Molly Ringwald notion. We are not static. We do not become something and then get to sit back and relax. Well, maybe for a year or two, but not forever. We are constantly in the state of becoming something.
So yeah, there was a twenty-something me that I really loved being. I haven’t lost her, but she’s old news. I’m becoming another me right now. Maybe I’ll have a different dress sense or haircut. Maybe my friends will be a slightly different sort of person. Maybe a job I’ll love will have different hours. There’s no such thing as grown-up. There’s only growing.
This is more important than it sounds — motherhood felt wrong hung on my old self. I struggled. I rebelled. I was uncomfortable in my skin, much the way I had been as a teen. And I was just as angst-ridden and given to bad poetry and crying fits and screwing up as I had been then. The key problem has been that I have believed I need to go back and find that old self and that it will all somehow be okay. And I can’t and I don’t want to. I need to go forward and find out who I am becoming.
This post makes me think, and want to say a lot of things. But I have no time tonight. I will just say, as so often I have found before, you are an inspiration.
PS I will be in touch, I’ve just had no spare mins at a possibly good time for you!
I’m encouraged by this post. Like you, I really came into my own in my late-twenties and eary thirties. Travelled, changed jobs on a whim, had solid friendships and way more fun that I should have.
I then spent most of my miserable pregnancy waiting to “feel like myself” again, convinced that would happen shortly after my son was born. (Ha!) This continued on for the near sleepless first year of motherhood, and its only recently that I’ve began to understood what you so eloquently expressed about going forward and unleashing a brand new me on the world. World, I’m so sorry.
Ok love Veronica Mars too!! We are so TV sisters!!! OMG if the world was smaller I would love to sit and knit and watch tv with you!!
I blossomed as a mother. Before motherhood I was lost. I did not know where I was heading the only goals I had was to help my husband achieve his. Now I design blogs and graphics, I write, I knit, sew .. I have individual purpose as well as purpose as a Mom and a wife.
I so want to be you when I grow up-or grown into my next stage. I love Veronica Mars. No one Roy and I know watch it. They just assume that we’re so immature for watching a show about a teenager.
wow…
i so love how you worded this,
and i know exactly what you mean…
i was also shy
and quiet and uncomfortable
with myself and by the time
i was ok with me,
me had morphed into something else.
heh.
your wording made alot more sense.
OMG, how eloquently you have managed to describe my struggles as a person, mom, woman, wife. It’s awesome to finally figure out that it is okay to be constantly changing. And isn’t it great that seemingly stupid television shows can give you so much insight. It has been Charmed and Dharma and Greg reruns for me. Maybe I should check out Buffy and Veronica as well.
I needed to read this. I’ve been struggling with this all lately, and reading your words about always growing up, and becoming something, hits home for me. I was stuck in the “I want to be the old Judy again” for a long time, and I think a lot of my unhappiness cam from that, and now I’m realizing I need to find out who the new Judy is, and will be.