Becoming Myself

"Don't you miss them?"

I hear this question at least once every July, when my kids go with their dad to visit his family in New Mexico for a month.

Sometimes the question is: "do you miss them?" - an inquiry, but more often it's: "don't you miss them?" - a foregone conclusion. As though a mother separated from her children for a month must surely be devastated.

At first, I felt guilty admitting the answer was "no."

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mom left her family to travel the world. She still lives abroad. And if I'm honest, there are days when I secretly wish I had it in me to do that.

But, I don't.

My kids are the reason I have become who I am, and our paths of growth are linked.

It was only after my kids were born that I realized I was in a marriage that was wrong for me, that I had tethered myself to someone who's values were completely different from mine, and with whom I could not fully be myself.

Having children catalyzed my values, and once that happens there's no turning back.

Then, there was the pivotal, day... (I imagine this in headline caps: The. Pivotal. Day. Most of the time you don't know it's happening until later... sometimes, years later. But in the end, you can trace it back to this.)

When my first son was 6 months old, I answered a knock at the door on a Thursday afternoon to find a policeman on my doorstep; the first clue that I couldn't keep pretending everything was okay. My then-husband had been arrested for DUI.

The moment is crystal clear: I open the door, see the uniform, barely hear his words, and think "how did I become the mother who answers the door with an infant in her arms to learn that her husband has been arrested?"

Something broke for me in that moment, and I took an invisible step away from my misaligned life and toward my true values.

And yet, while this may have been the first clue, it took several more years and another child before I realized that I couldn't change his choices -- but I could change mine.

A couple of years after my second son was born, when I was fully submerged in the exhausted overwhelm that comes with being the mother of two children under 5, I was offered the opportunity to train to become a Parenting Coach. At first, I declined. But one night I woke at midnight in a panic that I had missed the deadline, knowing without question that this was a path I needed to take.

In doing so, I took another small step toward respecting my intuition. I was of course hoping also that it would profoundly improve my parenting skills... and while it didn't have this immediate effect, it did start me on a path of self-knowing that 20 years of therapy had failed to spark.

As I did the work of becoming honest with myself, I began to realize just how much of me had been lost in my marriage, and how deeply this was affecting my parenting.

Once the marriage ended, I began the process of unwinding from the tight shell I had created around myself. I started to make contact with the core essence of who I am, and more and more to trust myself and my intuition (which I had been ignoring for so very long, and which - as it turns out - is a much better source for parenting than any learned strategy.)

And so, when I say that my kids are the reason I am who I am today, I mean it in the most literal sense. Having children was the catalyst for me coming back to myself.

However, this does NOT mean that I need to be with my children at every moment, or even every day. I love them wholly and appreciate them for who they are, and I also recognize the gift I receive when they travel with their dad for that month in the summer every year.

This time allows me to be ME. If I have lost track of myself in solo parenting over the past year, it renews and revives me for the coming 11 months.

And so, though I won't leave my kids and travel the world for years, neither will I lament their absence for a month each July.

I will be grateful for them, and grateful for my time without them.

I am a mother and I am not only a mother.

In order to be the best mother I can be, I must first be myself, alone.

"Don't you miss them?"

I don't miss them as much as I missed me.