Memoir Prompt:
Day 12: Decisions. I've been reading The Things They Carried and I feel gutted. In one passage he talks about the decision of whether to fight in Vietnam or run to Canada. "Twenty yards. I could've jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. . . What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think of your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?" Write about a decision. A wrenching decision. A decision that changed your course. How did you decide? What did it feel like? Who did it affect? 8 minutes. Don't hold back.
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I've always known I wanted to have children.
A love of children is the one thing in my life that I can trace back to my earliest days (well, that and crushes on boys...)
As a child, I would arrange my stuffed animals and dolls in a "classroom." I would make up lesson plans, take attendance, and even had a grade book in which I would carefully pass or fail them.
I told my parents, with great confidence, that I was going to have 100 children.
I babysat from the very moment I was allowed to do so.
I worked in the church nursery.
When I left to go to college, I spent COUNTLESS hours volunteering in the lab classrooms on campus, working with special needs children under the age of three. And I do mean countless.. which then evolved into my first full time adult job.
Rob and I got married fairly young and started our family fairly young, by today's standards. I had just turned 26 when our first child was born.
I have never, ever regretted having children, although there were certainly moments when I could have easily gotten into the car like Marie Osmond did and driven far, far away.
There have been times, big fat blocks of time, in which I lost track of who I was, outside of being a mother. Times when I truly felt depressed and overwhelmed and completely drowned in the needs of children and a husband and raising a family.
Times of overwhelming joy, times of heartbreak, times of white hot rage and boundless pride.
Times when the little girl I was would be so proud of her Mommying and times when she would be beyond horrified at her own future actions or words.
Now that my kids are growing older and up and out of the house, I spend time trying to decide things about this next phase of life: What does it look like? What is my role? Who am I now and what do I want for MYSELF. Do I even remember how to answer these questions anymore?
Time will tell.
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If you want to play along, Go here: http://anndeeellis.com/2016/09/11/day-12/
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1 comment:
I have spent several years wrestling with this issue and then spent this past summer working on it very intentionally. I have come across some good books that have helped me in the process. One I recommend is From Mom to Me Again: How I Survived My First Empty-Nest Year and Reinvented the Rest of My Life by Melissa Shulz. I still haven't figured out exactly what's "NEXT" for me, but I have at least determined a direction to head in. Good luck! And I personally hope that you will continue writing in the next phase!
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