Incarnation.

Dear friends,

I have a recurring dream that has punctuated most of my adult life.

The details vary from occasion to occasion, but the theme is the same: I’m in between semesters, in between jobs, in between places to live. I don’t know exactly where to go or how to support myself. Graduation is still a few classes away, so adulthood is just around the corner, but not quite here yet.  Sometimes I imagine I will go back to my mother’s home and other times I imagine my father’s. (Neither landing strip is attractive to me so I try to keep moving.) Always, I am unsure – how to stay afloat just a little longer until I can earn my degree and get a real job.

Unlike a lot of my friends, my college experience was not idyllic. I worked three jobs and took out loans to get myself through, so I was certainly not carefree. Honestly, I don’t remember having much fun. I remember stress and worry. I remember being restless and melancholy and impatient. I remember getting my heart broken by a boy and feeling adrift. I remember just trying to get through another semester, then another, and another, just hoping something better was in store for me beyond graduation.

It doesn’t surprise me, then, that the old anxieties of my early 20s come back to me through dreams.  What does sometimes surprise me is how far I’ve come since then, how a girl who didn’t have a clue who she wanted to be or how to be it managed to find her place in the world and put down stakes,  how the ennui of my youth became the equanimity of my adulthood.

A friend of mine started an interesting thread on Facebook the other day about graduation memories, in which he said: “I think my 1988 self wouldn’t be comfortable with my 2012 self, but could recognize him dimly.”

His words gave me pause because it’s the opposite of my experience. I’m pretty sure my 2012 self isn’t comfortable with my 1988 self, or any of my selves before it.  Sometimes I think my recurring dream is suggesting that my 2012 self is still trying to outrun my 1988 self.

Maybe that’s why I’m so fascinated by the AMC series “Mad Men” and its protagonist Don Draper, a man who recreates himself at will, over and over again, at no small cost to those around him.  I’d like to think I’m not nearly as self-centered and detached as Don, but a piece of me understands his shark-like instinct to keep swimming or die.

Middle age (as I define it) officially arrives for me in 2012. My “big” birthday is in December and after I cross that line of demarcation, I am no longer young. But I often think youth, except for the stamina and the slenderness – and, lord, that taut, tan skin – is vastly overrated.  I think I’ve arrived at a place unimaginable in my teens and 20s  – a place amply comfortable, and peaceful, and stable, despite my peripatetic beginning.

Maybe I didn’t really run away from myself as much as I ran into myself, into the heart of a girl who couldn’t see the destination but clung to the path anyway, jaw set, hopeful the margin would widen over time, only to look up one day and see the self she never imagined but whose reflection is startlingly satisfactory.

Or maybe my previous selves coalesced, a collage of incarnations, each of them contributing a piece of my existential puzzle that is never really solved but whose mystery is nevertheless a glorious, curious, amaranthine quest for the single self which eludes us all.

With gratitude {for all my selves},

Joan, who offers many thanks to her friends and fellow lovers of words, Dave and Maridel, whose sentence and word, respectively, inspired this post

“And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”

– Peter Matthiessen, in The Snow Leopard

“I am no Hindu, but I hold the doctrine of the Hindus concerning a future state (rebirth) to be incomparably more rational, more pious, and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by Christians on punishments without end.” 

– William Jones

Too many words on my mental state at this exact moment.

Dear friends,

I don’t have the right words to describe how I’ve been feeling lately, so I’ll just take a ham-handed stab at it.

Teary. Jittery. Frustrated. Angry. Distraught. Restless. Blue. Pensive. To the tenth power.

I told Mr. Mom yesterday that I alternate between wanting to burst into tears and stab somebody in the face. (Actually, I think if I could stab somebody THEN have a good cry, I might feel a whole lot better.)

At any other point in my life, I might have called this feeling hormonal. (Sorry male readers.) But I’m pretty sure I’m not hormonal.

I’m pretty sure I’m freaking out. I’m pretty sure I’m flipping my lid because the beautiful young woman in the photo above is moving out.  I’m pretty sure I’m melting down because my mother card is being punched for the last time and I don’t get a new one.

I’ve been a working mother for all of my children’s lives. My own mother raised my children until Mr. Mom took over a few years ago. I have always known my days as a pinch-hitter were numbered. But I looked up not long ago and realized my number had dropped from triple digits to double digits. That’s right, Kate moves away in 79 days.

Seventy-nine days and I’m no longer the mother of a daughter who lives under my roof. Seventy-nine days and anything I wanted to be as a mother, do as a mother, is over. Seventy-nine days and my fate is sealed on what Kate thinks and feels and remembers about her time under my wing. I had my swing at the ball and now I have to go sit in the dugout. Forever.

The thing is — when you are a working mother, you can’t think about your expiration date. You do, of course, but you don’t contemplate it seriously because — damn — you’re just trying to get through the days, you know, with some sliver of your sanity intact. Maybe stay-at-home mothers feel this way, too. I would never know. And maybe their guilt and regret is every bit as intense as those of us who go to the office everyday and work too many nights and weekends and take too many business trips and miss too many school plays and sporting matches.

Maybe the lot of every soul born a woman and who later gives birth is to feel sorrow and guilt and regret and to second-guess every thing she ever did, including the pink lipstick that she insisted upon and that infuriated her daughter on dance recital day, as well as the moment she lost her senses and threw the remote control at the back of her daughter’s head and mercifully missed because she can’t hit a target to save her life. Maybe the lot of every mother is to live out her days convinced all she did was fritter it away and screw it up and believe there is surely a special hell for mothers. Especially neurotic, introspective mothers.

All I know is this mother misses every moment she didn’t get to have with her daughter even though she knows made a bargain with her partner and her end of the bargain included earning a living and now feeling this way is selfish and indulgent, like she wanted it all and knew she couldn’t have it all but is still p-o’d about it.

Hey, I didn’t say I was being rational.

And since I’m not being rational, please don’t tell me about how great it will be to transition to the next stage of motherhood. I cannot hear those words right now. I’m still having a tantrum over this stage coming to an end.

But if you want to tell me I’m normal, not psychotic, that would be appreciated. If you want to tell me this feeling, much like grieving, will diminish with time, then that will be appreciated, too. If you want to commiserate and tell me this transition in a mother’s life sucks big-time — whether you are a stay-at-home mom or a working mom — then I’ll give you an “Amen, sister.” If you want to hold my hand and cry with me, then come over soon, please, or at least before I get my ugly cry-face on.

Because let’s not compound the tragedy, okay?

With gratitude {for . . . I’m searching . . . I’m searching . . .},

Joan, who feels a little like Anne of the Thousand Days, only she had 7,000 and it’s still not nearly enough