PYHO: The Changes In Me

I am joining up this week for Shell's PYHO.



I look in the mirror sometimes these days, and I wonder who the person looking back at me is.  There is a stranger in my mirror.  I am trying to figure out who the hell she is.

It's actually possible that she is the old me.  I haven't seen her in a few years, so I can't be too sure.

But...that's not quite right...maybe the old me, with some salt and pepper?  Not in my personality...in my hair.  I have had that salt and pepper for years...but I used to cover it up.  Now I don't care.  During treatment I got cute every day.  Contacts, light makeup, that fit.  That was my way of coping.

Now I have nice clothes...but only so I don't go to work in sweatpants every day.  And only if they are comfortable.  Discomfort can eat me these days.  The old me grabbed clothes off the floor, and if they didn't match, so what.  If they were so dirty they could walk out the door on their own, I generally wore them once more and THEN did laundry.  And now I have a twist on that...spitup, formula, and, yes, even pee are acceptable accessories.  No, really, I got peed on today and didn't have time to change.  So I didn't.

But still...there is some new identity emerging.  My piercings have slowly been vacating my body, for one reason or another, and I simply don't care enough to put them back in.  I have found some peace I haven't had in a long time.

I am not oogling for attention.  Which is what I did throughout treatment.  I needed someone else to find me attractive, make me feel alive.

I still want to help people, but I will no longer be walked over in the pursuit of kindness.

So when I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself.  But I also don't see a stranger. I see bits and pieces of an older me...and pieces of a new me I am still growing to know.

Is this what motherhood has done to me?  Is this the me I was meant to grow into?  I am still learning myself.  I learn myself through my son, through my husband.  I still have dreams, but once those dreams were ideas that possessed me.  Dreams whose incompletion made me feel...lost.  Now I see them as something I would like to do, but in the sense that I want to show things to my son.  I want to make HIS dreams come true.  And if I get to make some of mine come true along the way, awesome.

But I think this new person will no longer mourn the things I may never do, not like I have in the past. My world changed...not the day I got pregnant.  The day I held my newborn son in my arms.

And that was the day the person in the mirror began changing.  I am still learning her...and perhaps someday, she will be familiar to me once again...