Last night, I took ten minutes.
I took ten minutes, and I realized she is still there.
The woman I was before I had a baby.
In here, pushing through the jungle of guilt vines, choked with responsibility mosquitoes, thick with the oppressive humidity of doubt and the anxiety of everyday darkness. She's in here. She's still here. She's okay.
I worked from five thirty in the evening until nine thirty making cookies like I do every tuesday and thursday in the cafe a block from my apartment. I worked with the twenty four and twenty five year olds that I work with regularly. They played music from video games that have hundreds of hours of story lines and from bands whose members weren't born when I graduated high school. They talked obsessively about how stressed out working at a cafe made them, about how they were the only things keeping the place together, about how they "couldn't handle much more of this."
I smiled and kept doing their dishes.
I got my cookies made. I listened to them whinge about dating and apps and being single and being an introvert because apparently everyone's an introvert now, and they know their Myer-Briggs label, and they practically wear it as a t-shirt or use it as the heading on their resume. It's always been cool to be broken, but now it's cool to tell everyone your diagnosis and compare meds.
No shame...maybe that's a good thing?
It's all the same though.
The vocabulary is different.
The music is unfamiliar, and the technology has changed things a little, but it's still pretty miserable to be twenty. All the internal conflict, and an endless amount of energy to fuel the self doubt and discovery.
The night wore on. I listened. I thought about the rest of the day, how I'd been cleaning up the geriatric dog's accidents, chasing the baby, trying to get him to eat, taking my Dad out to lunch, getting myself to a dentist appointment, and making the baby and my husband's dinners all before I headed out the door to my shift.
I thought about how four or five years ago, when the compound housed all my closest friends, and we all worked in cafes and bakeries, how we used to waste time like it was an olympic sport.
Entire days were spent doing whatever we liked.
I could come and go as I pleased, go to the beach and change my mind halfway there.
Still, I would worry.
I would obsess about restricting and over-exercising and not getting fat.
I would obsess about reading books and being at parties or bars or seeing people and being clever and funny and looking like I had my shit together.
I wanted people to think I was a big deal so badly.
But so much of the best times were just sitting around with my friends, drinking coffee and listening to music and talking. Or sitting out on the porch having a glass of wine and singing along as my best friend strummed her ukelele. Or even taking slow wanders around the cemetery or the beach, working through the fogs of our emotions and forgetting to feel the breeze on our skins.
One of the things I miss the most since having a child, and the forced isolation it incurs, is the casual ways I could always access my friends.
I struggled so much with the feeling that I was being left behind.
I was anchored to my couch for an entire year, nursing and cleaning and finishing my masters degree.
Then I was stepping gingerly away from the couch and the baby, overwhelmed by how reluctant I was to leave him even for a couple of hours, confused as to who I was now that my priorities were so different from my single or child-free friends.
It hurt.
I know, right?
It doesn't make any sense.
It hurt that I had changed so much I could barely stand to leave my kid with his dad for a couple of hours and toddle down the street to see a jazz band play. It hurt that I skipped parties so much that I stopped being told they were happening.
It hurt that couples I had introduced were no longer texting me to come to their backyard bonfires or that the times I saw them were alway incidental, and I missed them, and they missed me, and we'd make promises to call each other for a drink, knowing as we walked away that we were never going to follow through.
Most days, I am spent by seven pm. I've spent twelve hours caring for my kid while his dad's away at work, and he's a magical joy of a human being, but he's also more exhausting that I ever fathomed another human could be.
It's surprised me how working a couple of days at the cafe has helped expand my perspective.
Last night, I came home from my shift, and I was tired, and I was hungry, but I was also kind of flying.
I'd made an absolute ton of cookies in a very short amount of time.
One of which was an experimental riff on oreos, and I'd never made them before, so when the results turned out spectacularly, I was over the moon.
I walked home and it was a surprisingly mild night.
I'd forgotten my coat, and barely missed it.
One of the blessed twenty somethings had handed me a third of a bottle of rosé that they couldn't serve, so I poured it into a glass when I got home, and I sat down on the porch.
It was almost ten, and my husband texted me, "Where are you," and I lied. I said I was taking out the dog, but instead I sat out under the stars and watched the blossoms from the apple tree in our yard shed all its petals like snow.
I sat out there, and I took sweet sips of the wine and breathed, and I realized it's all still here.
The parties, the books, the beautiful nights, the walks through the cemetery, the long talks, the fires, the coffee, the music, and the laughter. It's all still here waiting for me whenever I'm ready.
I sort of thought I'd been swallowed by motherhood, and that there was no coming back, and in a way, that's true.
I finished the glass of wine, and a breeze that smelled like someone's laundry steam floated by and was criss crossed by one that smelled like ocean. The petals floated by and settled into dimples in the grass and asphalt. I lifted my hand to move a stray hair off my cheek and my knuckles smelled like buttercream, and I smiled because I'm still me.
She's here whenever I am still.
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