"Sometimes the best way to be yourself is to get to that place where you don't have to be anything else."
Lately I wonder who I am now that I'm not pregnant anymore. I've been either pregnant, trying to get pregnant or post partom for literally two years now. Two years and two months. After all that pregnancy I'm now a mommy--a real mother--and that as well is all consuming. How do you invest all of your love, time, and energy into becoming a mother and being a mother and then have room for your original identity as well. Remember that person that resides inside you prepregnancy?
Well, I'm sitting here, wearing jeans (without an elastic waist), sneakers, and a Red Sox raglan shirt, and I'm actually writing so I guess I'm more me than I have been in many, many years. I went through a long phase after high school where the only time I would be caught dead in a pair of sneakers was if I was at the gym, and even then, they had to be cute sneakers. My sporty high school self would have hated the collegiate me who took a shower, blow dried my hair and put on make up before working out. But then I got over that stage too and I got married and I got pregnant. And now I've been in this maternity clothes phase for quite some time and yes everyone says how cute you look in empire waist shirts and flip flops that are a size bigger than normal, but really--that maternity phase isn't me either, it was just a time in my life where I put all my other life "normals" on hold. When you're pregnant, drinking is on hold, so a lot of your social life is on hold too, besides the fact that bedtime comes a lot sooner when you're sleeping for two. Even sitting comfortably was a problem in the last month of my last pregnancy so who even wants to go anywhere in a car and have to stop every fifteen minutes to find a bathroom? I missed half of my best friend's thirtieth birthday because my feet were so swollen after our chinese food dinner that I wouldn't have been able to keep up with everyone else at the club---not to mention, who wants to see a pregnant chick at a club anyway? Everyone would be like, "don't dance with me--what if your water breaks?" lol.
My point is, in the last few years of fostering the growth of two beautiful fetuses, I've lost touch a little with my old self and even my old friends.
I was noticing on facebook the other day how many people are still friends with the people they were friends with in high school. It seems like everyone I know still hangs around with their high school best friends except for me. My two closest friends I've been friends with since before high school, so I can't totally exclude myself completely from this category, but in general, my clique has dissolved.
I guess it surprises me a little because back then we were like sisters. Originally there were three of us and we did absolutely everything together. We spent so much time together that we habitually shortened words and only said the necessary syllables and yet could still understand each other's conversation. We had sleepovers every weekend, we shared clothes, we knew exactly how many bagel bites the other would eat and who liked the ones with the burnt edges and who didn't. We consistently emptied ketchup bottles at Friendly's and The 99. We knew each other's hand writing, crushes, fears and favorite names for future children. As we got older, three or four more girls joined our gaggle and we were a solidified "group of friends". Even as we entered college, we still remained close--mostly. But by the time the four years of college were over, all but two of these girls seemd like near strangers.
I always looked at other groups of friends and imagined that there was no way they were as tight as me and my friends, but I must have been mistaken. It's one of the many times that I look back and think, I didn't know it all back then, I guess.
This past weekend, Margaret, my bestie since high school that I still hang out with on the reg, and myself were invited to a birthday party at Jump On In, with our children of course. I haven't had so much fun in ages. Our boys are both toddlers and they of course, enjoyed the bouncy houses, but not as much as their post pardom mothers did. When you enter these little bouncy houses, if you are bigger than say, 75 pounds, your weight makes the walls and floors sort of sink under you. Well, that made Margaret and I laugh hysterically as our little boys would fall into the sink holes we created in the blow up houses. Now that I'm not pregnant and I'm twenty pounds freer, I was jumping and climbing and going down slides with my little man on my lap and it felt good. I didn't realize how much I missed being physical and playing! And having my high school best friend there as well made me feel young again and the sudden connection I had to the girl who I'd buried for the last twelve years began to emerge. We had so much fun--like real, good hearted, old fashioned, substance free fun. Remember slumber parties and laughing so hard that you became light headed drunk on happiness? It was like that.
Hello there, Shan. Nice to see you again.
