Reidentification

You might have noticed that I had a little blogging break, over Christmas & darkest winter. It wasn’t planned but now that it’s over I see why it happened, and also see that it was entirely necessary.

Since I haven’t had what you might call a proper job for years I haven’t defined myself by my occupation for a long time. This isn’t always easy when you meet new people, who ask what you do in order to begin to give you some shape in their mind. It’s a very unsatisfactory way if going about thngs really, since I bet if you say you work in marketing that’s probably not what you think of as being your core self, but since people are messy and complicated and not ever just one thing it makes the small talk at parties easier, if a little dull. Months down the line, of course, everyone will be very surprised to find out you’re a champion kite surfer, zine writer & amateur shoe designer, and will tell you how surprising and interesting you are, which might perplex you because internally these are the things you use to define your self.

For a number of years I’ve had to go straight to the kite surfing when people ask what I do. I usually ended up apologising in some way for doing things with fabric, writing & cat sitting, because it’s not an easy answer and takes up more than the allotted time for the usual sort of answer. But everyone would say it was terribly interesting & look wistful, or say they wished they could do something like that, all the time forgetting that they were hiding their real self under a blanket marked ‘accounts manager’ or ‘information architect’. Over time it became easier to tell people that I wasn’t in the middle of a real career. I even stopped apologising, and realised I was quite comfortable with the ways I defined my self.

This is probably why I imagined that having Fitz would have less impact on my sense of self than it would if I’d had to stop trotting into an office. After all the things I did I did at home, and I wasn’t going anywhere. I would still be me, but there’d be a baby.

Which is true.

And yet…

The first six weeks are like living inside an explosion that is still happening. Everything is moving, nothing will settle and you get so little sleep you can’t see straight anyway. You also have to keep this little person alive, and you don’t even know who he is. He is familiar and strange, all at the same time, and speaks a language you don’t yet understand. Then he begins to smile, and interact with you, and you start to think that it’s ok, you can do this.

The next six weeks are a little easier, but he’s changing so fast that you still have to run to keep up. You know him better now though, and you can see patterns emerging. The days become a little easier, if still all encompassing, and a bit of your brain starts to think that something like normal might be possible in the near future. Without quite knowing it, you begin to wait for things to even out, and be as calm as they were before.

And sometime in the fourth month it truly dawns on you that the old normal is not coming back. You knew that when you signed up for this, but there is still a part of you that hadn’t really grasped what it would mean. This is the new normal – taking care of this little person every day, making sure he’s happy, and warm, and fed, and rested. There is still room for you, and the person you are, and the things you want to do, but the balance is different. Your days will always look different. Your plans will always be different.

And the next thing you realise is that you really don’t mind.

I thought I might resent the fact that I couldn’t wake up and make a spontaneous plan for the day, or have hours and hours to sit and sew, or read, or write, or wander into town on a whim and have lunch. True, it is frustrating sometimes that a task like slicing the fabric for the quilt squares can begin at 1pm and not get finished until 10pm, because it must be slotted in rather than just done when I feel like it, but this is a choice I am making.

I don’t know if this is a one time thing for me, but I know that Fitz’s babyhood is a one time thing for him, so I’m there. I can still fit in all the other parts of me that existed before, but they fit around the newest part of me, not the other way around. I define myself with reference to him, before all other things, and I wanted to take some time out there in the real world to understand what that means.

The new normal. It’s a fabulous thing.