One day

 One day you will wake up and you will be in your forties. Your children will be teenagers. Your days of publishing a blog every day during naptime, of playgrounds and storytimes and PBS kids providing your only opportunities to breathe will be a decade in the past.

You will look at your life and you will say okay, world, I'm ready to come back. I'm ready to go back to being the person I was before I was ever just somebody's mom. I'm ready to return in full force to being a person myself because these small humans who I have been consumed by for so long are people themselves. 

And maybe the world will say no. 

Maybe you will find that after 15 years of being a parent, you can't just pick up the life you had before as if nothing has changed. Things have changed. And the things you've done because you thought they made you a good mom, the part time work you've done because you thought you were "keeping your hand in it," the things you created out of nothing and the things you have adapted to meet the needs of other people? These things will all seem small and indistinguishable. 

You will realize that you cannot simply resume a life that you left. You will realize that the person you were lo so many years ago doesn't exist anymore and that you can't bring her back to life just be wanting to.

And you will grieve.

You will be angry and then sad and then angry again, all in the course of an hour. And you will feel like you don't have a right to have any of these feelings because of course you chose this life, you opted out instead of leaning in, you wanted to be with your babies and you were, and that should be enough.

It won't be enough. 

And you will want to write about it. You will want to scream from the rooftops about how life isn't fair and also you will wonder if you did the whole thing wrong in the first place, and fair doesn't come into the matter. You will want to process on paper the way you did when your kids were watching Curious George just so you could have a minute with your thoughts, only now your kids are at rehearsal or at work and your thoughts are too much to be alone with sometimes. 

You will think that you are too small, too insignificant, to have anything to say anymore. You will not want to put yourself out there because you've been rejected so many times, and so your writing, your words, your feelings, they'll fester.

You'll think you're not enough. 

You'll think this world, this life, is not enough.

Maybe it won't be.

And one day you'll pick up a pen and you'll write "I have nothing to say I have nothing to say I have nothing to say" in your journal for three straight pages. And then the next day you'll do it again while you wait for your no longer a baby girl to finish band practice.

And then one day you'll have something to say. And it will feel small and insignificant and you'll be afraid of being rejected. And you'll say it anyway.

And then maybe one day you'll realize that if you can't step back into that life you had in your twenties (TWENTIES) then maybe you'll just have to find a new one.