And now I write to you with 40 days of a barren dwelling under my belt.  Many are curious about my silence, and eager to know if I’ve had some sort of mental breakdown, crying in the aisles of the grocery store as I plop a handful of items into my cart, enough to feed two people with rapidly expanding love handles.  

My life has transformed for sure, but it is not the grim, torpid existence I once imagined.  I am free from the confines of the groundhog-day-school/sports practice timetable.  Instead of racing around like an idiot making 3 different meals at 5:30 pm, I can often be seen enjoying the last visage of sunshine sprinkling its way across the grass shoots while wallowing in the warm quiet of a beautiful fall day.  The less favorable result of having no constraints, is that I also often have a cocktail in my hand at this time of day.  “Why not?” seems to outweigh any arguments the angel on my shoulder might be able to conjure.  

I take increased pleasure in watching my dogs bark, play and sprint from one end of the house to the other like a competing track team.  Less than a year ago, I would yell at them to stop ruining my walnut floors with their claws during the daily canine combat session.  This was the same person who felt the need to have everything clean and be on time to every event.  Who was she and why was she so fixated on tidiness and punctuality?   Who cares if there are dust bunnies in the corners, dishes in the sink, and we are a few minutes late?   I can proffer this latently discovered wisdom to my younger peers who are in the throes of parenting until I am blue in the face, but I suspect one can only make this leap in hindsight.  When you are juggling so many balls and have little control over where they land, sometimes having a clean sink can provide at least a fleeting sense of command in an otherwise chaotic landscape.  

Some days I wake up feeling like I’m 28 again, ready to conquer the world and seek out a new career path.  The world is filled with infinite oysters, just waiting for me to crack them open and reveal a pearly white entrepreneurial opportunity.  Other days, I am convinced that I am merely a sagging, washed up, unrecognizable version of myself, who has little to show for the last 22 years other than my maternal efforts and domestic contributions.  Now that the trees are gone, I’m having a hard time finding a befitting forest to forage in, even though I frequently walk the dogs in search of it.

Embarrassingly, in my futile stupor, I’ve even found myself talking about grandchildren!  Not that we will have any soon, or perhaps at all, but it seems to be the next inevitable phase of life hurdling down the runway toward me.  This prospect has encouraged me to consider the next ten years as a selfish gift, filled with global travel, neglected passions such as writing and art, and adventures with friends.  These are the proverbial golden years where we have the gift of middle age circumspection coupled with unencumbered time to pursue life’s frivolous joys (only dampened by hefty tuition responsibilities).  

My husband has a strange compulsion to fill my day with new tasks.  He views me like a vagrant worker standing outside of Home Depot holding a sign “looking for work today”.  It is here that I need to set some boundaries, or I will end up being his slave/personal assistant for the remainder of my childless existence, instead of the free agent I hope to be.  I signed up for a couple of classes, so I am not standing in the kitchen looking conveniently jobless.  I’m hoping to jump start the creative parts of my brain again so I can populate my home with art, and these pages with entertaining banter.   

Staring out the small oval window of the cramped Delta bullet I am traveling in, I am confronted with existential, cliched feelings.  I have one life to live and I am in the second half of it.  Who am I other than wife and mother?  What do I hope to accomplish?  What will “they” say at my funeral?  Will my children question why I chose to stay home and raise them?  Or should I have worked full time and hired a nanny?  Would they respect me more?  Not to pepper you with rhetorical questions that I probably don’t even want answers to, but these are the thoughts that play in my head like a wall street ticker tape at night.  Some of the times in our family life that I stressed about the most, my kids don’t even remember; conversely and perhaps more worrisome, some of the times I cherish the most, they also don’t remember.   However, I am sure that their memories won’t fail them forever.  One day in the future when they are reprimanding their own children, their subconscious will burst through and tumble from their lips in the form of some awful utterance.  They will gasp in horror and think “My God, I sound just like my mother” and the circle of parenting will be complete.