Solitude

Yesterday a friend posted this on her Facebook wall - Overwhelmed By Motherhood: The Anatomy of an Anxiety Attack

I have read this before, but every time is like a tap on the shoulder....I didn't have post partum depression or anxiety, but I know what the author is talking about.

In particular, this resonated with me:

As someone with anxiety, and an introvert, I do well having many hours of the day on my own. I sit in a quiet house, with only the damn neighbor’s yapping jerk hounds to disturb me here and there, and I write. I answer email. I chat with people on Twitter. It is a comfort for me to have that peace for so long.

I am similar to my mother in that I am an introvert who enjoys her own company.  Whether I inherited that trait via nature or nurture who knows.  It is what it is.

In one session with my therapist, she brought me to a point of realising that having married virtually from leaving home, that I had had very limited time with my own company and being responsible for only myself.  In fact, I probably had no autonomous time, as I moved from my parents care and responsiblity to a partnership with my husband-to-be. 

I have always been happy with this - it was what I always expected to do, and figured whether it happened at 18 or 28, what difference would it make?

Don't get me wrong... I love my husband, and I don't want 'out.'  I love my kids and I love my life just the way it is.

But this revelation was such a shocking one to me that I actually cried all the way home from that session.  I literally thought 'What the hell have I done?'

I do feel like I have lived my life outside the rules.  Most of the time I don't mind, but some days I just wish I was like everyone else.  Got married at 19, had babies starting at 25, haven't bought a house, haven't got a tertiary qualification.  I don't fit into the handy little box that is middle-class Pakeha New Zealand.  But I don't feel like I fit into any other box, either.  Some might argue that is a good thing, but at the end of the day, people always like to belong somewhere.

After my reaction at my realisation that 'me' is wrapped up in so many other people, it made me far more conscious of making an effort to extract 'me' from everything else.

So, I put aside all my 'perfect mother' aspirations, and decided to be 'good enough' mother.  I put my preschooler into an extra day at daycare so I could have a 'self maintenance day.'  This title was coined by a friend, and was very fitting when I would use this day to go to the therapist, osteopath, doctor and so on.

As I move away from outside management of my mental health, I have changed self maintenance day to being my day to just do things I want to. 

I think my revelation about a lack of autonomous time wasn't about me regretting my choices to live an unconventional life as a younger-than-average wife and mother.  But it was more about how, since having children, I have not had these lengthy times of restorative solitude. 

Now its time to claim them back.