The story below is from our November/December 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Sometimes a mom forgets where her family ends and she begins.
I went away last week to the coast of North Carolina, to meet up with my group of girlfriends from college, three women I’ve known since the late 1990s. Since graduating from Virginia Tech more than two decades ago, two of us remain in Virginia (after stints in various other locales) and the other two have scattered to Colorado and Pennsylvania. We are all wives and mothers and two of us work full-time. It was a massive feat of coordination, requiring willing husbands, understanding bosses and a dose of good luck, like available flights and no COVID bouts.
My husband agreed to run the Rippel minivan shuttle, handling some school pick-ups and drop offs, a swim meet and a Cub Scouts camp out. He enjoyed ribbing me a bit about leaving on a camping weekend (since I hate camping) but was supportive of me leaving for a break. I’ve left since we’ve had kids, but the leaving has been minimal, and the pandemic squashed plans in the works. It has been several years since I’ve left my family for several nights in a row, and honestly, it felt very strange.
I’m so used to defining myself in relation to the five people that I live and interact with, care for and love. Some days and weeks are so busy, the schedule so packed with soccer games, swim meets and sleepovers that I don’t stop to ask myself any questions, like, am I fulfilled? Am I working towards some greater goals for myself? Am I taking real care of myself so that I can show up in the ways that I want, because I have the bandwidth to do that? We are selective about activities on our family calendar, but with four kids living at home, it’s still a lot.
On the drive to Richmond, our meeting spot, I looked in the backseat a couple of times, thinking I was forgetting something (or someone). I settled uncomfortably into the quiet, resisting the urge to turn on the radio to drown out my thoughts. I think I lean into the busy because the quiet, the pause, the contemplation, is much more terrifying. I gave some space to a few things I needed to think on, and then I did listen to a true crime podcast, uninterrupted, while sipping on a latte from the drive thru Starbucks I found on my route. It was doing for myself, and only myself. It was odd and wonderful.
The drive from Richmond to the beach with my girlfriends, and the ensuing days, were an unraveling of stress, a chance to dig my toes into the sand without supervising my kids in the water, sleeping and waking on my own terms. We talked, we cried, we went deep and we went silly, in the safety of relationships that have existed for more than half of our lives. These women knew me before I was a wife and mother, and I knew them before they were. They are also other things, of course, like an interior designer, an HR leader and a nurse, in addition to all of the other roles they inhabit in their lives.
They know who I am in a way that I sometimes forget. They remind me with their depth of unspoken care for me that I need to care for myself, which I am incredibly bad at in busy seasons of family life. I tend to burrow in, working harder to cross off every item on the to-do list before taking time to read, walk, fix and eat healthy foods, see friends or simply be. Our first night there, my girlfriend Val made us all a beautiful dinner, with healthy foods, some of which she brought from the organic farm where she works part-time. I was nourished in every way those four days.
Today was my first full day back with my family, and I took a long walk with my dog, and I have a lunch planned with two neighbor friends before diving into the afternoon pick-ups, swim practice and a soccer game. I could have done the laundry, I could have tackled the list. I remembered this week that I deserve a place at the top of it, too.
The story below is from our November/December 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
