The Fourth Day

Strangely enough, this was written on time--just posted late. It turned out Thanksgiving was, far from being a distraction, a catalyst for focusing my thinking about this last bit. 

That's because Thanksgiving is a strange holiday for me. Since my brother and I started college, it has been a half-celebrated holiday in my home. Its traditions became inconsistent and casual. Of the last ten holidays, I have only spent three in my own home, only four with members of my own family. I spent this year’s dinner at a coworker’s house enjoying her traditions and her family’s company. I would say that it is sad or odd to be spending a family holiday away from home after what happened this summer but…

Home is a different word for me these days.

I used to know where home was because my mother more or less defined it. I have been living in apartments and paying rent for them, but home was always somewhere else because she was always somewhere else. Now, home is here. Home is me. I define home for myself. That’s a big shift, and it makes possible something which I wasn’t sure I would ever consider: that someday, I might define home for others. That someday, I might have a family that sits down to a yearly meal and Thanksgiving might mean what it used to mean.

My life ticks by like seconds on a clock as I delay that normal outcome of a normal life. I’ve gotten past the feeling that I can’t manage home and family, but not the sneaking suspicion that I will never want to. Is it selfish? To want to keep some of my life to myself?

I am fast approaching the age when my mother settled down and a part of me continues to fear becoming what she became: house wife and stay at home mom who never got to live any of her dreams because she gave them up as a sacrifice to her offspring. I fear motherhood, because I fear redefining myself in those terms. I fear the responsibility of a child. It’s not that I want to spend the late years of my life alone, because I surely don’t, but I also don’t want to enter into the role of mother.  

The Names associated with home and hearth and motherhood…I don’t connect well with them. Some I even find disconcerting—namely Taweret and Bes. They freak me out and make me uncomfortable on a deep level because in some part of my heart I am convinced they have nothing to do with me and that I would have nothing to say to them. To have one of them show in my lineup…I fear that it would feel like an expectation that I am not at all prepared to deal with.

Is it a bad thing that I hope so deeply that neither of them is in my lineup? It would call such a large and secret part of who I am into question… I spend a lot of time convincing myself that actively avoiding settling down and starting a family is acceptable even in the face of a society that repeatedly tells me otherwise. How would I react if I found out that the non-mother “self” I’ve been defending was called into question even by my faith?

I’m not sure…but I doubt I’d react well.