Identity Crisis

For a very long time I was a student.

After I left school, I worked various jobs. Nothing I would call a career, but jobs I liked and excelled at. I had a circle of friends at work and the jobs were, inevitably, part of who I was.

I also read The Georgia Straight, went to movies, read books, listened to music and went to a lot of concerts and shows, saw a lot of DJs. I went hiking in the Coast Mountains on the weekends with co-workers.

Then we bought a school bus and every spare moment was spent on the monumental project of converting an empty steel hulk into a livable space. We stopped hiking and camping. We went to fewer DJ shows. We gardened and went to Home Depot.

Then we had a baby.

There went movies and concerts and reading.

The first year living in the bus was like the first year of parenthood. It is so hard, so different and so all encompassing that at the end of that year, you come out completely different. There is so much to learn, so much to adapt to, so much work to do that a lot of your old self drops away.

The loss of former identity markers (though coupled with some disorientation) resulted in the forging of new ways of identifying. I became a “bus person,” a mom, and I suppose, (though I find this term a little silly) a birth junkie. I started my home birth supply business and threw myself into learning everything I could about birth and maternity care advocacy, about web design, about entrepreneurship. I was immersed in this world of living in a bus, of raising my son and of spending every spare minute building my birth store. Old interests were replaced with new and part of me was happy as I’ve always thought that we are more than our jobs, more than what we do. I felt excited about the prospect of self-definition coming from relationships, from who we are and who we love.

Then we moved away from the City, away from our family, out of Eliza. We live in a little house and Eliza sits empty in a friend’s yard, forlorn and lonely, and sadly, unfinished. Then I made the difficult decision to close my business. I have spare time again. I’m knitting. Reading novels. Enjoying cooking and baking.

But I am not a student. I have no career. I am no longer a bus person or an entrepreneur. I am not actively involved in the birth community as I was through my store. I have also come out of that fog as a new parent where your life is wrapped so tightly around the day to day necessity of being mom to a helpless infant. I am more than mom, more than wife, more than supporting actress. Right?

In the same way that a home-maker might feel a little at a loss when her babies leave the nest, I feel that my other babies (my projects) just flew the coop too. And well, what does that make me now? Other than a bird sitting on an empty nest?

I am letting myself exist in this space for a bit, knowing full well that I need me some renewal and some time. I am reading The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal, keeping tabs on the Mama Renew blog and waiting for whatever comes next. The next phase will probably start without me realizing it and in the mean time, I’ll be knitting.