Snick

I heard it this morning.  A quiet, but distinct snick.  Perhaps better described as a snap or a crack, though it was so faint as to almost be unnoticeable.  It took me a most of the day to figure out what it was, pondering, pondering, disquiet.  What was it?  It was me, coming apart from me.  Or more accurately, me coming apart from all my old titles, my old claims.  Me, losing the words poet, photographer, officer, manager, woman.  Me, losing all the titles that aren't mommy.  Probably losing wife too, leaving only housewife to serve in its remote place.  The only word still in place seems to be reader, and even that is stolen, wild-eyed, late at night and during kid TV shows and movies.  The idea of curling up on the couch alone for even long enough to watch a movie for myself or read more than two chapters has become ridiculous.

It's been coming all this winter.  Creeping, crawling, dragging toward me with every snow day and sick day and day spent working to get ready for a snow day or recovering from a sick day or just spent doing everything in the world for everyone but me.  I knew it was coming, really.  Tried so desperately to not let it.  And yet it seemed every day for me was the one day that got cancelled.  Today, the last one in the line.  We dodged the snow yesterday, and then Emma home sick with the stomach flu not an hour after I laid claim to my own time.  And so in the end here I am, defeated, left just mommy with no other me.

It's not that my life is so terrible.  Don't get me wrong.  It's a good life, and I am in fact a good mommy.  But it looks frighteningly like a life without hope at the moment, or spirit.  At least hope for anything exclusively for me.  All those projects I planned to do for myself this winter, a Green Pond book, an Alaska book, silly projects that don't mean anything to anyone but me, but still…  Last summer I worked so hard to rebuild my identity and find some sense of self worth again, and now it just seems so long ago and so pointless.  What good is an identity if you never get to use it?  Next week there is nothing scheduled, but for the first time there is no lift in my spirits, no pleasant anticipation.  This week was supposed to be relatively free, and yet here I am, two days in a row, home with a child again.  It's not even grudging anymore, just numbly OK.  Unsurprising.  All the things I am supposed to do left undone, all the things I want to do so far out of reach that I don't even have the energy to consider them anymore.

Dully, I trust that come summer this will change.