No one ever told me that middle age, and motherhood, would be marked by regret. I didn’t know the “choose your own adventure” of my upper-middle class existence would come to an end sometime in my early 30s, right alongside the arrival of our three children. I didn’t understand that the years of taking new classes and trying out new possible careers—seeking to “fulfill my potential”—had an endpoint. I didn’t know a page would turn, and suddenly the choices I made would become inevitabilities. I didn’t know I would turn around to look at all the other adventures on offer and find that doorways once open were now closed tight.
The ‘Year of Wine and Nachos’
We moved to a small town in Connecticut for my husband’s job in 2012, with a six-, four-, and one-year-old in tow. He started as the Head of a local boarding school, while I registered the kids for first grade and preschool, signed up for library cards, and found a pediatrician. I had recently finished a Master of Divinity degree, and I had written two books and started getting invited to speak at conferences. I gave thanks that I had a flexible job that allowed me to show up for my family and work remotely, while still using my gifts in the world. But we moved four times that first year, so my ability to actually write blog posts and essays, much less new books, slid into the crevices of my life, like Cheerios in the panels of the minivan—hard to retrieve, quickly forgotten. Soon, I was easily identifiable as the mother of those three children, and as the wife of the newly appointed Head of School, but not easily identifiable as me, the writer and thinker. Later, I called it the year of wine and nachos.
As our kids began to grow up, I experienced the delight of our son’s curiosity and budding knowledge of the world. I reveled in our older daughter’s love for books, and our younger daughter’s exuberant approach to everything. I loved being a mom, but I worried that the rest of me was slipping away.
I felt a longing for meaningful work in addition to the hours of driving carpool and showing up for the spelling bee and managing annual checkups and cutting the toenails of these three small humans. I could feel myself losing touch with the network of people who might have become thought partners and connections to generative creative opportunities. I was nudging the door shut on obtaining a PhD or becoming a school chaplain. Those closed doors became more obvious when I applied to get another master’s degree and was denied admission, or when I realized PhD programs would require uprooting our family, or when the editors I had worked with moved on to other places, and my opportunities to write seemed to dry up.
For years, regret felt like grief, as if the life I might have chosen had been taken from me without my knowledge or consent. But I began to realize that regret is as much about limits as it is about loss, and that—with time—those limits might even provoke a sense of wonder and gratitude…
Keep reading my essay for the Institute for Family Studies…
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