You Are Enough

Like all of us, I've had my ups and down. More than I needed in the past few years. I went through a divorce that upended every facet of my future that I'd once counted on. I had to let go of all of those hopes and expectations, all of those future memories I was looking forward to, and embrace the now. A very different now than I'd wanted, but a perfectly valid, honest, and significant now just the same. I had to rebuild from the ground up. And I did. Because that's what I do. I've been taken down before, and I get up every time. Because what's the alternative?

I'm a little thing: petite, soft-spoken, and kind-hearted. But I'm tougher than I look. Beneath my lofty standards for myself, my perfectionist nature where I exceed every goal without troubling another soul, lies a very hard, stubborn core. I know who I am. I always have. And sometimes, when I wish I could be somebody else, someone braver or more social or more forgiving or less likely to be taken advantage of when I'm in an overly generous mood, being who I am feels like a liability. I'm stuck, you see. And this inability to morph into someone shinier and more impressive than who I am, who I've always been, this flaw of mine? It turns out it's actually my greatest strength. That has been my real journey these past few years. Learning that who I am, right now, flaws and all, is enough.

It started with being alone. I hadn't been single since I was sixteen years old. I'm not afraid of being alone. I like my own company. It just happened that way. As one relationship ended, a new one bloomed, over and over, my whole adult life. But not after my divorce. For the first time in decades, I was alone. I spent a year scrambling to care for two young kids and trying to remember who I was without a partner in life. Then I spent a year in a relationship where at some point I lost myself again. Then I spent another year alone, remembering all over again. It wasn't a fun time. But it served a purpose. Because after the house of your hopes and dreams blows down, you have to rebuild it. And if you build it alone, you get to design it to suit you above all others. I had never done that before. Built my life around me. It was hard and scary and involved a lot of sleepless nights worrying about the future that I couldn't see anymore. And it was amazing and promising and full of infinite possibilities as well. Who would I choose to be, if I could choose to be anyone, without anyone else's input? I'd choose me. Just as I am.

So I did. I let my kids in on a little secret: that I wasn't perfect, that I didn't have all the answers, that I was making it up as I went along. And a very cool thing happened. My oldest, a perfectionist herself, relaxed her ridiculously high standards, just a little. My youngest, even a shade more stubborn than her mother, stopped digging in quite so deep and hard whenever she was challenged. And we laughed, and we cuddled, and we told each other stories, and we made messes and cleaned them up, and we hurt each other's feelings and apologized and forgave one another. And we dreamed up limitless futures of endless possibilities together. 

And I wrote. I wrote every thought in my head down, because without a partner to tell it all to, I had no choice. I wrote a book-length journal about the failure of my marriage, as I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. I wrote stories about heartbreak. Novel attempts about loss. I wrote blog posts about single-motherhood. I put it all on paper, because that's also who I am, who I've always been. A writer, in secret, afraid to own the title. Worried that I wasn't worthy of it somehow.

But in my new house, built just for me, I let those worries go. It wasn't about anyone else, my writing. It was me putting my heart into words. And as soon as I stopped writing to please anyone but myself, I finally had it. A book worthy of an agent, a book deal, a new career.

I'm still learning, still faltering, still making mistakes as I stumble along. And still dreaming of bigger, better futures. I'm still building my house, filling it with myself, owning who I am.

And I can see now how many of us are doing the same thing. Struggling with the idea that we need to be bolder or more successful or funnier, sharper or more sophisticated to get the approval we so desire from those around us. So as this new year rolls out before us, I wanted to share with you what I've learned, and what I personally think of you. That right now, the person you are today, you are already enough. The next step isn't chasing some better version of yourself. It's owning who you already are. Loving that person. Giving him or her a house, or a room, or any safe place, to simply be.  You are enough.

The Non-Mommy Parts of Me

Here’s the thing: I hate dating. I’m not a dating kind of person. All of that posturing and fake smiling and hair-tossing. It just isn’t me. I’m a jeans and t-shirt mom with princess band-aids, hair ties, and hand sanitizer at the ready at all times. Need a tissue? I’ve got a whole pack for you right here. Splinter? I can fix that. Monkey-bar blister? No problem. But get dressed up and head out to sit across from some guy and impress him? Not my strong suit. That, and I haven’t been on a date in over a decade. So you might say I’m rusty. Except even back then I wasn’t a good dater. So can you really be rusty at something you never learned to do in the first place? Probably not.

Anyway, all of these things led me to one conclusion in my year of being single: I probably had another few years of being single to come. I mean, when would I even meet someone? I have my kids most of the time. And I’ve noticed that nothing spooks a handsome young guy who has just smiled at you like the two little girls traipsing along behind you calling you “mommy.”

My girls’ dad keeps them for a couple hours on days he can knock off work early, and he has them overnight on Fridays when he’s in town, but he does travel a lot for work, and that means I’m a three-bodied, six-armed, six-legged person most of the time. Which is fine. I adore my kids--probably to a borderline-unhealthy degree. I fully accept and am honored to hold the role of being their mother, solo or not. And honestly, I think I’m pretty good at it, this single motherhood gig.

I didn’t mind being single. I needed that year of solitude. My year alone gave me time to grieve the end of my marriage, to let all the negative stuff go, to get back on my own feet, to push myself harder than I ever have as a writer, and to find a balance that doesn’t just feel like surviving, but like thriving, like moving in the direction I was always meant to go, like pure, unrestrained joy with two adorable little sidekicks cheering me on in the sidelines. But, still, there was a part of me that wondered: is this going to be it, forever?

It’s not that I need a man around to fix stuff. I can fix stuff. I work out. I can lift my own heavy things. I don’t miss cooking for someone else (I don’t even like cooking) or doing someone else’s laundry or tripping over big man shoes in the hallway. But sitting on the couch at night, girls tucked into beds they refused to stay in, watching TV before prepping school lunches, checking homework, folding the endless laundry of two girls who love outfit changes the way I love sleep, I found myself thinking: meeting someone would be nice, right? Someone who saw me as more than just a mom? It seemed unlikely, though. I travel between my house, the kids’ school, and my favorite table at Starbucks where I write and ignore all of the other patrons. My quiet cocoon of an existence doesn’t really invite others in. Especially not single men.

But lo and behold, the universe has a way of listening, even when you aren’t sure you’re really asking. A year after my husband and I set up separate residences, an old acquaintance from high school, a film producer looking for new material, asked to see some of my writing, and a conversation started. After a couple months of exchanging short stories and comments on them, we met for dinner—not a date, so I didn’t dress up or get nervous—to talk shop. And sometime between dinner, the bookstore we visited, the cafe we ended up in, the business meeting started to feel like a date. I didn’t have my kids for the night, and he didn’t have his, which meant hours of uninterrupted conversation about utterly grown-up topics. I had my princess band-aids and pink hair ties and hand sanitizer right there in my purse, but I didn’t feel like a mom for a few precious hours. We didn’t know much about each other, except that we’d passed one another in school hallways twenty years earlier, but he’d read a lot of my writing, so in a way he knew more about me than most people do. The inside of me, the vulnerable parts and sharp edges and restrained anger and hard truth-seeking part that doesn’t posture or hair-flip or tolerate any fakeness whatsoever. And even with all that, he liked me.

I guess you could say we’ve been dating for two months now, except that I hate dating, so I wish I could think of a better name for it. We’re taking it slow, getting to know each other and trying to maintain the balances of our own careers, our own relationships with our kids, our own fears of getting hurt. To call this new territory minimalizes the wonderful oddness of the whole thing. It’s new territory the way an entirely new solar system would be, when someone you barely knew in your past can come back around and help the present you feel, well, more like you. The non-mom part of me is now a bigger part of me, which is strange and scary and, ultimately, good. It makes the mommy moments more special, when they aren’t the only moments I’m having all day. So maybe dating isn’t so bad.