A Room with Two Selves

This is the metaphor of my life. Sometimes I feel like the family room, usurped by my children as their needs permeate every moment of my days. For, there are two children in this tribe of ours and the demands of each as individuals and of them as a sibling unit are very real and taxing. Though it is the truest labor of love, this motherhood thing has hit warp speed. Thus, stuck in the family room, I find myself revisiting that same old worry…the one wherein I fret that the part of me who is not a mother, no longer lives and breathes. However, this time around, I know better. Though at times it is hard to see the study for the carnage of the family room, hard to see the woman behind the mother, I know that it, she, is there. I know, like a burning secret, that in the moments of rest and tranquility, when the family room transforms into the study, I can escape into that room, the room wherein a Mother goes to be Herself alone. There I will find my writing voice, the well-worn pages of my favorite books, the music that was the sound track of my former life, and the solitude I so often crave in the melee of mothering. For I, too, am one room with two selves.