Wayfaring Stranger

Its been a long time since I have sat quietly with my own thoughts. If this is an intentional avoidance or circumstantial lack of opportunity, I could not say. Today is the last day of having a child at home- a standard feature that hallmarked the last decade of my life. So tomorrow, child #4 starts preschool. I will drop him off and have six hours of possibilities without the constraints and blessings of little people tugging on my sleeve or inviting me to gawk over a shiny stone found in the parking lot.

What I am “supposed” to do with this time or how I feel is unexplored territory. In fact, I am in such an unknown space, that I feel disconcerted, making me wonder if I really know who I even am. I got a glance at my kindergartener this week and was awestruck by the growth that had occurred without my careful observance and diligent tracking. It was the same realisation when I was pregnant with her- if I didn’t know if she was the size of a kumquat or a pomegranate, she would develop all the same, and being a good mother wasn’t tied to my vigilance in this regard.

I see myself as this child who has grown and changed over the course of time, but because it happened without my constant meta-analysis narrating my lived experiences, it has taken me aback. Mysteriously, I changed right before my own eyes. Typically in big phases of growth, I am pursuing self-help with an idea of who I am trying to become- giving myself the perception of control and direction. The experiences I have had over the past six months have profoundly changed me, only I cannot verbalise exactly how.

The way finder in me craves to know which steps I took that led me to this chapter and verse. The artist in me wants to live wholeheartedly as the story is written. The worrier in me wants to know what comes next, and the connector in me wonders, Am I alone here? If I cannot articulate on paper who I am, I used to believe I would need to be found. But in this moment, if I no longer fit inside the constraints of my own labels and stale (?) ideologies and rigid boundaries, am I actually now more fully alive? I suppose I’ll find out.