I stared at this blank page for several minutes, realizing I feel the same about writing this week as I do about this phase of my life:
Blank, not knowing where to start, not knowing what this next part will even be about.
The kids are all in school, my husband is at work.
For 16 years now I’ve stayed home as a support to them, and now I’m left with just the whir of the lawnmower across the street, the sound of the birds.
I let the dogs in and out, and notice the glass of the sliding door needs to be cleaned.
Maybe I’ll do that? But then what?
Looking at your own reflection isn’t really a plan for the long-term.
I never really thought past the part where the phase of life I had dreamed about comes to an end, where I would stand in the hallway looking at family photographs that I so often took,
but was hardly ever in.
I barely remember who I am at the core of myself.
I opened a note on my phone last night called “Things I Love” to list a reminder of a few of them.
I’ve spent years pouring all of myself into the building and shaping of my family,
and now it feels like maybe I poured until there was nothing left.
Back again to only me.
Is this when I become a crazy artist?
Is this when the dogs get dresses and strollers and I rollerblade them around town?
Is this where I train a steer to be ridden?
Friends tell me that I’ll love the quiet eventually.
“The world’s my oyster now!”
Maybe middle-aged women often become bolder because they don’t want everyone to forget about them…
Maybe brighter clothes, wilder hair, black-rimmed glasses and red lips aren’t an identity crisis.
Maybe they make themselves a billboard saying, “Please remember all I’ve been.”
I can remember years ago when my soon-to-be 16 year old, Chloe, was an infant.
The night before I was set to return to work after my maternity leave, I stood over her bed and wept so much her floral sheets got damp.
I knew then I would do anything I had to do in order to stay home with her, no matter what it took, or how we scrimped, or how many hours I’d have to spend.
I had worked full time as a single mother with her older sister.
I’d set her in her carseat on a friend’s counter at barely 8 weeks old with a knot in my stomach, and I just could not do that again, so, I quit a job I’d had for 8 years with no real back-up plan;
Just flung my breast pump over my shoulder and took down all my fresh-taped pictures of my girls.
I called my husband sobbing on the way home, confessing what I did.
Still needing some extra money, I advertised myself on craigslist as a housekeeper, muralist, or administrative assistant; Ad after ad, desperate for a job that wouldn’t mean I had to leave that rainbow baby I had begged God for in someone else’s hands.
I was hired quickly by a very wealthy woman who lived at the top of a hill overlooking the sprawling Sonoma vineyards.
She had more money and space and freedom to do what she wanted than I’m sure I ever will.
She had a family constantly running to lessons, and sports practices, and she wanted me there three days a week to wash their dried on cereal bowls, and change their sheets,
clean the rooms they never entered, and prep dinner for them.
I would drive the 45 minutes home to my tiny neglected rental cottage, and put my daughters to sleep in their shared bedroom, windowpane rotting, and fall exhausted into my own unmade bed.
I remember noticing the way the Spanish tiles in that house absorbed the mop water so quickly into them, making me question if I’d even mopped a room. Sometimes I mopped again.
I noticed how her fancy refrigerator didn’t have anything that looked like the inside of mine did.
I worked for many strenuous hours a day for three $20 bills.
She left them on her table with a list of chores every day.
It was barely enough to pay for my gas back and forth up that hill and for one meager family meal, but she had said I could bring my baby with me.
Chloe babbled in a pack-and-play happily while I did.
One day that woman inquired about my murals I’d mentioned, as well, and asked if I would paint the spare room at the top of the stairs.
She had found out she was expecting – Her first and only little girl.
I carried Chloe on my hip to the second floor that day and sat her down in the center of it to see what it was she wanted me to paint.
The room she had led me to was nearly as big as my entire house was at the time.
The new baby furniture being put together the kind I’d only seen in posh magazines, or on TV, made with all natural materials, held together with dovetail joints;
Blankets with tags still on them that I looked at quickly when no one else was paying attention to me, the toys in the basket were all wooden.
Nothing in that room was cheap.
I remember Chloe started experimenting in that moment with the way her own voice echoed in that room as she sat there in the center of it, and her gummy smile grinned at me every time it did.
She had discovered a thing.
She had found joy in the echo.
Maybe I can, one day, as well.
For weeks that woman left me alone as I painted there.
She had told me to be creative. She said she trusted me.
In the end I created my dream room for my own little girl who played in a pack-and-play out in the hall, and I tried to choke down all the feelings I started to feel of wishing I had that kind of life to give to my own girls.
The voice of Not Good Enough crept in.
(Its voice can be deafening)
My heart began to mutter. It hadn’t started to see.
The soft walls and white carpet, the views as the sun set…
I didn’t know that I was standing too close to what I was making.
I hadn’t stood back to admire it yet.
In that moment I was like that mop water
the way the life that I lived, comparatively, felt completely sucked in.
I didn’t know those tiles looked dry and untouched, but they still held the essence of the work I’d done long after I’d left them; Pine Sol and my sweat.
From that job I took on being school janitor for a while; Heavy backpack-style vacuum, scrubbing unimaginable things off the boy’s bathroom wall.
After that job I began to take on some daycare kids, as I welcomed two more of my own, and I’ve done that now for 15 years.
(When I will be done with changing diapers, I really do not know)
It’s hard taking other people’s kids into your home when your own kids are small.
It sometimes feels like you take from your own children to give to them,
But I did what I had to do.
I would have done anything just to be with them.
I did it so I could be here to make lunches packed every day with a well-thought note,
so it would be my arms that comforted them.
I did it so that they could count on the same face at every pick-up window, and at night as they were put to bed.
It wasn’t easy by any means.
Some people envy moms who get to be at home,
but my body suffered, I often felt isolated, and my back hurts from years now of holding other people’s babies so I could be right here to see all of my own grow.
Because my life has been filled with little people, it has been nearly 16 years of fighting to not feel swallowed up by any empty room.
I’ve grown accustomed to noise and chaos after four daughters, pets, and daycare kids.
It’s what I am used to.
I forgot to think about the beauty of the quiet after,
when I would get to gaze on the way my chosen colors fill a room.
I had quit working there before that nursery was fully finished.
I never saw it complete. I just put my head down for a long time, and focused on
doing what I came to do.
It’s hard to believe sometimes that I’ve been home with my girls as long as I have,
that I made it work after that day of quitting my long time job with zero plan.
Over the years I’ve questioned why I’d work that hard for that little pay,
but my own mural, it wasn’t finished yet.
I was still speckled with wet paint.
I am a firm believer that we go through some things in life just so we can look back one day and see the lesson that lived inside it; Our own life’s seedlings, tucked away.
I realize now that the image that lives in my mind of my baby girl listening to her own echo in a dream room she would never have isn’t about all that I never gave to her,
but instead, all that I did.
I gave my girls new discoveries, and a belief in themself.
It’s time I give those very things to myself, as well.
That clapping girl sits in the center of that memory for a reason I can see more clearly now.
She sits there grinning at me because I set out to do whatever I had to do for my children,
as so many of us do, whether we’re working full-time away from home, or in it, and that’s exactly what I did.
In the end it wasn’t about dovetail joints and fuzzy blankets.
It was watching my daughters all find their voice in the echo.
I see I did that now.
They may not have had muted walls and blankets that cost more than any of my shoes did,
but it was my babies in the center of the room, and nothing else existed.
Just me holding them up to a window on a break, and pointing below us to the winding path we followed, the things we passed up, to get to that windowsill.
I sit here now, Day One of Whatever Comes After Those Years,
and I haven’t sorted out what is left of me after putting so much in.
Right now it feels like I’m right back to that room at the top of that hill
being told simply,
“Be creative. I trust you.”
I have the paint,
I have the vision;
The room echoes, still.
But, my baby girl’s face after hearing her own voice that day is reaching me through all the years,
telling me it’s safe and fun to discover something new, and I should dive right in.
So I will try to find joy in this echo,
and I will try not to forget the lesson of the years I poured myself out for them:
The finished mural can’t reveal its full beauty while the paint is still wet.
You have to stand back long afterwards to take the whole thing in.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
