The Ten Year Nap

All my kids are now in school full-time – for the first time – and I feel like I’ve taken a ten year nap. Of course, I haven’t been sleeping this whole time. In fact, quite the opposite.

It’s taken ten years, but we’ve finally made it. I always figured I’d be the first mom popping the champagne cork when my youngest finally got on the morning bus, but — and I’m finding this hard to believe — I wasn’t. In fact, I was a little sad.  No, actually, a lot sad. And just as equally confused and surprised by my sadness.

“Once the kids get back in school,” I’ve said to myself for the last ten years, “you’ll be able to put on a nice shirt that doesn’t have syrup and stickers on it and go into the outside world and converse about something other than how much you hate that one Fresh Beat kid.”

But what I didn’t realize is that while I changed diapers and drove to horrible rec center playgroups (seriously – I can’t listen to the Lori Berkner Band anymore without having flashbacks) and shoved one squirming toddler after another into clothes that in five minutes wouldn’t be acceptable anymore, the world would go on without me.

I feel as if I was cryogenically frozen and have now been awakened in some new, strange future. Music, movies, fashion, celebrities, language – it’s all changed. And I feel alone, adrift in a sea of foreignness.

And let’s not even talk about going back to work full time. I know it’s crazy, but nobody has held a job open for me for all these years. Go figure, right? Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I thought there existed a desk somewhere with my name on it, just waiting until I emerged from the stay-at-home-mom world if that’s what I wanted. I could clap my hands, the job genie would appear, and my professional life would resume. And, just like the laundry genie, and the car-vacuuming genie, and the cleaning-up-puke-at-3-am genie, I’ve found that the job genie is a myth.

So yes, I’ve made it — I can have my life back now. I have reached that mythical Xanadu, with all children safely stashed away from 8-3 every day. But, what life, exactly, do I get back? There is no waiting place for me now, and even if there was, I probably wouldn’t fit. I am no longer a round peg in search of a round hole; I’m a lumpy, middle-aged, emotionally transformed peg, and I don’t know what that kind of hole even looks like.

While bemoaning my fate to my sister-in-law, she mentioned the book The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, because this situation is exactly what that book is about. I think the title perfectly sums up what I’ve been experiencing.

I’m slowly learning that I need to create my new place, take all these new parts of me (literally and figuratively) and find where they fit. It’s a daunting task, and I’m not going to do it all in a week – or even a year – but it can be done. I just have to be patient, and figure out what my “new” life will look like.

So if you just woke up, like me, welcome to the new world. If you cry the first time you go to Target while the kids are in school, I feel you. It’s not just that you miss your four-year-old pulling boxes of cereal off the shelf or melting down when you don’t get her a pretzel; it’s all that, plus this idea that you are going to have to figure out your new path, your new place, and it’s a daunting thought. But it will happen.

If nothing else, we can get coffee together and complain about Disney Jr., just for old times’ sake.