Authenticity.

It’s lunchtime and I’m drinking the last half of the Racer 5 that I started last night. I haven't had beer in the house for weeks...because I feel better. After months of turmoil, I finally found some balance and grace. I crack open another beer; is this a sign? Is that a twinge of anxiety I feel? Am I self-medicating again?

I haven't blogged in months...again. Been thinking…again…of retrofitting the blog. I write about life as a single-parent, a homeschooler, an anarchist, a rebel, a writer?…none of it works because what I really want to write is authenticity.  I affix labels to my philosophy and ways of being to try to share and define who I am, but find the label quickly begins to bend words; the adjectives start to coerce. I want to get to the bottom of things, find truth. Because so much writing is tainted with strategy; get readers clicks, go viral, create the image you project of yourself.

So, this blog just is today. Label less. If I must decide on a descriptive adjective, I will aim to make that adjective “authenticity.”

Its hard to blog when you are changing so rapidly; as the insights pass through, and chapters come to a close and begin again, and end and begin, I scarcely have time to write before my writing looses relevancy, before I finish one post, I realize I am living another.  But now, I hope, I have reached a point in which my life is entering a new manageability… but prior to right now…

Months of anxiety, depression, confusion. I smoked a bit of (state-sanctioned) cannabis and I drank beer, though not like a drunk.  I’m too old to drink like a drunk and get away with it. A couple beers in the day, to stave off the anxiety and fits emotionally induced paralysis.  I am a single-mother. I don’t have the luxury of letting my demons knaw my toes, of hiding, of sleeping it off.  I am the Earth and she is the moon. Though I am tempted to feed and taunt my psychosis; feel around in the darkness in the deepest parts of my soul and then exorcize it all.  I self-medicate to mute, just a little, that incessant scratching and to soften the pointy shards of glass that cut me just a little too deep.  I self-medicate because I know myself better than any doctor…anti-depressants are a last resort for me... I don’t like them.  Where am I going with this...well, I am drinking a beer and I haven't drank a beer in my house since I stepped out of the hazy cloud of confusion and anxiety a few weeks back.  Am I self-medicating or just having a beer? 

It is three days later, and I realize, I like beer. If I have it in the house I will drink it daily.  So I won’t keep beer in the house, and save my drinks for times when I have someone to share them with. 

This summer was to be one of creativity and space; my self-help retreat from the ocean of brilliant all-encompassing energy of my beautiful daughter. She had 5 weeks of summer camp. I had thought that motherhood had taken from me a piece of myself that, now that Ramona is old enough to be more independent, I would be allowed to begin to regain.  Or maybe I just read that somewhere? I lost touch with myself, I thought. I have been walking a path that is decided divergent from my own, cause babies do that to mothers, especially the creative ones. All I needed were lots of “free”  hours to impose some sort of art therapy on myself, returning as a more complete, creative and whole human being, ready to take on the struggle of motherhood and the world with evermore grace, and surety in who I am.

It turned out that in those days when I sent my child away 5 days a week to summer camp, I wouldn't actually get in touch with any of that spiritual, creative mojo that motherhood must have robbed from me.  Actually, I sat around, in a panic, with no idea why. Incapacitated, depressed, lonely, anxious, useless, drowning in the mess of a house I had no energy to maintain. Wow, is this who I am inside? When I picked up my daughter from camp I would feel like I still hadn't had enough time to myself, cause if I had had enough time to myself I would magically be reunited with me, my true identity, who I really am.  But none of that happened.  The real me, the supremely authentic me, was sad depressed and anxious, immobilized and even a little it mean. Huh, maybe it isn’t the act motherhood that steals away a woman’s identity.  Maybe the devaluation of mothering was part of stripping women and children of their place in society.  It seems as much, have you noticed: men have begun to take on parenting more, and parenting is becoming more revered. But still, the stay at home mom is still looked at as sacrificing her life and her identity.