At the age of 31 I had an epiphany that I shared with my
husband over a bottle (or two) of wine one night on the front porch of our first
home – I wanted children. That was not
news. The news was that I had realized
that I wanted children, but I did not feel the need to be pregnant or to give
birth to them. My husband, the amiable,
amiable, indicated he was ok with that and if we adopted or did not ever have
children he was ok with that too.
By confirming we were on the same page I freed myself. I was
able to silence the noise of my biological clock, which had been ticking in my
ears since my 30th birthday.
I grabbed this opportunity with both hands and spent the next 6 years
enjoying being married to my best friend.
We danced and drank. We threw dinner
and birthday parties. We threw wedding and baby showers. We slept in. We had sex whenever and wherever
we wanted. We took our time working long
hours in jobs we loved. We stayed awake for movies. We spent those 6 years building our village
with hopes that the village would be there if and when we did bring children
into our family.
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| Our last year as a childless couple was quite an adventure. |
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January 19, 2012 Whitman Stevens Hagan Dier made
two wild and crazy kids playing adults into parents!
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| August 2011 - 14 weeks pregnant & walking in the Tomato Art Fest Fashion Show at the tender young age of 36 |
At 40 I got
pregnant again with our last child, our baby daughter Eliza. Gone were the days of thinking of myself
first and doing whatever I wanted on a daily basis.
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| Our little family of three as photographed by the talented Judith Hill of Judith Hill Photography before we became a family of four. |
Today, as a 41 year old woman (gasp) who is the mother of a 4 year old son
and an infant daughter, who works full-time outside of the home, is the breadwinner
and the family organizer and coordinator, I sometimes feel like I am the female
version of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog’s Day. In the movie Bill Murray plays an arrogant TV
weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, finds himself in a time loop, repeating the same day
again and again.
His character wakes up to the same alarm clock playing the
same song at the same time every day. The
same announcements and the same people doing and saying the same things. Once he realizes he is actually repeating the
same day over and over and he is the only one who remembers it he begins to
take chances and do things he would never otherwise do. I mean, why not
right? What an opportunity. He has nothing to lose if he is just going to
have another chance the next day. Of
course, my life is not a movie, but at times I do feel like it is just a series
of “wash, rinse, and repeat.”
Almost every morning when my alarm goes off for the gym or
for a run at 5:00 a.m. I hear this in my head, “you will never regret going,
but you will always regret not going.” This
mantra really does help me get out of my comfy bed to go do something that is
good for me both in mind and in body.
Most days, I put my feet on the floor and get out of the bedroom with
the promise that if I get out of the house and still want to sleep I can come
back. Secondly, it has helped me to
recognize that not unlike Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day, I can only escape
repeating the same day over and over and losing myself in the process if I make
time for what is important to me and my family.
This means establishing boundaries, picking battles, asking for help,
taking chances, staying at work or walking away from work when I need to and
paying attention when I am home.
For example, one day a few years back our child literally feel asleep in his lunch at day care. The
picture was hysterical. If he hadn’t of deserved it, I would have felt awful.
You see, that morning he got
up at 5:00 a.m., which as I’ve mentioned is my sacred time and he would not go
back to sleep. So, guess who got to go
with momma to the gym? Yep. In an attempt to not wake up his father and have
to listen to the bitching session of how I “woke Whitman up early” with my
alarm clock and then woke up the old man, I got Whitman dressed, put on his
shoes, took the dogs out, fed the dogs and took him with me.
Why? Because working out with my girls, like I have done for
the past 8 years, keeps me from hurting people and makes me feel like Jennifer
and not just Mother. The child loved
class and even learned to do a burpee, but apparently does not do well with
super early mornings. Now other parents
might have stayed home so the child could sleep, but not me. Will this screw up my kids? I sure don’t
think so. In fact, I think I’d screw
them up more if my world revolved around them and I stayed home with them and
did not work or work out. Society seems
to think I need to feel “guilty” for these things, but at my ripe “advanced
maternal age” I am now telling society to shut the hell up and mind its own
damn business.
As a Momma, I am an expanded version of who and what I used to be. Some days I do not remember my life before my two children, but I do not and will not accept that being a Mother means I must be someone or something different that I was before they came into our lives. The love I have for my children is not a love of choice. It is an unconditional and consuming love that, without constant attention and boundaries might just take over the person I am today and smother the person I was before I had a family. I look at my two beautiful children and our village and I know that if nothing else, I’ve done something right, something good and something worth the wait and my time.
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| Whitman, age 4, and Eliza, age 4 months, make everything better including me. They don't complete me, but they do make me a better person every single day and I hope that they will think the same of me some day. |
The moral of this story? It is ok to love both your family
and yourself unconditionally. It is ok
to have a job you DON’T WANT TO LEAVE at the end of the day. It is also OK to want to run out the door and
grab your kiddos and take them to the park when it is sunny and you have a
deadline at work. This is your life and
you have the power to do with this time what you want. Don’t let anyone tell you any
differently. Do what your gut AND your
heart tell you is right because there is a very good chance that “regret” only
visits when you are not listening or paying attention to yourself. You were you before you had children and you'll be you after they leave the nest so be sure not to lose yourself.