To be able to make a choice may be one of the greatest gifts...

I had plans this weekend but my partner in crime was bedridden. So I took to my couch with my blanket and my Netflix. I do love weekends like this - we all need a little downtime. I tried to get some writing done today and in fact I did get a lot of writing done. Only to wad it all up in a ball and toss it. Nothing like an unproductive productive day...

This morning I watched The Hours, the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel, loosely based on Virginia Woolfe's  Mrs. Dalloway, and brilliantly acted by Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolfe, Julianne Moore as a 1950's housewife, Meryl Streep as a modern day editor living and working in New York city and Ed Harris as an AIDS stricken poet and longtime friend of Meryl Streep's character. Without giving any of the story away, much of the movie focuses on depression and the various stages of unhappiness each character experiences at the time. Now unhappiness and depression are universal and timeless. True depression, as suffered by Virginia Woolfe and Ed Harris' character cannot be easily fixed or remedied. Medicine works as a band aid, merely covering the surface. I focused on Julianne Moore's character - the young 1950s housewife, and mother expecting her second child, who seemingly had it all. I thought to myself how glad I am that I live in modern times and not mid century. Sure things are much more complex and more complicated today. I would much rather raise my children when times were simpler, but as a woman, as a woman with choices I am so grateful to be living today. 

In 2006 I read a book that may very well have changed my life. Now I know that sounds so dramatic, and it probably is, but it really did. I remember picking up a book that at the time was all the rage. In fact, I am sure people are still talking about it today. It was the topic of book clubs. It was impossible to track down at the library and it was on the lips of everyone I knew. In the world of books I do think that word of mouth is the most powerful form of communication. I, always impatient and always impulsive, couldn't bear to wait for someone to finish a borrowed copy. I had to have my own. Luckily the bookshelves  at my local bookstore were lined with them. I opened the book and was hooked. 

I never expected the book to resonate so strongly. I never expected to feel empathy. Compassion. Pain. While our lives were so different, and we were so very different, we seemed to have one common thread. I read and I cried as the author described how she'd collapse onto the cold, hard bathroom floor and burst into sobs. She knew she had every reason to be happy but she wasn't. It was her marriage. It was causing an unbearable sadness. I overheard many describe her as spoiled and other unkind words, but her thoughts and her actions resonated so strongly. The pain of sadness, the pain of loneliness, the pain of being trapped in an unhappy marriage... If you've experienced it, you know exactly what I mean. If you haven't you will need to just take my word for it - or someone else's word. But it's a pretty bad and painful place to be. I was lucky and grateful to have my young children, my youngest at the time wasn't even walking yet. They kept me focused and grounded and the kept the smile on my face. During the day I would lose myself in arts and crafts, diapers, and preschool and at night I would lose myself in the magical, amazing worlds of Italy, Indonesia and Bali. I would be lying if I said I didn't want to trade places with her. Anyone with young children knows how exhausting and overwhelming they can be. Who, after all, wouldn't want to taste and see all the treasures of Italy? Who wouldn't want to lose themselves in the peace and quiet of an ashram? And who wouldn't want to fall in love in Bali? I was home in Connecticut, but transported, if only in my mind, to these wonderful and exotic places. Books are truly wonderful that way. 

I was able to push these feelings aside for a while but they would eventually return and when they did they hit with a strength so severe I often felt as though I had had the wind knocked out of me. It had gotten to the point where I couldn't ignore these feelings that played on me both emotionally and physically. I knew, first hand, what those hard, cold bathroom floors felt like myself. I knew what it was like to burst into tears without warning. I knew what it was like to sob uncontrollably because I was so sad. I knew sadness and panic and fear. There were days I walked around with an elephant on my chest and the world on my shoulders. I wept for the sadness that was my life and I wept for the sadness that my life would become if I opted to end my marriage. Neither choice seemed ideal to me. But I was aware that I had a choice. I was grateful I had a choice. So many do not. So many women, decades before us, didn't have the same choices. Sure there were divorces. But they were almost unheard of. A mother's place was in the home - tending to her husband and children.

But that's not really where a mother's place is today, is it? We are all over the place. There are mothers who stay at home and there are mothers who work from home and there are mothers who work in offices - some because they have to and some because they must. 

My life is not at all how I imagined it to be. It's not at all how I planned. My life isn't perfect, but I'm content - I'm happy. I'm in a good place. I am where I am because of the decisions I have consciously made. I am grateful to have had the freedom and opportunities to make those decisions. There's a lot I do have, and a lot that I don't have. There's a lot I want still, I won't deny that, but how lucky am I to have found freedom and happiness? They're such gifts, you know?