Death of a Suburban Soccer Mom
Coming from an unstable childhood, the stable suburban life was all I wanted. Get married, buy a house, have a kid, get a dog….I mean, it’s what we all want, right? Soccer games on Saturdays and yardwork on Sundays. So peaceful, normal, and calm. The complete opposite of my childhood.
For years this life was satisfying…..I think? Raising kids, paying bills, and squeezing in some version of a social life has a way of keeping you so busy you don’t notice that your life and who you are is slipping away.
Midlife crisis…….that shit is real. You hear it about it when you are young and think, yeah I can see that. It becomes something completely different when it slaps you in the face at almost exactly 40 years old. It’s like waking up from a deep sleep, not sure where you are, with a nasty taste in your mouth and crust in the corner of your eye.
You wake up with an insane thirst for life with no idea what you want that life to be. All you know is that craft day and bunko aren’t going to cut it anymore. When parenting, running a household and being a wife is no longer your purpose, you start to question who you are and how the fuck you got here. Everything that surrounds you is a reminder of the life that you know, but instead of comfort, it feels like drowning in quicksand.
So then you start searching. You start to open your eyes to new possibilities, but there are so many. How do you decide when you have spent your entire life drowning out the voice inside you? Most people are empowered by endless possibilities, for me, it’s terrifying.
I have been on this path for almost 4 years now. Some significant progress has been made as I have forced myself in this new direction. I still lack focus and drive since I have yet to define my purpose. I latch on to ideas in books and people in my life that seem to have this figured out. It works for a while. Then I sink all the way back up to my neck, allowing the self pity, confusion and loneliness to win.
