Since becoming a mother, I have wanted nothing more than to be able to stay home and raise my little girl. My career has always been very important to me – in fact, teaching was my lifelong dream – and I never thought that I would want to give it up, even temporarily. Motherhood lends a new perspective to everything.
This year, I’m getting my wish. A year+ of pilot training (that happens to not match up with a school year) and the cost efficiency of base living provide the perfect opportunity to allow me to stay home with H. I couldn’t be happier to finally be able to have a schedule that allows for preschool and mommy-daughter days. I think it will be a terrific experience for both of us.
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| Loving our Mommy-daughter time |
It’s funny how we tend to define ourselves by our careers. I wasn’t quite prepared for the loss of identity that came with my decision to stay home. For the last seven years I haven’t been just me, I’ve been a teacher. Other titles follow suit – wife, mother, daughter – but my entire being was wrapped up in being a teacher, much like C is a pilot at heart. (Think about when you introduce someone: “This is Bob. He’s a [fill in the blank].” It’s how our society operates.) So I began to ask myself: who am I now?
The answer came by focusing on my goals and what I want to accomplish during this year that I have been blessed with. 1) I want to spend as much time with my daughter as possible, doing all the things we couldn’t do while I was working. (That includes enrolling her in preschool since all of the preschools we’ve encountered have had irregular, non-work-friendly hours) 2) I want to get back in shape. 3) I want to finish the book I’ve been writing for the past few years and try to get it published.
While these goals gave me a pretty clear-cut path on how to spend my days, they still didn’t provide me with the “title” I seemed to be craving. That’s when I figured it out: Why do I need to define myself with a title? Why do any of us? Why can’t we just be ourselves and do the things we love to do and accomplish our goals without being defined as something. I am a mother, but that is only one of many ways that I am identified. I don’t have to label myself a “fitness guru” in order to make the gym a part of my routine. I don’t have to be a “chef” to enjoy cooking. In the words of Popeye the Sailorman, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam."
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| From tvtropes.org |
