Majorly Undecided

I was reading my blog over, happy to have a real live blog in the first place when I skimmed over the side panel and read under my picture, the one of my son and I at my Commencement from BHCC and directly below it, there is a very meager, skinny, slim, small amount of words describing Yours Truly. This bothered me for the past few days. It made me think of the movie The Runaway Bride. It may cost me to admit I'm a Julia Roberts fan, as I have recently learned some people just can't stand her as an actress, but I love this movie and I think she did a phenomenal job in it. Really, I did.

What I was thinking about was when the ever handsome Richard Gere comes to town and after a week or so of getting her to warm up to him they eventually fall in love. He makes it clear to the heroine of the movie that the reason she cannot commit to someone is because she does not clearly know who she is.

I am not single. I have never run away from an alter. I've never even walked up an alter, I eloped. I think this could still apply to me though. It was starting to really get to me that although I can unlike Miss Robert's character name the way I like my eggs (sometimes in a hefty omelet other times scrambled to perfection) I don't really know what makes me tick. I know that I like to read, and write. I live to care for my children and dream every day of travel.

More than these things I think there are some fundamental basics I am not as sure on. I went out with a friend who I have not seen in a couple of years and when we went to order food at the local burrito place, she knew I would probably want something steak filled and overloaded with all the delicious things you can have rolled into a tasty portable wrap. Why was I looking at the menu then, deciding what I wanted while she rambled away my "usual" order, including extra salt on the side? It's like I have been a total outsider on the experience of knowing myself. I have this weird feeling sometimes like I am not really in the present.

Ever since I was a very little girl I kept expecting to wake up and be in "real life" We would be driving down the street in our old Toyota and I would ask from the backseat, "Mom, am I going to wake up now?" I think my parents thought I was a bit strange compared to my mostly silent brother, but I didn't know why I always felt like I was in some perpetual dress rehearsal for life.

When I was in high school I was for the most part on the verge of failing out. I was not stupid, I was simply unmotivated and frankly, couldn't see what the big deal was. My junior year of high school I was grounded for the first time, ever. In order for me to leave the house I signed up to take the PSATS. I wasn't totally up on what all the fuss was about that test either. All around me there were flashcards and panic stricken kids flying around every where from the cafeteria to the nurses office looking for some secret blue print for how to pass the imposing exam. And so on the morning of the PSATS instead of using my parent's twenty dollars to take the "stupid" test, I used it to buy my friend and myself some breakfast. Looking back now I see that I was on a pretty bad path of self destruction, especially considering I allowed to do whatever I pleased. And more importantly I look back and think, who was that girl?? Wasn't I entirely present through all those half baked decisions I made? I totally backed them up with convincing arguments such as, if you're smart you'll always find a way to make life work out the way you want it. I can't believe I was ever so brazen at just seventeen. Was it the arrogance of youth? Or something else? Maybe I had carried that childhood notion that the friendships I made and the experiences I had were not really happening via live time into my adolescence.

The next year when my world of care free living turned up side down and I became pregnant, again it was like it was happening to somebody else. Once I accepted what was happening and started to feel excited about baby showers and future birthday parties, the time flew. And the next thing I knew I was the mother of a one year old boy. I watched the videos of my baby showers, with my swollen belly and even more swollen face, and I didn't see me. I mean, not just because I was short of hideous my first time around preggers, but because everything I saw myself do seemed orchestrated, and feigned and like it was coming from someone else. Are my hormone levels dropping here or something? Am I the only one who has ever looked at her life and thought, that couldn't be me, could it?

Every year when I was in elementary school, at the beginning of the school year I would look back on the previous year and determine where I had matured. Maybe this year I won't switch friendships so quickly. Next year I would look back and decide that the following year would be one of solitude and self searching. I was a very intense twelve year old. But when I look back on my pictures, read the little scraps of notes I find in my keepsake box I find that I was pretty consistently the same girl: a bit of a wise ass, who loved to be surrounded by people.
I can't put into words to feel like you are missing yourself at the very moment but it makes me think of a silly poster, one of those inspirational ones they put up in schools to make kids think about life that said: dear me, I went out looking for myself, if I should return before I am here, ask me to wait. I thought this was ludicrous at the time. I read it and reread it but couldn't make sense of it. Now I get it.

Maybe I will wake up in three years and read this and think, who was that? Maybe that's something I can come to anticipate in my personality. Sort of like I'm realizing I may never be Suzy Homemaker considering I can only keep my room let alone house neat for no more than three days a month. Maybe this is an archival growing up, learning to wait for myself when I think I am already there but not really. I am the girl who will be slighted, or offended but not realize it and not think of what to say back to that person for another two months. I am the girl who still has the thank you notes I wrote out five years ago for my son's very first baby shower.
I also hold on to every birthday card I have ever gotten. I still have dried carnations from Valentines Day in 8th grade. I cannot see the importance of dusting, over finishing the last really good chapter in a book.
So instead of This is me, it's more a process I'm finding of, Is this me?