One of the hardest things about parenting - for me, anyway - has been listening to this constant refrain, everywhere I go:
"Enjoy every minute. It goes so fast."
Are you a parent? You know exactly what I'm talking about.
I expected my breasts to change after breastfeeding two children, but I didn't expect them to change quite as much as they did. Going from a C to a G to a god-knows-what-I-was-when-my-milk-came-in and back down to a B twice in three years apparently does a bit of a number on you, and when everything finally "settled," as it were, it settled down (...ha?).
But it wasn't "what I looked like" that was the problem, exactly - it was how I felt. I mean it when I say that I'm more or less happy with my body - sometimes I love it, sometimes I wish some things about it looked a little different, just like anyone. It hasn't always been this way - I've written here and there about the anorexia I suffered from when I was in my early twenties (and will write about it more one day, when I can) - and trust me: after that experience I'm well aware of what it feels like to hate your body.
I don't hate my body. I don't hate my breasts, either. But after having two children, and having them go through such dramatic changes, they ended up virtually unrecognizable to me; they barely even felt like mine. I had no sense of them as a part of my body, and certainly didn't connect them to my sense of sexual identity.
Let me tell you about the moment when I realized that even though my work is incredibly important to me, I need more separation, and I need to be able to shut off sometimes - not just in a half-assed way (where I'm technically playing with my kids but 60% of my brain is devoted to the email I need to remember to send by the end of the day), but all the way.
And I need to do this on purpose, because it doesn't come naturally.
This realization has happened to various degrees many times over the years, but it really happened - like, can't-get-it-out-of-my-head-happened - a little less than a year ago, when I was visiting a Children's Science Museum with Indy and Goldie. They were playing with this massive model of hills and trees and buffalos, and I was half-watching them play and half-checking my text messages because even though I'd taken the afternoon off I still needed (wanted?) to make sure everything was cool work-wise, and suddenly I looked up and realized how photogenic and symmetrical the background was and how great the colors were, and thought, oh hey - I should Instagram this! It's cute! And symmetrical! And those colors!
For a long time - longer than I wanted to admit, and certainly longer than felt "okay" - Kendrick and I were not getting along.
I wrote about it in this post, back in January '15, at a point when I thought we were on the way up towards a place where we'd be better - back to the couple I know we are, or at least want us to be - but it took much, much longer than that.
I've gotten emails from a few readers, and a few comments here and there - "I've noticed you haven't been writing much personal stuff; are you okay?" - and the answer is...well first, damn you guys are observant. And second: no, I wasn't okay, and part of why I wasn't okay was because I was trying to - to some extent, anyway - pretend that I was, because while I write about my life on this site, there are some things that are too upsetting to present for public consumption, like my fear that my marriage wasn’t everything I wanted it to be.
It's been awhile since I published my post Someone With Problems, about my decade-long struggle with anxiety and my decision to finally, despite a deep-rooted discomfort with the idea of seeking outside help, try medication (Zoloft, if you're wondering).
Now it's a year later, and so I wanted to talk about how it's going.
It's better. So much better, most of the time. But not always.
