One day you wake up and you don’t recognize yourself.  You don’t know what you want in life, who you are, and you’ve forgotten most of where you’ve been.  You spend so much time surviving and keeping your head above water that you don’t glance back to see what the trail looks like, just in case you need to return to where you started – you just keep walking in a forward direction.  Unfortunate reality is that in order to move forward you need to know where you’ve been.  You need to know what you’ve done, other than accomplish things to stay afloat.

I typically tell people I have no family but my kids.  I get a funny look and people don’t know how to react, if at all.  Truth is that until I say it, I myself don’t realize that’s my reality.  My kids.  They are my only family.  Truth is that if I had more family I don’t know what I’d do.  Or maybe I would because I’d be different.  Sometimes the sound around me is so quiet my ears hurt – and I can hear everything.

My kids have built lives for themselves and they are living them.  Truth is, outside of feeling “useful” to any of them I don’t know what else I am.  I’m mom of course.  But I know that I’m out of sight and out of mind.  Maybe if I had other family that would not be such an obvious reality to me.  Maybe that’s my reality because I have no other family.  How do I know?

No, this is not some self-pity diatribe.  This is a reflection of my state of mind in an attempt to feel out my next steps in my life.

My mid-life reevaluation of self.

Retirement is not around the corner, but it’s a few blocks away and I wonder what I’ll do with myself.  Will I stay where I am?  Will I go to where I can spread my retirement dollars?  Will I create a second life for myself?  Who know?

My entire life I’ve built my life around my children.  The past few years I’ve built it around one of my grandchildren.  The time has come where I’ve begun to wonder what will happen when that circumstance is changed for me and not by me.

I’m a worrier.  I worry about everything – fatalistic at times, world is ending types of scenarios and then I wake myself up.

But mostly I worry that my children will make mistakes as parents that they don’t need to make if only they would say, “Hey ma…”  I’m not full of answers or solutions, but I do have experience and suggestions, recommendations.

As parents, we fuck up our children unintentionally.  We know everything or we don’t want to make the same mistakes “our parents made” or we never had parents to make mistakes and therefore we are running blind.  We fuck them up for a number of reason.  Our friends kids… This article… So and so did that… The list can run a muck.

And then, you wake up one day and you don’t recognize where you are, you don’t know where you’re going and you wonder what you’ve done with where you’ve been – who remembers what, whom did you impact and how.

I ramble.  But, that’s where I am at this moment.  Rambling and listening to the quiet noise around me and the tapping of my finger nails on the keys of my computer.  I can hear the hum of my printer and the noise the inside of my head makes as I move it from side to side.  Huh.

Life is a blur.