Arms Full. Chest on Fire.

On motherhood, resentment, and becoming a person inside my own family.

My secret mom shame is that for a long time, every time one of my kids started talking to me, my chest filled with fire. Rage fire.

I tried to squash it. It burned so bright I was afraid they could feel it when I hugged them. It made no sense. I loved my kids. I wanted to hear their thoughts. I loved their curiosity! I loved that they wanted to share it with me.

So I did what I had always done with a feeling that didn’t make sense. I condemned myself, numbed and stuffed, and tried harder.

Until one day in therapy when it all came apart.

What we found was me, standing in the hallway with a load of laundry in my arms, on my way to three other things, listening to a random science fact for as long as it took. The child telling it to me didn’t notice the laundry or that I was in the middle of something. That child, it’s worth mentioning, had also not put away their own laundry. Ever.

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And I was standing there making sure they felt heard. Loved. Understood.

Arms full. Chest on fire. No clue why.

It had literally never occurred to me that I could say, “Walk with me,” or “Tell me at dinner,” or “Give me five minutes.” It had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to be the receptacle for every child’s every random thought. That I didn’t actually have the capacity to be everyone’s best friend.

It turns out, the fire wasn’t failure. It was a signal. Some part of me recognized my right to exist as an independent being. To honor my limits and capacity. To meet my own needs. And it was trying to tell me so. It had been trying to tell me for a long time.

I just wasn’t listening.

After leaving Mormonism, the deconstructing didn’t end. It was no longer just about what I believed but what I had built while I believed it: a marriage, six children, a motherhood organized around service and sacrifice. A life in which being needed had become so fundamental to my identity that I had no idea where usefulness ended and I began.

I went through a long period of grieving that.

I grieved the life I might have lived if I had known myself before I was told who to become. The career I might have pursued. The number of children I might have had, if any. The places I might have gone. The version of adulthood I might have constructed if motherhood had been presented to me as one possible

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Had you asked me as an active member I’d have sworn I chose my life. Made an informed, active decision. I no longer see it that way at all. If everything you know about yourself, your life, and the world is a lie, any decisions you make based on that information go away once the fairytale dissolves.

Regret.

Not regret about my children as people. That distinction is everything. I loved them so much it physically hurt, and I could not imagine the world without a single one of them. Wouldn’t want to.But I had to face the fact that loving the people who came from my choices did not retroactively make the conditions under which I made those choices free.

I loved my life. I had not fully chosen it. It would be a long time and alot of work before I could learn to live inside both those realities.

So I kept escaping. Girls’ nights. Trips. Book clubs. Lunches. Anywhere I could step outside the machinery of the family and become a person whose preferences mattered again.

The first time this ever felt real to me was in New York. I visited my brother and spent days moving through the city with almost no one to account for but myself. Hungry? Eat. Tired? Go home. Want coffee? Get coffee. Want to wander through a store for an hour? Wander. No one needed me to make the experience work.

I remember thinking, with embarrassing sincerity:

Oh. There I am.

I had met adult me. And then I had to go home.

On my last night I sobbed on the subway. Huge, humiliating, heaving sobs. I loved my husband. I missed my children. I also felt like I was leaving myself behind.

Photo by Donny Jiang on Unsplash

The question I could not answer was how to bring her home. I didn’t want to visit her twice a year, or let her out for girls’ night, or take her to Manhattan and feed her pasta and let her browse vintage shops before locking her back up again when the plane landed.

I wanted to know how she could live there. In the house. With the children. At five o’clock when everyone is hungry. When someone needs a ride. When one child is upset and another wants to tell me a fourteen-minute story about Minecraft and there are dishes in the sink and an email waiting and somebody cannot find a shoe.

How do I remain a whole person then?

For a while, I thought I solved it.

I set boundaries. I stopped making everyone else’s needs my emergency. I made my work matter. I wrote a book. I started saying things like, “I’m not available right now,” and “Tell me at dinner.” Sometimes I chose the movie. Sometimes I made the thing I wanted to eat even if it caused disappointment. (VERY hard for a food-is-love girl.)

Revolutionary stuff.

I began to understand that a family is not six children plus the adults who facilitate them. I am one of the people who lives here. My experience counts. My comfort counts. My time belongs to me. My preferences are valuable information. My work is real work even when no one in my family directly benefits from it.

For the first time, home started feeling like my home too instead of somewhere I worked.

And slowly, I wanted to be there more.

Photo by Land O'Lakes, Inc. on Unsplash

I always assumed putting myself first sometimes would pull me farther away from my family. Instead, the less I disappeared inside them, the less I needed to escape them. I missed my kids when I traveled. I wanted to pick them up sometimes. I planned trips with them because I genuinely wanted to go. I could be around their needs without feeling consumed by them quite so quickly.

It became much easier to love people once loving them no longer required laying myself out on the floor for them to walk over.

For a minute I told this like a before-and-after story. Then life kept going. And I learned that life doesn’t really DO before-and-afters quite like that.

Families are especially good at reorganizing themselves around whatever is easiest. And for most of my kids’ lives, the easiest thing in our house was me!

Mom knows. Mom remembers. Mom will drive. Mom has the password. Mom knows where the thing is.

And sometimes I do! That’s what makes it so slippery.

I’m not walking around thinking my needs don’t matter anymore. I know they do. It’s sneakier than that now. It’ll only take a minute. I’m already headed that way. I don’t mind. And half the time I really don’t.

But I carried everything for everyone. Everywhere. All the time. And I can still catch myself on one of my missions through the house, three or four stops in a row, standing in the hallway with my arms full, nodding along to a fact about the deep ocean like I have nowhere else to be.

So I protect a little space, and then someone needs something, and then there’s an exception, and another one, and one day I look up and I’m the customer service department for the whole house again. Nobody did that to me. I did it one “it’s no big deal” at a time.

Photo by Sangria Señorial on Unsplash

I really thought that once I believed I mattered, I’d just… act like it. All the time. Nope. I can believe it with my whole heart and still plan dinner around everyone but me. I can know my work matters and still feel guilty working when a husband wants to spend time with me.

Part of the problem is I’m REALLY good at this. I can see a meltdown coming three exits before we get there. I can make a whole day run smoothly without anyone knowing how many tiny saves it took. For most of my life I thought that was love.

And some of it is! Feeding people is love. Listening to a science fact is love. I don’t want to stop doing those things. I just want to stop disappearing while I do them. Just when the cost is too great.

So these days the question isn’t “Was I a good mom today?” It’s more like: Was I here too? Did I get to want anything? Did I notice I was tired before I was furious that nobody else noticed while pelting me with needs? Did I let someone be disappointed without interpreting it as failure?

Sadly, I’m not getting a do-over. No adulthood redo, knowing what I know now, without the church in my head. I don’t know what I would have picked, and I’ve mostly made peace with never knowing.

What I can pick is how I show up in the life I’ve got. The me who likes things and wants things and gets tired and needs quiet. The one who sometimes puts the laundry down and says, “This sounds really interesting, tell me at dinner.”

The woman I met in New York did come home. She tends to wander off. I keep going and getting her.

It’s my family too. My dinner. My hallway. My life.

My home too.

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Love your family deeply and still wondering where you went inside it? You’re in good company here.

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