Trapped?


I’m seriously reconsidering my move to Chicago. It is so fucking cold. And the cold has got me moody and stir-crazy.  -15 degrees? Seriously? Like 0 degrees wasn’t cold enough. Old man winter is so stinking insulting. 

And I can really think about absconding, because well, um...I have the freedom to do pretty much anything. I have a job, actually, a relatively good job, but I am not my job. I find it difficult to say that I am a teacher...rather I say, I teach. I could very well sign up to do cartwheels around the world next year. That’s just how I think. 

And I am not tied to motherhood, which is simultaneously liberating and slightly problematic. Many women organize their identities around motherhood--it is convenient way to create meaning and purpose in a world that can otherwise seem random and incidental. You know the story--the unruly woman kissing girls and taking shots in the bar, suddenly births a baby, and subsequently, stability and domestication. 

But can you be a mother and free? Can you access full autonomy when another, literally, being created from self, depends so fully on you?  I don’t know. 

What I do know is that many women in their thirties cannot shift, change, and move so quickly because of motherhood. What the hell would I do with that? I am freakishly mad at Chiberia’s frigid temperatures and snow because it is interfering with my freedom to get the fuck out of the house. But a child. Whom would I blame?

So, I’ve been thinking much about Adrienne Rich’s quote on responsibility to oneself.  Of not marrying, or taking on motherhood as an easy way out--a way to “escape from real decisions.” She calls on women to avoid what is expected, to be different. To live actively instead of a life of “passive drifting.” But dear Adrienne, If I am not leashed to motherhood, what am I leashed to? How will I create meaning? What will be my legacy? 

If I don’t have little orangutans, then my life better be fucking amazing. Like. The best life ever. I have to travel the world. And live in a polyamorous, Zegg Community and grow my own avocados. And tomatoes. And I have to take lots of pictures. And I really need to start writing that memoir, because if I am not remembered through a fertilized egg, then how the hell else will be I be remembered?

I better get on this promptly. I will. Well, just as soon as layer up and dig my car out of the snow. 


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