Eat * Pray * Wait
When Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love was released, my daughters were little. In fact, Luna had only just been born, maybe three weeks old, and Dylan was the most beautiful lop of blond curls, attached to my side and breaking my heart wide open every day. These two baby girls were my mission, and I happily, though not without complication, poured myself into being their mother.
So like pretty much every other woman of my demographic, I got that book. In fact, I remember taking an afternoon getaway to a local hotel with my best friend and looking around the pool, and every single woman was reading that book. Every last one.
Clearly, Ms. Gilbert, you were writing something we were thirsty to hear.
Before even starting the book, I felt a kinship to the author. Wanderlust runs through my blood, as I was born to a mother who, to this day at eighty years old, packs her bags and trudges to dusty, exotic places. My soul, like hers, feels even more alive in faraway lands, guided mostly by intuition and heart, without much itinerary other than a general direction. As a young woman, I was no stranger to grand love affairs in these distant venues, although my greatest love affair has always been with myself and the collection of women friends I have gathered and held dear from a very young age. When I say love affair with myself, it’s not in a creepy, overly self-helpy, I am all that kind of way, but in a deep, knowing way from a very young age, that I had to be aligned with my best self, willing to make decisions that would challenge me to get better, be better, be more.
I think at times, out of necessity, on my path I forgot that.
Not completely. But when you have (or, at least for me, when I had) small children, life becomes short little increments of the present moment, and often, the big picture gets lost. We are driven by a primal need to show up for our cubs above and beyond all else. Including ourselves. Despite having long preached the exhausted oxygen mask metaphor, when push comes to shove and you have to make a choice, let’s face it, you choose your kids. Hands down. Every time. At least I did.
But let me unpack that a bit. I am in no way climbing up on a cross about how hard it was. I am in an elite demographic where I got to choose to forgo career for motherhood. Yes, a complicated decision that was gut wrenching, painful and amazing all at once. But I got to have a choice. Many women don’t. Most, in fact, don’t. I am under no illusion about that. I had a family, a husband who made that decision with me, and I don’t regret it for a second. I am wistful for sure at times, as those of us women who go through school, college, graduate school, careers, only to pull the emergency break to interrupt that to redirect a course to motherhood cannot help but wonder what would have been had we made a different choice.
I was deep in the trenches of motherhood as I cracked open Eat Pray Love. Trenches. Another tired metaphor equating motherhood to combat and life or death decisions. War. A little too dramatic and woe is me for my liking. So by trenches what I am trying to get at is the thick of the early stages of motherhood. Two little budding babes, not a ton of sleep, balancing how to show up for my three year old and still tend lovingly to her new baby sister. And play with the myth of balancing on of the other things.
I cannot even remember exactly what happened in the beginning of that book. What I do remember is that sweet Elizabeth was having a painful epiphany on a bathroom floor (am I remembering right?) that she just was not in love with her husband (boyfriend?) anymore. That she just couldn’t do it one more minute.
And, long story short, she didn’t. She left him. She left him for great travels, delicious, calorie packed food, spiritual journeys, and great love.
Great love.
And all I could think was, “Fuck you, Elizabeth Gilbert. Fuck you.”
I don’t have that choice.
At least I didn’t right then.
Clearly, she struck a chord. But there I was with my two daughters, a husband who loved me, and yet I was pissed.
to be continued…
