Identity Crisis? The End of an Era.

I have a lot of feelings these days. 

Big feelings that I'm trying not to feel, if I'm being honest. I'm worried if I dwell on them too much, even to write this post, I will feel sad and emotional and overwhelmed.

Charlotte is weaned. Officially and for real. I thought it had happened when I went to Asheville for the weekend, but she nursed off and on a few times a week for another month or so after that. But the last time I let her do it was the night before her birthday. It's been almost a month. So... pretty safe to say we're done. Done. 

I'm glad I had a good cry about it then, because now... I don't know what to feel about it.

For the first time in six years (SIX! YEARS!) -- since the fall of 2006 -- I am not pregnant or nursing. Because I breastfed right into each following pregnancy, I haven't had so much as a weekend of no one else needing my body. In six years.

That's not a complaint. I am very okay with how it played out. 

But there were lots of times I would daydream of having my body to myself, doing what I wanted without regards to caffeine or morning sickness or  pumping or heartburn or medication guilt (oh the meds guilt; I cannot begin to explain  how every pill over the last year has made me ache). I could imagine this coming freedom -- I would feel neither the kicks of a baby inside, nor the tingle of a milky letdown, and how weird and wonderful it would be. We laughed and pictured a big "off the boob" party, complete with booze and swimming and debauchery. Oh and t-shirts.

But.

Now that it's here... I don't know. It doesn't feel like a party. It feels lonely, to be honest. And I hate, for the sake of my needing a separate-from-Mommy identity, that it doesn't feel happy or relieving instead. Basically I'm sad that I'm sad. What the what, Erin.

And the identity changes get more complicated:

Now with Nathan starting kindergarten, it also feels like the End of an Era. I quit my job to be a stay at home mom "til the kids were in school" -- so now, even with two other babies still at home, I'm scared to feel his daily absence too acutely. I mean, this is it. He's in school every day. From now til college. My SAHM time with him... done. I don't get to prolong it or do it over or do it differently. Did I do it well enough? As well as I wanted to? As well as I thought I would? 

The questions I'm scared to let myself think too hard on.

And sweet Anneliese, stubborn and naughty and utterly unfazed by consequences, is also complicating those feelings of mommyhood success. I don't know what to do with that child these days. She confounds me. After all these years of having nothing on my agenda except learning to parent well, she still kicks my ass way too often. Downright cheerful in her defiance. I just... I don't know.

I never wanted to be That Mom whose whole self and world was swallowed up by my children, but the reality is raising these kids is what I do, it's the most important thing I do, and it consumes the largest portion of my brain and my energy and my time. Being a mom of babies has been part of my identity, the main part of my identity, for a long long time. (SIX! YEARS!) And now it's changing. My children need me in different ways. It feels strange. 

And somehow it's changing how I think about myself. 

Most days I don't know what to feel about that. 

Not yet anyway.