How did I get here?
“When did this happen?” I’m sitting on the steps to the living room talking to my partner who’s just returned from a work trip. It’s 8:30 on a Sunday evening. I’ve just made a meatloaf (!) of all things. My son - after several days of just the two of us - made clear that he needed me to not be in the same room with him so he could really relax. I’m already in pajamas and bathrobe. And the thing I’m most looking forward to is getting into bed, lying down, turning on my side, and letting this day go.
“When did I become this person? This middle-aged suburban mom wearing a bathrobe and making meatloaf?” He kisses me and tries to understand.
The next morning I start singing “She Used to Be Mine,” Sara Bareilles’s heartbreaking song from the musical Waitress. “It’s not simple to say. Most days, I don’t recognize me.”
I remember a moment as a young teenager in my house on Long Island. I’m sitting in the family room, my mom is in the kitchen: I’m suddenly aware that she is a person - like a whole person - that I know almost nothing about unless it’s in reference to me.
And suddenly I’m my mom, in the kitchen. Making meatloaf, my son largely unaware of the depth of my personal internal experience except as it relates to the care and feeding of him. I’d feared turning 50. I thought it would be the existential equivalent of falling off a cliff - no one would listen to me, notice me, I would have nothing to contribute.
And yet, the older I get, the more I see clearly and feel deeply. The more important everything feels. That’s why I’m here. On Substack, with a sense of deja vu for the moment I started my blog Drinking to Distraction almost 15 years ago. About to go deep into the personal realm because I want to, have to, and (maybe this is grandiose) think it might help someone somewhere.
There are things I feel the need to write, to explore, to piece together. I need to create something of use and channel my energy into finding meaning so that I don’t continue down the rabbit hole of true crime series on Netflix and playing f*cking block blast on my phone, wasting the precious minutes of my finite life.
Things are changing. Yes, they are always changing. But a specific set of important shifts seem to be happening right now that affect me as a human, a woman, a mother, a Gen-X-er, a person with aging parents, someone who has taken a vow to help others. The identity crisis I’m experiencing in mid-life feels very aligned with the identity crisis we are experiencing in the United States. Who are we?
There are things I want to revisit and expand on:
The wounded girl I was. She wasn’t just weird, depressed, anxious, and awkward. She was curious, passionate, and hopeful. She wanted to do big things, feel big love, see and smell and taste everything. But she couldn’t quite be on the outside the person she felt she was on the inside. And I’m still making sense of that.
The decision to quit drinking 17 years ago, and write a memoir of my early experience with sobriety, long before sober was “the new black.”
The ever-changing experience of motherhood. When I wrote the book Mommysattva, I had a 4 year old. Now he’s almost 10, much more sassy, and growing up in a world of toxic masculinity, incel culture, anxiety, gun violence, constant distraction and entertainment. How do I mother him to be who he is meant to be and to be part of the healing of the world?
My body is changing - I’m in perimenopause, which seems to have prompted some neurodivergent unmasking. What? Swimming, yoga, sleeping, having sex, eating, traveling, finding my way - it’s all changing in this aging body.
Communication is everything and we’re not very good at it. I want to change that.
Buddhist philosophy saved my life. Yet I am confused, disoriented, suspicious, and sometimes enraged at the patriarchy within the Buddhist community and the lack of mothers, other women, and ordinary householders in the teacher’s seat.
There are many delights to acknowledge - just this morning watching the sunlight filtering through the new growth on the trees. Kissing Lucy’s perfect orange butt as I move through chaturanga (sp?) because she’s parked herself at the top of my yoga mat. There is so much beauty that I don’t want to miss.
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you. I’m glad that you’re here with me. And I’m glad that I’m here with me. Because writing feels like an important way to acknowledge how ordinary I am and how powerful. It feels right to document the quiet, subtle aspects of my inner life and to keep showing up, let myself get absorbed in the in-between moments, and fully be a stitch in the tapestry we’re all weaving.
I don’t know yet what this will be. I have created a schedule where I’m protecting a few hours on Mondays and Fridays to write. I’m still working on several other writing projects, including a companion workbook to Eat to Love, a manual to support clinicians to self-evaluate for disordered eating, and a children’s book called Beep Boop Beep and the Broken Heart.
My goal is to use this space as a forum for what I feel are deep, meaningful, potent thoughts and to invite you to reflect on them as well. My work as an eating disorder dietitian has always been all about clearing the clutter from your mind and making space for who you really are because we so desperately need her (a natural result of trying to do this for myself). Perhaps you’ll decide that your inner world also needs a room of its own?
Jenna, as a fellow mother-householder taking the teacher’s seat, thank you for naming that and for showing up here!
Merci pour le superbe texte! Happy to read you.