I once had a short lived blog. It was about living with passion and revolved around a list of 40 goals I wanted to accomplish before I turned 40. A handful or the goals were crossed off, and I thought I would easily take care of the rest over the remaining years.
However, despite careful planning, I found myself the single parent of a newborn when my husband left a few days before my due date. Suddenly, I went from trying to live life with passion to trying to make it through each day with at least some of my sanity and money left.
I must pause and say that I do enjoy several privileges as far as parenting solo goes. First, I have a full time job with benefits. Additionally, my parents live a mere five minutes away and are retired.
Nonetheless, the first year, keeping any remnant of my sanity was challenging. My mother stayed at my house for the first two weeks, so I could at least get a few hours of sleep each day and feel less nervous about caring for my newborn. She then returned home so that I could begin developing a routine of my own. Sleep-deprivation, spotty eating, and the seemingly constant crying (both my child’s and mine) created a dark background for my bitterness to fester. At times, it even verged on paranoia: perhaps my in-laws had convinced my husband to more cross country to stay with his father so that he would not develop a bond with our child. Maybe he had never planned to stick around in the first place. Perhaps I would fall into so deep a sleep that I would not heat my son cry at night, and he would become emotionally detached from me. Or maybe I would return to work and realize I had completely forgotten how to teach.
Then there were the rational things that were chipping away at my sanity. The postpartum hormonal roller coaster, the physical and logistical demands of breastfeeding while working full-time, the reality of financially providing for my son completely on my own—more factors that left me in survival mode.
However, things have finally settled, and I am again able to look at the possibility of really living with passion. In the end, most of the items on my 40 by 40 list had to do with wandering in one way or another, whether from my comfort zone or from my physical location. So here I am now, still doing what is natural to me: still wandering.
Still Wandering 