This week’s writing prompt from Mama Kat is 1.) The moment I realized I was a grown up
In a lot of ways I think I always felt more grown up than I should have. I grew up conversing and connecting with other adults and that never really went away. At seventeen I felt nearer to forty than anything adolescent. It was my twenty-fifth birthday though, that really shifted my adulthood-self perception axis…
I was working in a group home, happy and fulfilled, at the time. That morning, however, waking up slapped me in the face with the most severe depression I’ve ever had. I was well aware of the details of my life and the journey that had led me to that place, but suddenly the weight of it all felt far too heavy to embrace any ownership in.
I was twenty-five years old…
This was an age that had never scared me before. Suddenly though, I realized that- at 25- I was already divorced. I was surrounded by pseudo-religious people who reassured me of the completely sinful notion of marrying anyone else. Ever. I had it ingrained in my brain that I had messed that up, and my marital chance had passed…
Twenty Five felt terribly young for such a sentence…
Having had an emergency hysterectomy the October before- despite how well I had handled the entire situation before that morning- suddenly the notion that I was 25 and divorced {never to wed again}, deep in the trenches of sudden menopause and never going to be a mother… I felt old.
Prematurely old.
Every decision felt deeper, bigger, weightier, meatier…
I had good friends who were graduating from college and still partying it up. When they had started college I had been a wife, desperately trying to get {and stay} pregnant while worrying about things like how to pay the electric bill and what to make for dinner… and now, just one degree (for them) later and I was facing my death sentence.
That day sucked…
Despite any maturity I’d had, beyond my years, though- that day I grew into an adult. I realized how much moments matter, and how things flee beyond our control or wishes. I caught a glimpse of the giant world beyond me and my immediate one… I learned that I wasn’t my circumstances, I was more than that…
Some of those things are the toughest lessons we face.
Thankfully, it didn’t last. I don’t care that I had a hysterectomy (evil menopausal health and body complications aside) because i LOVE my kids… I don’t want any other kids. I don’t want babies with my nose and Chw’s eyes… I want kids with the eyes and noses attached to the faces of THESE kids! In fact, it was loving my two older kids (who were 10 and 11 then) that pulled me through that. They weren’t legally able to be “mine” then, but I loved them as if they were… And Chw and I reconciled. And things are really good.
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