Mom's Overcooked Spaghetti


Overcooked spaghetti.

That’s how my heart feels sometimes. Jumbled emotions glued together in a confused clump.

This morning, for example, I overheard the following conversation between 2 women at the gym as they changed into spandex leggings and t-shirts:
Mrs. Tichel: Where have you been? I haven’t seen you at the gym forever.
Mrs. Sheitl: I wasn’t here for a few months because we just married off a daughter.
Mrs. Tichel: Mazal tov! But that wasn’t easy, right? It’s not easy to marry of a daughter.
Mrs. Sheitl: You’re right, it wasn’t easy. It isn’t easy. Now the house is E-M-P-T-Y!
Mrs. Tichel: Believe me, I know what you mean.

The moms left for pilates, and I was left with tears in my eyes, imagining my own 5 little girls grown up and setting off for the big wide world one by one. I imagined myself waking up one morning and finding my home, as my mom put it when her own nest emptied out, “Too clean and too quiet.”

The overcooked spaghetti in my chest screams out in terror: “Don’t leave me! I don’t want to be alone!”

On the other hand…

This week I did a little math, and I was shocked to discover that when my newborn baby Tsofia (universally known in the Weisberg home as Tsofi-leh) turns 22, I will be 60 years old. That means that when Tsofia is taking her first baby steps into adulthood, I will be eligible for a senior’s discount. And that’s a little scary. Make that a lot scary.

Motherhood, it looks like, isn’t just a stage of my life. It is my life. Period.

Of course, life doesn’t end at 60. But still, the overcooked spaghetti in my chest screams out in terror: “If I spend my entire life being a mom, when exactly will I figure out what I want to be when I grow up? When I’m past retirement age?”

So there you go. For dinner tonight, and every night, the overcooked spaghetti of a mother’s heart.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com user WEnDaLicious

4 comments

  1. Well said!

  2. Iy’h @ 60 you’ll be busy w/ grandchildren, too! That’s s/t 2 look 4ward 2: b-ing a SAVTA!

  3. so true. i think we will spend our whole mothering “career” trying to find that perfect balance of childcare and self-expression we all crave…

  4. It’s funny how we hover between waiting for it to all end, and a bit of normalcy and being scared when it will end. Whenever I wean a child I feel like I will never nurse again, even though I know I will IYH. When I nurse I feel like I will never sleep properly again. I always make these calculations, when will my oldest (now 4.5) be old enough to really help? When will I be pregnant for the last time? Then sometimes I think, chaval, why can’t I just enjoy the moment!

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