Bonus Time

Speaking to some friends about how I feel these days, 3 weeks after separating from my husband of 10 years, I described this as my “bonus time”. The way I see it, at my ripe old middle age, by evolutionary or biological standards, I should be dead. As my mother said (jokingly, I think) after I had my son (I already had a daughter), my “duty was done”. I had checked all the boxes: got married, bought a place to live, had a girl and a boy. And yet… 

 Someone accused me of not being “fulfilled” by my family life. At first I was offended. Not only did I nurture those two beautiful little people in my body, and then WITH my body, but I sacrificed every eensy bit of personal space & time in my life for them. I gave myself wholeheartedly to their upbringing, and I did it with pleasure. It was incredibly difficult, but it was a choice. I *made* that family. And yet… they were right. I was not “fulfilled” by it, if by fulfilled you mean it is the be-all and end-all of your existence and you want nothing more in life but to fill the role of someone else’s something (i.e. mom, wife, etc). So, yeah, I was not fulfilled by that. I have a lot of questions about who I am outside of those roles. When I look around, I see many, many women in a similar position - so involved in their roles, it’s not clear who they are beyond that. Diving into those questions is part of what I plan to write about here. 

 But getting back to the notion of “bonus time”, my feeling is that now that I have checked off society’s requirements of me, and I’m not actually dead, and I’ve now released myself of some of those obligations by separating and sharing custody of the children, all of THIS is bonus time. I get to start over, without losing any of the knowledge or experience I’ve gained, and consider how I would like to do things differently this time. Just writing that fills me with amazement: that I get to have that opportunity! Two years ago, I would not have dared to dream it. The thought of separating literally terrified me. Some parts of it are still scary, and I will also get into that later on. But overwhelmingly, this feels like a fresh start, in the best way.