So I am starting to figure out how I can still be myself without my kids. In one way at least
I teach a riding lesson once a week to two girls in their 20s, all tatted up, they're a couple, they're dopey and cute and love animals, and I was scared at first, to have to talk to people, and to do a good enough job to make it worth the $150 they were paying me to do something I would do for free, and now it's been a few months and even though I don't love the having to be responsible and caring for 2 hours on tuesday, I am finding that it keeps me from being lonely, it keeps me learning my horses from a newer angle, and I am getting paid.
And most of all it gives me a thing I care about improving, how I can mix my teaching with my horses, both separate skills. AND today I supplied them with a snack chamber full of junk that I used to give to Bess's basketball friends, so I feel happiest that I can continue that momming aspect of myself that I liked, feeding people in ways that make them happy. Who doesn't like a little surprise.
I think I'm learning that what I like best is treat or treating and christmas stockings. I like anything where someone is handing you a surprise. It was even my favorite part of volunteering at Children's Hospital back in the day before I had kids and was thinking about joining the Peace Corps. You had to have volunteer hours doing the sort of thing you might do in the Peace Corps and since I didn't have a degree in forestry (which is really helpful apparently for them), I knew I'd end up working with kids and families, so I did my volunteering at that hospital. And in the basement there is a richie rich style vault room that is full of toys and stuffed animals and prizes. They would make you sign a ledger stating what toy you were taking and to which sick kid. So officially you did that, but the other volunteers whispered also stuff your pockets full of things and give them out to visiting brothers and sisters on the the elevator. Which totally appealed to the robin hood thief me. This was the greatest part of the work there. Cheering up not just the kids in the hospital where you could bring them like a huge toy truck or giant bear, but the kids in the elevators that are stuck in a bad time, to pull out a fun trinket or a coloring book or a ball, this was the time of my life.
So today after I helped the kids learn more little steps to becoming solid riders, I opened their snack vault and they stuffed their pockets and one girl said well I don't want to take more than one so I can have something next week and I said I'll put more in, take as much as you want.
Because I like that somewhere later today a kid is going to have a cookie she wouldn't have normally had and she's going to sit in a patch of sun on her couch that that cookie created, and she's going to think, my day is looking up.
Maybe this journey of figuring out Why I Matter is actually fun. Some of the things are so basic, it just takes me looking at them from a different angle to know that Hey, I already am that person. That person is all oiled up and ready to go. I am always going to be a nurturer because it is like liquid love. Pour it on like coppertone.
Maybe the hardest challenge in my life will never happen, like learning to let a person touch my body who knows me, and also trying to get money for my writing. Maybe I should try to get money with my body and just touch my writing.
I did learn from my neighbor who grew up in a fam where the parents stayed married that she always thought marriage was a place you could feel safe and care the most. My view of marriage was it was the most unsafe place to be and never to allow that if you wanted to live. It's good to know that some things you learned can be removed from your pockets. Even if you can never do it. You can feel safe knowing that there is another, crazy truth.
And save some space in that pocket for cookies for sweet kids.
