On Turning 35

The Feelings Wheel, Maternal Contradictions, & Coming Back to Bobbie

Luna (2014), Miguel Padera

Hello. I’m circling back to this newsletter that I’ve ignored for months. I spent the earlier part of the summer with two sick children, with back to back illnesses, virus after virus. Bacteria ransacked our home and found it quite comfortable here so they decided to stay for two months! Battling infections while letting the house build up with dishes. I was up most nights doing loads of vomit laundry, and spraying Clorox on every single thing my children have laid their hands on. At that point we were visiting our pediatrician every other week. I cried and pleaded to her on our last visit: “Throw us a bone ma’am!” “Write me some magic script to cure us!” “I’m begging you! Please help us!” Sure, I felt sorry for my kids but honestly I felt sorrier for myself.

But the latter part of the summer turned out great. We stayed in Miami for the month of August and had a great time with family by the pool. I divulged in make up and taking bikini selfies. Bad Bunny can be heard in every crevice of the city. I tried to stay out past 1am one night and simply could not. My best friends and I went to the Bad Bunny concert and I danced so hard I almost fainted. If you were there, it was undoubtedly a great look for me.

It’s always exciting to get back home, to get back to normal. Here I am, getting back to the routine of airing my humanness in this newsletter. I’m coming back to center: trying to find meaning in the everyday, trying to deepen the connection between my feelings and how I manage them, trying to sit with the push-pulls of being a Mother. I turned thirty-five this summer so consider this my attempt at finding meaning in my big age. Here I sit and reflect: I am married with two kids. I have no job and I am most-of-the-time overwhelmed by the level of domesticity my life has taken. I used to be a Fashion Editor and felt I needed to shrink myself in order to make it in the industry. I was in the industry for almost ten years, so sometimes I miss it. Especially now, seeing that it’s September and Fashion Month is underway. The girlies are hopping off planes, cars and trains to make it to the shows and there’s a lot of FOMO that bubbles up as I am in bed scrolling through my phone as I give my baby his bottle.

But this year I acknowledge 4 years of therapy. The biggest privilege I have in my life, hands down, is my ability to afford therapy. Especially since becoming a mom, therapy has been monumental. How do you navigate your history, impulses, triggers, traumas, feelings, resentments? How do you work through that while being a parent at the same time? How do you keep imposter syndrome at bay? How does one attain real authenticity? Honestly? Who the f*ck knows! There’s too many feelings to navigate, too many people that piss me off (including my children), too much daily stress that’s wrapped into one big emotional mess, and not enough language to communicate any of it. Which leads me to the foundation of my therapy: The feelings wheel! So, after 4 years of referencing the feelings wheel can I sit here and tell you that I understand how to recognize every feeling that radiates through my body? Moreover, can I communicate each feeling effectively after recognizing each feeling? Honestly? No. I can’t, I’m sorry <3

It is delusional to think that I can unlearn all of my flaws and egoisms in therapy, but it is very admirable to give it my best effort. It is humiliating to talk about it in this way but what I aim to do here is sit in my truth. The only way to process my realizations in therapy is by holding myself accountable. It is my studied choice to sit here and find reverence in the mundane, in my domestic life, in the daily comings and goings of a mother and wife. It must lead to some kind of awakening, to be crafty with this banality, to make it useful. There is so much reading that has pulled me through emotional turmoils, and I can only hope I am paying it forward with Bobbie.

Like me, I urge you to accept that you are extremely f*cked up and damaged and that is literally the best thing you have to offer. It’s what you do with your trauma that matters. So, if you’re open to it, you can be like me and turn into an emotional little wench and air all of your damage on a public platform. I could take it one step further and share a screenshot of my notes app, admittedly a very grim place. But I guess therapy, if nothing else, has taught me restraint. 

https://feelingswheel.com

So. Many. Feelings! How does the feelings wheel work when you’re a mom? When feelings don't make sense anymore (or maybe never did)? When feelings that fall under different categories all mesh into one big pile of sweat and joy and fear and love? The maternal zeitgeist, I imagine, is this: The collective of mothers pushing through the daily conundrums of guilt, exhaustion, and selflessness. The swinging pendulum of whether to put herself first vs. putting her children first, being that someone always loses. We put our sh*t aside so we can tend to their sh*t, like me ignoring my beloved newsletter for so many months, and not being able to stick to ONE deadline (I’m sorry). It’s not easy to accept coming in second, and it’s not easy to catapult yourself to first either. As a result to all this, it all feels very complicated.

Becoming a parent is like time traveling. I look into my son's eyes and am sent back in time, to when I was little, before my flaws took root, before I became haunted by stressors of all kinds. I peek down at him and in an instant I can see what I’ve come from and when the ambition went away. Like, his eyes are telling me where it all went wrong. My first child has expanded my knowledge on everything, but my second child has solidified the notion that I know nothing. My kids help me see a side of myself that has always been there, just dormant. They give me permission to love myself, to be curious, to want to do things over. My kids highlight the precious nature of being alive, and that alone brings me very intense feelings. 

Currently, I'm a mother studying the systems of push-pulls: I want to sit on the floor with my kids while eating frozen pizza and playing dinosaurs, internally willing these moments stay forever. I want them to grow up and get out of my house. I want them to crash into my bed and pull at my long hair. I want them to go to school so I can be free from their suffocation. I want to continue to wipe down pee driblets from the toilet. I want to give them the iPad so I can sit at my desk and write in detail about how toxic they are. I want to live in their shadow, not blinking, not sleeping, not eating, not wasting any moments in my selfish needs so that I don’t miss a thing. I want them to know how much they’ve ruined me. I want to read Goodnight Moon to them for as long as they’ll let me. I want to love me half as much as I love them. I want them to continue to show me how naive I am. Perhaps this is how you win some kind of maternal lottery, when you’re cozily tucked under the clutches of your children, all the same content yet desperate to break free. 

My toddler is knee deep in his lunacy, me just his mere assistant, following him around to make sure he doesn't accidentally kill himself. There is endless energy that comes with its fair share of bruises and scrapes. There is a lot of running and sometimes there is some fleeing. Close to one hundred dinosaurs inhabit my house and I despise every single one. On Sundays we eat ice cream for breakfast. We are always, and I mean always, dancing to Bad Bunny. It’s almost one year with my baby, already showing strong signs that he is no longer a baby because he no longer cares to cuddle with me in bed. He loves pancakes and cubed cheese and sneakily stealing his brother's toys while he’s not looking. His way of showing distaste for a new food is by snorting like a little pig. He is starting to clap his hands when Bad Bunny comes on. When something in the house breaks they both look at me with big Precious Moments eyes, completely synchronized, and I have to count to three before reacting.

My kids’ ambition surpasses mine. They are the proprietors of knowledge and motivation. If kids sat in Congress we would live in a much better country and at the very least, live with basic human rights. My 11-month old will army crawl his way through anything to get to a discarded goldfish cracker. My toddler will spend a whole day trying to finish a new dinosaur puzzle, too motivated to even watch Blippi! I am suddenly, at the age of thirty-five, overwhelmed by our mortality. This is all so fleeting, this “life stuff,” don’t waste it by pursuing any sense of normalcy, our kids certainly don’t.

I’ll never try to be perfect ever again. I’ve surrendered to my real life and all its feelings (please reference the feelings wheel above). By doing so I have to admit that sometimes anger and rage oozes through no matter how hard I try to subdue it. Pain will always find its way to us. Pinch your arm when you find yourself in a moment of joy so you’ll never forget it. Curiosity refutes fear, ask yourself everything. Bravery is worshipping every dent, crack, and fissure of your wonderful being. Say something nice to yourself in front of the mirror. There is no objective to this life other than accepting we are worthy of everything just as we are. I deserve to give myself a safe space. At thirty-five I have no choice but to honor every living cell in my body, my heart is fuller and more vulnerable than ever.

So, do I love being thirty-five? Not sure. Did I have the best summer to date? Yes. But, I am eager for the start of fall so that I can be sad again. I’m thankful to be returning to Bobbie: where I come to make contact, to find meaning in the meaningless, to hold myself accountable, to embrace my humanness, to finally understand that I’ve devoted too much time and energy in therapy to give a sh*t about anything else. I promise to never conform to anyone else’s opinion of how I should be. Because behind all this “life stuff,” the way we must trudge through our day-to-day and the way we are expected to comply, just remember that we are all extremely supernatural beings living in a very boring world. My kids taught me this.