Independence - The New "Problem that Has No Name"

My first Independence Day - The thrilling abyss of time and space to yourself

I spent my 20s mindlessly working like a fiend, and mindfully avoiding anything - or anyone - that might distract me from getting there. Then, there was, as has been noted, no there, there. But it was so great having such a ferocious dedication to myself. At 23 I spent a month in Europe alone, deliciously journaling, just luxuriating in my power and independence. Sitting in a café in Prague in the Spring of 1990, just days after that city's Velvet Revolution, I wrote:

"In every moment of my life, of my day, I am doing exactly what I want to be doing."In my late 20s, I watched a couple friends drop off the cliff into marriage and motherhood. I had nothing but envy/dread for their new lives on their new planet. I'd get there, someday, I thought, but just not yet. I knew - in the unknowing way a single twenty-something knows anything-that you got something when you leapt off that cliff, but that you gave up even more. I was crystal clear on what you gave up. I had become so expert at paying attention to myself, to my needs; was so in tune with what I wanted to do, that it seemed impossible to me (to ME!) to give all that up, to subsume self, in the way I understood wives and mothers had to do. I will don my airtight spacesuit and go, I thought, but I will go kicking and screaming. No delusions had I.

I knew exactly why the flight attendant (then called ‘stewardess') required that if you're traveling with small children. you must put your own oxygen mask on first, before assisting them.

Fast forward, because it does, doesn't it...fast forward, I mean. Fast forward exactly 20 years. I am 43. I am a wife and a mother. And since I've buried it, here's the lead: my husband and daughter are away from me for two nights and three days in another state for the first time. I know I've lost many of you. This is what I'm talking about? Three days and two freakin' nights without my kid? That's all I got?

Yes. This is what I'm talking about, because for so long, as predicted here first 20 years ago, I have been putting the oxygen mask on everybody else in the room first. I made the choice-within-the-choice and now, faced with the two things I've had none of for a decade - time and self-space - I am baffled. And exhilarated. Let's see.... Between teaching, I could: write, sleep, run, sleep, call friends, shop, garden, sleep. It never occurred to me to go somewhere, like the beach or the mountains, which are both literally two hours away from my house.

I am not complaining. I'm more marveling. I cannot believe how somebody who was so expert at reading/loving/serving/knowing herself could travel so far. Self care is a habit of mind. It's infrastructure you build into your life, your day, your soul. Sure I've had time to myself, obviously. But not like this. Not nights. Not so many hours strung together, taunting, seducing, blinking like Christmas lights.

My impulse is to place this lack-of-oxygen-mask feeling in opposition to Betty Friedan's radical and revelationary outing of "The problem that Has No Name," suffered by wives and mothers in the 1950s. I mean, how a thousand-years-ago is that?? DUH. Until I read it again. Here's how Friedan begins The Feminine Mystique, where she just calls it out:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"

http://www.amazon.com/Feminine-Mystique-Betty-Friedan/dp/0393322572

And here's the thing. It's not that. I am a fully self-actualized, loud, feminist working woman with the kinds of professional, emotional and financial independence those 1950s women couldn't even dare to imagine. My husband and I co-parent. Our daughter sees both mom and dad do all of the householdy work.

And yet.

And yet I read Betty Friedan's revolutionary words as I sit here, with two more days and one more night to myself, spread out before me like a deep, black, unknown sea; and I feel lost and sad and thrilled and mystified by how hard it is for me to care for myself. My Self.

What am I doing with my new-found freedom on this Independence Day?


Writing this.