My Reflection

Pulling into town last night, after being away a week for the holiday, my heart sunk. Being at my mothers for just over a week, felt like a break from reality. I didn't have to worry about the money I didn't have for groceries, or the unpaid bills. Coming home wasn't a warm welcoming, it felt like I was walking in on someone else's world. A world I don't want to be a part of, a world full of stressors and anxiety. It makes me nervous to watch. Then I realize this is my life. I love the actors, but the situations we are in and the place we live don't seem to fit where we need or want to be. We have all these dreams and aspirations, one could say that we have the aspirations of children. The weight of reality is pulling us down, yet our dreams feel within reach. How do you get from here to there? With everything that has happened in our world, the changes in the value of the almighty dollar and the value of an individual as a person rather than a number........ I feel disconnected from the beliefs of the world and society I live in. As I told my husband tonight, nothing feels right. Other than being with him and the children we have shared, our world doesn't seem to fit here. I'm living a lie. I am not happy here and can no longer pretend to be. Every time I walk past someone who has seen me during the last ten years of my life, times during challenges and struggles, they can't look me in the eye or muster a hello. The person they have seen in parenting discussions, feelings shared during some of the most vulnerable of times, is not who I am. The conclusions they have drawn, the conversations they have had about me in my absence, are not who I am. They do not know me. They only think they do. It has been said I have alienated everyone I have known in town. How does one alienate others when only respecting themselves?

My mother came home with us, so we could spend New Year's together. I have fear and sadness that will come undone once she leaves. My days will go back to silence filled rooms, family life messes that will only be tended to by me, a lonely stay-at-home mom with an empty house.

The strongest fear of all, one day waking up to find the love of my life got tired of the constant state of my unhappiness, the mood swings, and his inability to make me happy or his ability to sustain his own happiness any more. I will wake up alone, and not understand why it happened or how it came to be.

How do I fix it? How can I make it better? What do I do to bring back my ability to find happiness in the life I live? As much I wanted to, I was never able to find the slightest bit of sunshine on the cloudiest of days. I walked around with a smile tattooed on my face, never digging deeper to find how I really felt. Then one day, a friend sat me down and told me who I am. I am a pretender. I am someone who walks around pretending to be happy but not having any reason to be as such. I don't know who I am, never looking past my own reflection in the mirror, to see who I am inside. After having the mirror placed in front of me, having been forced to look through the plate of glass to determine the edges of the ever so slightly peeling silver paper gilded to the back, I discovered someone I have never before seen.

As the years have passed the looking glass has aged and the glass has become clear as all the silver paper has been scraped away. My reflection is no longer there. Without a reflection, how do you see who you are? What if the reflection you catch a glimpse of in the store window isn't who you are, but who everyone else sees? Why can't my reflection show who I am on the inside? Why do I always have to see who everyone else sees and not who I know I am? I am a vibrant soul. I am generous. I am loving. I am passionate. I am creative. I am beautiful. I am worth loving. I am a great mother. I am forgiving. I am breakable. I am a friend. I am trust worthy. I am capable of great things. I am a person. I am a living being. I am breathing. I hurt. I am NOT perfect. I am flawed. I am what my physical body allows me to be. I am depression. I am anxiety. I am being held against my will by a body that will not allow me to cope with every day life. I am disappointed. I am anguish. I am frustrated. I am crazy. I am vulnerable. I am the woman who no one wants to befriend. I am unstable. I am rejected. I am who I am, and I cannot change that. I can only do so much. I do not own a cape. I am what I allow myself to be. I have to stop allowing the opinions of others to carry such great worth in my own personal value. I want my reflection to come back. I want to be able to see the smile I was once happy to share with the world. The past needs to stay in the past. I spent so much time trying to scrape away my ability to look into the past that I forgot to leave enough silver so I could see who I am going forward. All I see now are the hills and mountains on the other side of the glass, with no encouragement from within to conquer what lays before me.

It used to be I could see my reflection in the puddles left behind from the storms. Since then, it has gotten much colder and the raindrops have turned to snowflakes and the puddles have become black ice. I can only hope that the sun returns, melting the snow and returning my reflection to the puddles. Some day, I will rediscover my ability to dance in the rain and splash in the puddles, without worry of what will come of my clothes, hair, and makeup. I look forward to the day I dance again, as there is nothing quite like dancing in the rain.