Sitting in the Washington, D.C. airport, I wanted to shout "my life was just changed!" It was days before Christmas, December 2007, and I had just landed back on home soil after studying abroad in East Africa. The isolation of my experience was overwhelming. I wanted to announce my personal reality to those around me.
And how much more now, as a new mom, I feel this every day. When I am with Alice, she serves as a flashing, neon, drooling sign to my place in the scheme of things. When I am without her, the idea that those around me do not know that THIS is my life, THIS is how I have been so recently upheaved- they might not have any insight whatsoever into my emotional, physical, spiritual exhaustion- it fills me all the more with the isolating shadow of experience. I do not know whether to hang a sign around my neck that reads "new mom," or to delight in the anonymity.
Oh, the immaturity that experience reveals! This is reality every day, with every person we meet! How can we possibly know their unique battles and accomplishments, their very personhood. We are mysteries brushing shoulders in the grocery and speeding past on the interstate.
And how much more now, as a new mom, I feel this every day. When I am with Alice, she serves as a flashing, neon, drooling sign to my place in the scheme of things. When I am without her, the idea that those around me do not know that THIS is my life, THIS is how I have been so recently upheaved- they might not have any insight whatsoever into my emotional, physical, spiritual exhaustion- it fills me all the more with the isolating shadow of experience. I do not know whether to hang a sign around my neck that reads "new mom," or to delight in the anonymity.
Oh, the immaturity that experience reveals! This is reality every day, with every person we meet! How can we possibly know their unique battles and accomplishments, their very personhood. We are mysteries brushing shoulders in the grocery and speeding past on the interstate.
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