MIA

Nearly 3 years since I've written here.

Sooooo much has happened between January 2010 and now.

For one thing, that 3 month old baby that I'm pictured with in my last post is now 3 years old. I've taken a break from baby catching and all on-call birth work for the first time in eleven years.

I've become a registered yoga teacher (a life-long goal but definitely not a money maker).

I'm doing a ridiculously tedious job where I listen to podcasts for 6 hours a day, talk to almost no one, and index medical records for Gotham City Hospital.

I just found out today that my oldest-- my sweet 13 year old girl child has her first boyfriend. Holy shit.
Sunday night as I lay in bed with my husband, I couldn't shake the realization that I had my first boyfriend at age 13, and did S even entertain such ideas yet?! My husband claimed he couldn't remember how old he was when he had his first kiss, or when his first girlfriend was. He just wanted to go to sleep. I kept talking in the dark, wondering. There has been no strange behavior or secretive weirdness. Yet the idea that she could have a boyfriend hit me like a ton of bricks. Today (3 days later), another mom at the kid's school came up to me and said her son confessed to her that he had his first girlfriend: my daughter! So my Mama Radar was working after all.

Of all the kids in her social circle, I couldn't ask for a better boy to hang out with (and they only see each other at school, or rarely, in large group settings outside of school).

I feel old. And that's all right.

I feel like I'm in this very transitional space this year. I no longer have the insane passion and drive that fueled me for over a decade in regards to birth work. I'm also kind of bleh about gardening and growing food. I've stopped sewing, tinkering, and over all making stuff. I've become the person who gets kids to school, goes to work, gets kids from school, makes dinner, reads stories and goes to bed.

For the first time in my life I am purposely not drinking caffeine to stay up late studying midwifery texts, making some Gee's Bend looking quilt, surfing through books about off-grid living, meal planning, or child rearing. No insane late nights of bread-making, yogurt-making, granola-making, salve-making. I go to bed. I sleep all night. No one calls me at 3am to discuss a prodromal labor pattern and questionable vaginal mucus.

I'm just LIVING.
No passion. No drive.

And I'm finding I'm really content and as a result of just doing this repetitive no daily surprises on-call  thing, I'm also healing from some traumatic events and career burn-out.

Part of me wonders if this is it. Will I feel like this for the rest of my days?
Is this okay?
I've ALWAYS had something driving me, for as long as I can remember.

I had my watershed moment only a few weeks after my last post here. My entire life outlook has changed immensely in the interim. After several months of introspection and some serious studying of Self, I find I'm happily in this mode where being Me is plenty good.
Being a wife and mother is fantastic and very worthy of my time on this earth.

Some day I will write more about the space that filled the time between the first weeks of January 2010 and the autumn of 2012.

For now, I'm embracing my awesome husband and lovely/crazy children and mother.

I keep asking myself if this, THIS, is all okay.
I think for right now, it most definitely is.