The other day, I sat down to write a bio for my website, and it was way harder than I anticipated. I'm a pretty self-aware person, that wasn't the issue. The problem was fitting everything in. There are the roles that I play in my life (wife, mother, entrepreneur...), the facts and statistics (where I live, how old I am...), there are the adjectives that describe me (creative, independent, emotional...), there is the narrative of what I have done, there are other things I like to do, the list goes on. I had to make choices about what to say and what not to say.
Then again, we all do that all the time. How we introduce ourselves depends not on our own self awareness, but on who we are talking to. When I am talking to other moms with young children, I focus on completely different things than when I am talking to other expatriates with no kids.
The people we spend time with become a mirror that reflects a certain part of ourselves back to us. We tend to hang around the people who provide a reflection that we like. But it is always a partial reflection, or a distorted reflection, like those crazy mirrors at a carnival where parts of us look really big and stretched out while other parts shrink way down.
It seems like the essence of who we are shouldn't change just because we emphasize certain parts of ourselves. But, if you hang out with the same kind of people all the time, you start to associate with the reflection you see. And the parts you don't see can fade or disappear out of view.
I have spent the past 6 months as a stay at home mom in Switzerland, with almost no break. We don't have any good babysitting resources, I don't speak the language well enough to do anything useful in the community. But, last weekend, my husband and I were able to stay overnight in a hotel without our children for the first time in a really long time. We were hiking through the mountains toward our hotel, and I couldn't stop smiling. I had the feeling that my soul was expanding. And I realized I was seeing a different reflection of myself, one that I hadn't seen for a long time. It was like meeting a part of myself all over again, and thinking "oh yeah! I remember you!"
Right now, "mother" is the dominant role that I play. For some people, it is "employee" or "spouse." These are all good role, and I love my children with all my heart. But spending a little time away and reawakening another part of myself made me a more whole person and an even better mother. Everywhere you read about parenting, someone says "make time for yourself." What they really mean is check your reflection in a different mirror.
