I sat on a tire swing at a playground the other day. As I rocked back and forth, I watched them – four other families we gather with every week so our kids can play soccer together. The parents sat on the grass at the end of the evening chatting while the kids let off their last bits of steam on the playground nearby. I just sat, the links of the chain wrestling the pieces of my spine for position. It was uncomfortable. My back, my pregnant belly, the tears stinging my eyes. It was all uncomfortable.
I’ve known these families for a long time, or the parents anyway. The children are new to me. And to Connor. “They’re not my best friends,” he said one day, hiding in a pine tree instead of joining in with the running and ball kicking.
I know, I thought. They’re not my best friends either.
They are friends, though – some of them formerly very good friends, others less well known but just the sort of people one would hope to get to know upon moving to a new city. But I looked at these formerly-very-good friends and thought, I don’t see myself in them anymore.
I don’t see myself in much of anything anymore. “You haven’t really been yourself since Connor was born,” my husband said to me one day as we talked to my (new) doctor about medication. No, I said. Is he right? I thought.
Haven’t I been?
I haven’t been.
Maybe others who have struggled will help me understand. Did I not recover? And what does that even mean? Does that not involve going back to who we were before? Is that how anything in life works when there was a before?
However it (in theory) works, I am not the same as before. At a fundamental level, I am a different person. At a DNA level, if that were possible, which it’s not, but for as changed as I feel it might as well be.
We went to my parents’ house a couple of weeks ago to sort through boxes in the basement. As we pulled out long-forgotten treasures and my siblings re-lived our school days I watched. I didn’t recognize the girl who lived through those times and those treasures with them, just as I didn’t recognize her in old friends at the park. I don’t know where she is anymore, and what’s worse, I don’t know what happened to her.
She’s just gone, apparently.
Last year I said farewell to the stranger in me, and I thought that would make things better. But what I didn’t notice at the time was that she seems to have taken the girl I used to be with her.
The girl I used to be is lost.
And there’s no milk carton for that.
Image credit: ~jjjohn~ on Flickr
