Look! There's a DOG!

On Monday morning, I was walking to the bus stop on my way to work and a man with a dog was approaching and I literally almost said aloud, "Look! There's a DOG!" I certainly thought it in my head. Because Bonnie loves dogs, and most of my time is spent with Bonnie, and we like to talk about everything we see. If I would have said, "Look! There's a DOG!" aloud, it would have sounded insane, because what woman in her mid-thirties does that walking to the bus stop on her way to work. It made me think about myself and the person I am becoming. It made me think about myself as a woman in this world. A woman with a child. A mother. But it also made me think about myself as a woman in this world with an identity apart from my child, apart from being a mother. It made me think about how Bonnie and Robert and I have been watching these fantastic episodes of Sesame Street from the '70's, and how every song that ever gets stuck in my head lately is a preschooler song from Sesame Street. Robert and I used to talk nonstop about music, about new bands we were listening to, and shows in Seattle, and what was good and what was not good. I used to spend hours at home and at work listening to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel and now it's sometimes people like that, but most of the time not. I think what I'm trying to say is, I have this very real fear of losing myself in my role as a mother and becoming nothing but a woman in her mid-thirties saying "Look! There's a DOG!" out loud on the street and hearing nothing but Sesame Street songs play in my head for the rest of my life. Robert and I used to be members of an independent film theater downtown and we would see everything. We would do nothing on weekends but sleep and read. I know that one day I'll get my brain back, and I'll know what's good and not good and watch all the films in the theater again, and one day I'll wake up and my daughter will want to spend all her time on weekends with friends and not with me. And I will remember this time we shared just the two of us, the hush of early mornings and long stroller walks to the park and all the desperate Starbucks trips and dishes and laundry and bags of diapers and an overflowing dumpster and I will cry.