How I learned to maintain my sense of self in a relationship
When I was younger my mom would talk on the phone constantly. My dad was in the military and, as we were often moving around the world, the phone was the simplest way for my mom to stay in contact with her support network of friends and family.
As the oldest child, I can quote hundreds of snippets from these phone calls. I remember watching my mother cry as she talked to my father from the house phone in our home in England. He was deployed with no return date. She was running a house in a foreign country, alone, with three children under five — all of whom had a nasty case of the chickenpox. She was only 30.
I recall the phone call from the night my parents first fought with one another. My mom’s voice rang hollow as I overheard her on the phone minutes after, explaining to a friend what had transpired.
Out of the decades of one-sided phone calls I’ve listened to, the one that comes back to me, again and again, is a call where I only heard one sentence. “I can’t be just mommy and wife,” she declared to whichever confidant sat at the other end of the receiver, “I have to have space to be me too.”
With every passing year, my mother’s declaration becomes more applicable to my own life. I’m not a mother, but I am a fiancee, a sister, a daughter, and an aunt. I fill complex roles and uphold heavy responsibilities, all of which I am grateful to be entrusted with.
For years I allowed the excitement and gratitude I feel for the people and relationships in my life to justify making them the center of my existence. Then, in little spurts, the things I learned to do in my years alone began to call out to me. I missed the cold of metal under my hands in pole dancing classes and the inexplicable pride of mastering symmetrical winged eyeliner. I longed for the sweat of yoga class and the calming vibration of long walks around LA at night. I craved wild nights dishing dirt with friends and drunken singalongs in my favorite bar at 2 am.
It dawned on me that I needed to find a way to reconnect with who I used to be without losing the connections I’d built in my present. So I thought back to my mother and how she’d changed her life after that phone call. She’d made time for herself, rearranged her priorities, and reminded herself that it was okay if her family wasn’t always pleased with her absence. In one particularly vivid memory, I recall her kissing my tears and telling me I’d “get over it” as I begged to join her for lunch at her friend’s house.
The realization that I couldn’t just be a partner, a daughter, and an aunt, drove me to emulate the example my mother set. In the last few months, I’ve found ways to revel in my identity while maintaining my relationships. Little changes, like committing to daily yoga practice and prioritizing my writing, give me a chance to fill up my cup and reconnect with myself independent of my relationships with others. But there are days where I struggle with guilt or notions of selfishness. On the days when I find it hard to rationalize sitting alone in a cafe for hours with a laptop while my fiancee asks when I’ll be done and my beautiful nieces and nephews ask where I am, I know that a simple phone call to my mom will remind me that I’m headed in the right direction.
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