Regarding My Title

I renamed this blog when I decided to start it back up.  "The Meowbrain Diaries" just didn't suit my subject matter anymore.  But the new title, "Getting Back To Me", is more than a nod to my natural human arrogance.

Everybody who has ever had children will tell you that having a baby changes your life.  Irrevocably, utterly, and drastically, your life will be altered in every regard.  The people you have to worry about are the ones who believe they understand this before they can officially say they are a parent.  The ones who will have it slightly better are, like me, aware of the fact that a total world overhaul is about to come, but grasp that knowing it's coming is absolutely nothing like living your life after it's arrived.  I've been a mom for a bit over five months now, and I am still trying to figure out all the nuanced (and, to be honest, all the glaringly obvious) ways in which my life has changed.

There are now two distinct eras in my life.  There is the time before the baby, and everything after that.  I would also argue that there are two distinct versions of me, similarly divided into me before the baby and me after the baby.  These two women are both me.  They have things in common, like they both love cats and tea and get super overly excited about kind of ridiculous things.  But they are also very, very different.  I know who I was before I had a baby; I know the things I liked to do and what was important to me and how I spent my time.  But I am only just getting to know the person I am now, the mom of a tiny, wonderful, amazing, sweet, terrifying human.

It's really weird to have to get to know yourself.  You would think that living in your own skin and being inescapably inside your own head all the time for your entire life would make it easy to figure out who you are.  But after the tiny human arrived, I was no longer just me, the way I was before.  If I were just me, I would only have one name, one version of me.  I'd be Marley and that would be it.  But that one name isn't enough anymore.  Now I'm Mom, too.  And sometimes the two versions of me disagree, or the old Marley version wants something and the new Mom version has to tell her that she probably won't be able to have it.

Like when I put up a calendar my folks got me for Christmas.  It happens to be the Runner's World calendar.  And along with the usual holidays and daylight savings time reminders, this calendar also lists when popular races are occurring.  Old Marley looks at that calendar and sees all the races she wants to run - half marathons with quirky and cool themes, and marathons that are nice and flat and cool.  New Mom looks at those same race names and thinks about whether she could even get through a marathon without having to stop to pump breastmilk, the logistics of traveling and racing with a baby, and whether it would be fair to Paul to leave the baby home with him all weekend while I jet off on a quest for health and personal achievement.

This kind of thinking happens all the time.  It creeps up on me and surprises me.  It happens when I'm awake and when I'm dreaming.  I'm assuming that someday it won't happen as much, because the Mom part will have taken over, but until then I'm planning on being regularly stunned by how often I have to rethink things that wouldn't have even given me pause before.

So this blog, Getting Back To Me, is about trying to figure out who I am.  It's about sorting out the new version of me, the one with two names and conflicting internal thought processes and a frighteningly new world view.  While I may be living with two versions of me right now, I'm hoping that writing about it and processing it and hearing from folks kind enough to read my posts will help me reconcile my two halves.  I'm hoping to be able to give old Marley some of what she wants, while making sure that New Mom doesn't have a total spaz attack.

I hope you find this little quest of mine interesting.  I know I certainly will.

Take care, and I'll write again soon.