A Good Laugh at Myself or "Deinon"

I simply have to tell on myself for this one. It made me happy.
This morning I stopped at the coffee shop on the corner near my house. I had Elijah with me and I propped him up on a stool by the bar while I waited on "my usual" drink (large coffee with cream and a little chocolate syrup, yum!) There was this blonde chick sitting on the next stool over. I could only see her from the back and side because her long perfect hair was concealing her face and she was at an angle to me. I could still make out designer jeans and a perfect figure. Her sunglasses were lying on the bar in front of us. Movie star glasses. She thinks she is so hot. From the corner of my eye I caught her smoothing her hair and I could tell she was checking out her reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bar.
I was only partly taking all this in because I was mainly trying to keep Elijah from pulling the lids off all the pastry containers and asking him what kind of snack he wanted. There was also a talk show on. I heard a snatch of the conversation. "Moms need the internet at home but they have to..." I looked up at the TV and read something on the screen to the effect of "Bad girls: Moms attacking each other online." Evidently there is a problem with girl slander online among stay at home moms. I groaned inwardly.
Elijah and I got our treats and headed back to my van. As I buckled him into his seat and opened my door I caught myself involuntarily checking my reflection in the window. All of a sudden, I got tickled and giggled like crazy. "If I was as hot as that girl, I would check out my reflection too!" I said to no one in particular. In that moment when I caught myself looking at my reflection it all suddenly seemed so comical to me that I had been scorning my fellow sex relentlessly while I, despite my "enlightened, liberated" perspectives had quite the same streak operating somewhere in my otherwise sensible (ha!) little mind.
"Many marvels walk through the world, terrible, wonderful, but none more than humanity..."

My Body, My Minivan, and My Identity

This posting is a musing on some changes that have come along with being a mother. When I first got pregnant (at 28) I was really felt too young to be a mother. Ok, so I had an extended adolescance. Now I am 31, only three years have passed, but in terms of experience I feel like a different person! When I was 28, it seemed scary to me to change from my still somewhat adolescent mindset to the mother mindset. I worried about looking like a mother, too, whatever that means.
Of course my own mother is awesome, and that definately helped me face the idea of motherhood with optimism. I remember as a small child thinking that "being a mamma" must be the best thing in the world, because I couldn't imagine anyone more awesome than my mamma!
But I still felt worried when I got pregnant at 28 about what life would be like with children. At the time I worked very hard to stay thin and dress in a style that I thought portrayed my personality, and I was worried that I would loose my individuality in motherhood.
When the children (I say children because we had two pretty close together) arrived, I did struggle with my identity for awhile. But the interesting thing was that I ended up coming to the conclusion that I had not really had an identitiy to loose. I had spent alot of time thinking about what I thought was cool, but less time living what I loved. Now, I was not a total looser by any means, and I did alot of stuff. But my heart was not always in the moment. I did not always know why I was doing what I was doing, and often thought I needed to be doing something else.
And at first, I still thought identity had to do with what I looked like. I think that in our society, that is the natural conclusion. You watch TV and get all these messages that what you look like is who you are. I spent alot of time back then trying to look natural, artistic, and outdoorsy, because that was what I wanted my identity to be.
A couple of changes after motherhood brought this image idea to a crisis for me. One thing, this is an obvious one, is that my body changed after bearing two children. At first I could not deal with the fact that my body changed from the waifish, girlish figure I had before babies. Gradually, as I learned to focus on health, and what my body could DO, the miricle of making a child, making food for that child, and the amazing strength of my body to continue staying fit and strong during and after the process, I started caring less about what it looked like and more about how amazing it is. I have over time learned to appreciate even the new look of my body, and finally to come to appreciate a more womanly appearance. In fact, my husband thinks its really hot:)
Another, kind of funny change that happened was the process of switching to a minivan. My dear inlaws were so patient with me about this, and now I find it kind of a funny joke on me. Well, I think most people, to some extent, see the vehicle they drive as a projection of their personality, at least to some degree. And I dont think too many women who drive minivans really would say with satisfaction, "I think my minivan is an image of who I am." And as I said, I was still living my extended adolescence to some degree when I got pregnant the first time. So when I was faced with the prospect of driving a minivan, I did not at first find that too exciting. Over time, however, I came to think differently about what a minivan is. First I just saw it as your steriotypical "mom car." But as I hauled two little ones around in my station wagon, I began to think space could be an important thing. Actually, just the fact that we do lots of outdoors stuff, and that I have lots of art projects, means we have STUFF to haul around, and we need more space. A minivan has space. In fact, I think it has the most space of just about any vehicle you could drive, and is more fuel efficient. It is a smart and economical vehicle. It makes sense. I started seeing it that way, and I realized there is a reason to drive a minivan. My husband knew this all along, and he had actually driven a minivan in college. But I had to come to it on my own. And, as I said, my dear inlaws were patient with me about it, because they were the ones offering to buy us one.
I still dress in a way I like, that seems to me to be natural, outdoorsy, and artistic. I even bought bumper stickers that I love for my minivan, and I have a secret (not secret now!) hope to get some flames added to "the Ghost" (that is my minivan's name). But now I see those things as something for fun and not the definition of who I am. Who I am has to do with what I love. Now when I take care of my babies and my family, I am able to be in the moment and know that I am exactly where I want to be, doing just what I want to be doing. And that is what identity is about.