When I first started writing about motherhood, I drafted a piece called The Story of an Invisible Woman and sold it to a website that doesn’t exist anymore. Less essay, and more of a poem, I shared about my experience in motherhood where much of what I did seemed hidden in plain sight. The emotional labor, the logistics, the research. The worry, the planning, the scheduling.
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I remember writing about how it felt like I was a ghost floating through the hallways, a crucial part of the family dynamic but never really there at all. I was the person behind the camera, the milk maker, and the clean up crew. I was everyone and no one. An essential piece of my children’s survival, but seemingly gone as a standalone individual. My identity shifted from woman to mom overnight, and with that, I felt a gaping hole where who I thought I was once lived.
In a recent recovery meeting, we talked about using alcohol to check out mentally when physically we had to remain put. As someone who is very conflict adverse, I mentioned that when it comes to fight or flight, alcohol became my means of flight; allowing me to avoid the realities of any situation on any given night until the habit became a reality of not an occasional take-it-or-leave-it escape but a daily essential one.
This week I started thinking back to that invisible woman I wrote about all those years ago and long before I quit drinking. Some things haven’t changed, and some things have changed radically. I still instinctively respond to conflict with a flight response, though I no longer seek alcohol as my escape hatch. My drug of choice now is often through my phone, reality TV or a fantasy book.
It’s a seemingly safe way for me to mentally check out when I can’t physically leave. But I can see exactly what I’m doing. And while these choices aren’t bad or wrong in and of themselves, they do feed this self-perception (or perhaps preservation?) as an invisible woman. Because when I immerse myself into an alternate reality, I’m not fully present anywhere. I toe the line between where my body versus my mind take up space, never really fully existing anywhere.
I’ve grown so much in sobriety and in motherhood. I know my value and my place. I take up space unapologetically in a world where women are still expected to stay small and quiet. I don’t know when this happened but I give a lot of credit to my sobriety for giving me permission to feel again.
Somewhere along the way I took off the invisibility cloak. I decided I am no longer willing to hide from the pain. I will not shy away from standing up for the only person who knows me best — myself.
It’s easy for mothers to feel invisible when so much of what we do goes unnoticed. Add a shift in your career or the inevitable transitions in roles at home, and life feels like a noodle soup of chaos and confusion. But if I could go back to that woman who wrote about feeling invisible in early motherhood, I would tell her that gaping hole inside of her needs nourishment, not escape. Find ways to make yourself bigger, not smaller. Seek out avenues that build fulfillment within. Keep your feet firmly rooted in the earth even when your heart wants to flee.
As women, we are our own greatest advocates. As mothers, our kids need us to advocate for ourselves as much as for them. Because we not invisible.
And despite what alcohol, society or our own inner critic might tell us, we never were.
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