Mama - sweet & sour

In the Anonymom family quest for meaningful together time, we've put together a schedule. We get Thursday evenings and half a day Sunday together, so Thursdays are fun time, and Sundays we get to do one "fun" thing and one "project" thing. It's scripted, but so far it works. We've avoided many a regretful midnight session on the sofa where we look at each other and say "where did the day go and why don't we have anything to show for it?"

Problem is, although our project list is long, our fun list was short and dwindled rapidly. Trip to the zoo? Check. Neighborhood toy store? Check. New eco-friendly hot dog place? Yep. Today we are due some fun time, but our short list is spent and all week we had a hard time coming up with something we wanted to do just for the hell of it. At one point I got what I thought was a great idea. Let's write down fun things as they occur to us and put them in a jar, to be drawn out as we're making plans each week. But the electric synapse-fired joy of inspiration hardly had time to be felt before my superego kicked in. A freaking fun jar? Who am I, my mom?

Now, I'm not one to think I should try to hold on to my pre-mom identity for dear life. I'm sure there's a reason our mothers were who they were, right down to the smiley-faced pancake breakfasts and the dulcet-toned baby talk. I'm sure the overly sweet exterior of that change holds within it a hardy nugget of survival technique. I'm not just making a fun jar because it's cute. I'm making it because I have to work to have fun. I have to write how to have fun down because it will slip my mind if I don't, and if I don't have more fun in my life, some part of me will surely curl up and die. So I make fun jars so as not to become the living dead. Kind of throws the cheesy aspects of motherhood into a whole new light, doesn't it?

So although there's a part of me that accepts this new mommier me, I just need a moment to acknowledge that yes, I see this happening, and yes I think it's a little lame. Just not as lame as fighting this mommy identity without understanding it first.

Hear that all of you non-breeders? I'm going deep into the heart of this parenthood thing, and I'm going to keep reporting back. But if it swallows me whole, and I don't remember who I was before job jars and behavior contracts and co-sleeping...just lay a flower down at the fork in the road where our paths diverged and let me know how things are going in your world.

Hmmm, this was all a little darker than I'd intended. Maybe I'm sadder than I thought about the death of my old identity? Perhaps my band's first composition (drawn from the song jar, of course) will be a dirge for my pre-mommy identity. I need some sort of Dark Crystal ceremony where I can merge the pre- and post- mommy woman into one complete being with all of their dark and light aspects. Anybody know where I can find a seventy-ton crystal and a three-sun eclipse?