"What am I going to say to people? I mean, they're going to ask, 'What are you doing these days?' and what am I supposed to do? I don't know how to make small talk anymore, let alone tell them what's been going on," I told my friend Jess after she met me at the airport. She didn't answer, either because she wisely clued in to the fact that I was speaking rhetorically or because she was (as she later told me) feeling sick at the time. I'd flown to my old home town for a high school reunion, after having spent the bulk of the previous seven years as a stay-at-home mom who, unlike many other stay-at-home parents, really did stay at home.An introvert to start with, I'd gradually become more isolated since my son was born, and at the time (several years ago) I wasn't sure I knew how to talk to real live people anymore. At least not the kind of real live people I imagined most people to be: the kind who didn't frequent either IEP or 12 Step meetings, let alone both, and who certainly didn't blog about it or anything else for that matter. Nearly all of the things I spent my days working on and thinking about were not fodder for casual conversation: recovery work, spirituality, my pseudonymous blog or even the way my son's special needs fit into our family. But I worried: who was I without those parts of myself? In leaving them out entirely, was I presenting a falsely perfect picture to the world, just as I had been prone to do in the past? Was I keeping secrets and hiding parts of myself because I was too ashamed to share, too afraid to destroy an image I'd created of myself?
It's several years later, but I still struggle at times both with oversharing and with engaging in a vast personal coverup. Learning to strike the right balance has been a part of my recovery. I look at my pseudonymous blog, where I share a picture of what it's like to live in my family, and at the family blog I keep under my real name, where I share a slightly different picture of what it's like to live in my family. Both are true. But each only tells part of the story. And I've learned that that's okay. It wouldn't be wise or healthy to share the identifying details of my day-to-day life with everyone here in my life as MPJ, nor would it be wise or healthy for everyone in my real life to know about my husband's sex addiction or my recovery work. The people closest to me are the ones who have access to both halves, like a teenage girl's Best Friend necklace
, the kind where each person keeps half the charm and the two only form a whole together when brought together. And those people, the people who have access to all of me, are the ones I truly trust: both to listen to my story and to help me understand it.In the end, my worries about that high school reunion were (like most worries) overblown and ill founded. Most of the conversations I had that night didn't last long enough for me to say more than where I lived, that I was married and how many kids I had. There were simply too many people and too little time to worry about slipping into any kind of conversation, let alone one about the big issues. The closest things came to a fuller picture was when I told one former classmate, in response to his question about what I was doing now, that I was a stay—at—home mom. "That's it?" he said, "You were the smart kid and now no big career, you're just home with your kids?" And I got to smile to myself as I thought, "If you only knew!"
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
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