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Disjointed

By Anonymous

I haven't slept well the last two nights. On Monday I stayed up too late reading The Time Traveler's Wife and couldn't turn my brain off when I crawled into bed. The book mostly takes place in Chicago and just reading the familiar names of the streets, neighborhoods and museums left me missing Chicago so acutely I woke up JP, crawled into his arms and started to cry.

I get affected by the books I read. JP always knows when I'm reading a romance because I'll suddenly need to hear him say why he loves me (the men in those books are wonderfully, unrealistically verbal). And because he does, he always tells me, and I know that I'm living my own love story, made better with its absence of battles and corsets. He knows when I'm reading something troubling or thought-provoking because I stay withdrawn and separate from him, even after I put the book down. Monday night night, after four hours of flying through the The Time Traveler's Wife I felt disjointed, like I was split in my component parts and couldn't fit perfectly back together again. I was thinking about living downtown in the city and I desperately wanted it back. But then I thought about my job and my family and I know I couldn't combine those in Chicago as well as I can here in Austin. I thought about a life with no JP and no Landon and me living in a small modern apartment just North of the Loop- working late, meeting up with friends, walking home along the Chicago River- and it fit. Sometimes I think it fits me better than the one I have now.

But then I looked at my sleeping husband, the man who has been the biggest fixture in my life since I was 18 and I can't wish him out of it. Even if he is the reason I'm back in Texas. I thought of Landon. I thought of the children I still want to have, and even right then when time travel and anything else seemed possible, I don't want a life without them in it.

I finished the last 80 pages of the book yesterday at work, stealthily speed reading in my lap under my desk. I went home for dinner and Landon's new daycare orientation and then headed back to the office and worked until after midnight prepping our partners for a hearing on Thursday. My mind was jumbled driving home- I was quite tired, happy about a job well done, and oddly preoccupied with trying to name all of Chicago's downtown north-south streets in order. I was bothered by how much I longed for an urban existence that excluded the two people I love the most.

And then suddenly, in those moments of imagining my alternative life, I understand why I need my career. It's the other part of me, the life I'm not living in the city I'm not in. The challenge, the stress, the sheer separateness it provides from my daily suburban life is why I can be so happy here even though a version of me longs for somewhere else. I've tried to explain to myself why I need to work- why even though I adore Landon, I don't question my roll as a working mother. Not even when JP and I are spinning stories about the future and not even deep down inside when everyone else is asleep. It's why I feel sadness but no guilt at the trade-offs involved in combining work and family. This is how the parts of me fit together. I haven't lost the city girl I discovered when I went to law school and I do love my family as much as I think.

I don't know how long this feeling of peace will last and I don't know if it will make sense to anyone else. JP seemed to understand when I explained it at 2 a.m. but he mostly just wanted me to get under the covers and stop talking. I've debated off and on all morning about publishing this, but maybe one day I'll need to read it again.

Full post as published by Lag Liv on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).