Surviving Inadequacies

She threw her hair over her shoulder, gave me a shrug and mouthed "It is so hot," while dramatically fanning herself and rushing back into the kitchen to fetch more pancakes. She never came to say hello. She didn't bother. Why should she with so many more important things to do?

There I sat, in a tiny booth meant for two. Me, my growing belly, my husband and JR. Well, in truth JR was off running up and down the aisle ways with the love of his life. My eyes narrowed as she returned from the kitchen, balancing plates and engaging in an easy banter with patrons. "You're growing a life," I repeated to myself. "You're raising your son," echoed in my head.

She's a teacher. The head of the English department of which I was once an integral member. She has given up her Saturday to volunteer her rather limited time to run tables for a pancake breakfast fundraiser. The restaurant was filled with teachers I once joked and laughed with while mingling in the mail room. There were students I once sat with, hovering over essays and open literature books discussing themes, plots and characterization.

But now, there I was, eating one pancake after another while my eyes darted from table to table, reliving the time when I was someone everyone knew. When I had my own voice mail box. When I had a creamy colored notepad with a name, mine, and title embossed on the bottom. When I had a room to call my own (granted there were no windows and it had a serious pest problem--it was still mine).

I have been a stay-at-home-mom (I don't even like the way it sounds. The tiny needling meanings that slink around the letters do nothing but make my lip curl) for well over a year . . . going on two.

Is my story done? I am often wondering if this is my final chapter.

I have no regrets . . . do I? Never, ever do I regret that tiny voice that calls for me late in the night, only to soften to a moan the moment my hand begins to rub the gentle curve of his back. Never do I regret the slow swell and swoop of my belly as I contemplate fabric choices for a room yet unfinished. No. No regrets there . . . none, whatsoever.

Yet, there is a part of me--she sits, small and wishing, hoping for more. Scrape-kneed, fingering the fraying hem on her shorts and smoothing the stained fabric on her daisy-embellished shirt.

She always wanted more, but never thought she should. So she hoped instead.

Maybe some days I have regrets for her. For all she wanted to do, for all she never did. For stories left unwritten. She was not the smartest. She was not . . . no, there is no SHE.

We're talking about me.

I do sometimes wonder about what I haven't done. What I didn't finish. Where I didn't go. I wear my inadequacies like a wool coat, weighed down with the heavy snow of winter. I shrug it off from time to time, especially when the sound of JRs giggles fill a room or when I fold the knitted purple sweater for a baby girl yet-to-be.

I am reminded of what I have done. Where I have gone. What will never be finished . . . but in a good way. In a you will always matter and what you do will always make a difference way.

This is not as easy as the words beg it to be. I wish it were . . . I wish these feelings of inadequacy could easily be washed away with giggles, knitted sweaters, photos drenched in sepia, artwork hanging on doors, tiny booties tossing in a dryer, the scatter of letters on the front of the fridge.

But it isn't.

I am left to think about all those filled notebooks of "Where will I be in 5, 10, 20 years." I think about the poetry filled with schoolgirl dreams . . . rock star? Artist? Writer? Doctor? The faded To Do lists I recovered from a journal I don't even remember keeping--yet, there was a day when the entries, the poetry, the lists just stopped. Did the story end? My story . . . our stories?

These stories of mothers, of women, there they are. Like hallowed bones they lay, splayed open like empty pages, waiting for the guts to fill them up, the skin to pull them together. Those inadequacies, those fears that gray the white, they can be more. I tell myself that they can, that they will. I don't have a choice but to believe it. To hope for it.

While part of me will always be surviving these inadequacies--the other part of me, lets it all go, knowing that my story is not yet finished. And that his tiny voice, her tiny wiggles are mere reminders of the pages I have yet to fill.