The need of me...

Today has been...interesting. I'm in the wake of pretty intense feelings that are still stirring within--beautifully, beautifully intense.

I'm really looking forward to the children visiting their grandparents--my parents are picking them up this weekend and they are staying for an indeterminate period of time. Perhaps two weeks, maybe four.

Sure, I'll be sad and miss them like crazy but I just need some breathing space from the need of me. I need me right now. I need to be inside and intimately around the space of me--as a mom especially, I just don't get that sort of relief.

On some level, deep, deep inside, I feel slightly ashamed for needing it but that's not me--at least I don't think. I recognize it as the larger institutional message of motherhood.

Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice.

But this is my life too and I have an inalienable right to claim that relief for myself and to need me and to want only me, for a period, as I set our new path in motion.