Identity

Life can be full of winding roads, the twists and turns. You start out in one place and end up somewhere completely different, sometimes unexpected. Almost 22 years ago, I was a young mom. At a time when others my age were trying to find their place in the world, I found myself just trying to figure out how to raise a child—learning how to “adult”. I bypassed many of the youthful “norms”. I traded them in for diapers and a full-time job.

I may have harbored some resentment for some of those early years: the memories I missed while working to keep bills afloat, and food on the table. But looking back, they were the very best years. We didn’t have a lot but we had one another. We enjoyed every ounce of time we were able to spend together while still wishing for more. We had an endless supply of $5 movies from Walmart, stovetop popcorn, and laughs—we had all the laughs.

Somewhere along the way, over those years, the kid who never cared became the adult who wanted more, the person who wanted to be better—for me and my kids. Sometime in my late 20s, after my dad was diagnosed with cancer, the load got heavier. I found myself a parent, a worker, a student, and, then, a caregiver. I watched him wash away little by little every day and a little of me would wash away with him.

You see, you lose a piece of yourself when you lose someone you love. You lose your purpose when you lose someone you have taken so much time to care for. My depression hit me like a ton of bricks when I lost my dad. It hit even harder when I lost my mom in 2023 after taking care of her for ten years. I felt alone, without purpose. It changed me in ways I didn’t even realize until later. I felt to move forward, I had to suppress my grief and move through the pain or just stay so busy running from it that it couldn’t catch up.

Now I’m 39. I’ve spent 23 years as a caregiver and a mom. All of the experiences that built my mold have now fallen to the floor, and I’m to stand without an anchor, trying to once again figure out my place—who I am—my fingers reaching out to the nostalgia of earlier years in a desperate hope to cling to a version of myself that no longer exists.

When so much of your identity becomes tethered to the ones you love, it’s easy to forget all the niche-defining characteristics of yourself that get lost over time, over the years— the hobbies, loves, and passions. It’s a tightrope act spending so much time trying to figure out who we are and what we want, only to have our identities gobbled up by the emotional chasms we fall into along the way, leaving us in the same familiar spot we found ourselves in so many years previous, struggling to find our definition and purpose.

Recently, I’ve noticed it’s the little things that help bring me back to those happy times, the times that remind me of who I am and where I belong. That fresh batch of cornbread muffins that reminds me of my mom, movie night with my daughter, bike rides with my friend, long phone calls with my son off at college, and even longer car rides with my dogs, like the ones I used to take with my dad; those car rides to nowhere, where we would solve all of life’s problems together—starting out one place, ending in another.