Why me?

"Why me?" is a question I usually ask myself when I'm thoroughly exasperated at being a 40-something mother in an otherwise male household of deliberate incompetents. "Where are my shoes? cell phone? jeans? favorite shirt? receipt for that faucet that stopped working etc?" they cry. Having just sat down for a moment's peace, I usually holler back across the house: "Try your closet, front hall table, drawer, laundry room, filing cabinet etc." only to hear the inevitable "I can't find it" and wonder as I get up from my comfortable perch: "Was this what I spent four years in college and another seven in graduate school for?
To become Chief-Finder-of-All-Things-Otherwise-Intelligent-Males-Can't-Find?"

Now I'm asking "Why me?" in a completely different and refreshingly individual sense. I've been part of a collective called the D-W Family for over twenty years, and it's been too long since I took the time to think about things just from the perspective of Beth --not R's wife or N's mom. Sure the experience of those identities has shaped who I am as an individual ,and I'm certainly not going to follow the example of Meryl Streep in her role as Ms. Kramer and abandon my family in a mid-life crisis quest to find myself.

I know who I am as part of this family I love and cherish, but I want to filter out those everyday interruptions of family life to think a little more deeply about who I will be when my role as mother in residence is over and I've sent my little ducklings to make their own way in the wide world.

"Why me?" is also a question that springs to mind, painfully I admit, when I consider the hubris of adding one more middle-class, overeducated, white mom's musings to the thousands of blogs that are printed every day, only to vanish into the ether without a trace of a reader's response. At least in the internet age I don't have worry about today's print being used to wrap up tomorrow's fish, something the Latin poet Catullus used to imagine as the most ignominious fate for a writer.

In fact, my words could come back to haunt me if I'm ever in the position of having political hacks dig up my kindergarten musings on my presidential aspirations. (Sorry folks. I went to school in the un-liberated Midwest and at age five I just wanted to grow up to be an actress or a school teacher. ) But I hope my words do haunt me in the sense of coming back to me months, years, or even decades from now when I look back and wonder: "Good Lord! What was I thinking?"