wanderlustfully anxieated

I think I made anxieated up.

Call it postpartum depression, but I think it's just plain me. Only now instead of doing what I want, I have another (although wonderful) human being for which I am responsible for.

Yesterday I was driving in snow (again, which is another grievance) to Wal-Mart for some formula for the babers. Quite honestly, I thought about driving straight to Vegas instead, calling my parents when I got there and profusely apologizing with a cosmopolitan in my hand for leaving them with the little guy. I'd return, sure, at some point.

Unfortunately as a mother you don't get a hiatus. Even if I went to Vegas to party like a rockstar, could I do it with the same disregard I'd had in the past? Could I not care what time I got in, and that my girlfriends and I got up to the penthouse suite? Would I respect myself if I pretended that I am not donning yoga pants and driving an SUV around for formula and diapers the other 360 days of the year?

I believe that at some point most mothers feel like becoming a mother is/was a loss of self. I don't want to lose myself, but I'm not quite sure I can be my pre-mother self either. Which leaves me with a wanderlustful anxiety that I am just dying to relieve.

I have to ask: do we become someone else as parents? If the person we were in the past is not entirely what you'd hope from your offspring, do you have a parental responsibility to be another person? If so, how do you become that person? Is it a part of "growing up" (a thing I swore I'd never really do since the day I heard the Toys R Us song after the Kid Sister commercial)?

I believe that I long ago opened my Pandora's box and the swarm of evil that was released is still to this day intoxicating my veins; still pumping through to my core along with my blood. I just hope that as a mother I can trump this curiosity and wanderlust with responsibility more often than not.

I envisioned myself going through life as a quasi-gypsy, following music and my other passions around the earth. I believed that in some way I would spend my life with someone who felt similar, and lived the majority of the time outside or the norms and routines of life. Yet here I am driving an Acura in suburbia, CO, cooking dinners and decorating my tree. These are things I love, but a routine of this sort of life bores me to tears.

I can only hope that someday my son and I can tour the world watching indie bands and eating strange foods. And maybe we'll find someone to do it with. Until then I live vicariously through books and imagination, hoping I still have nine lives with which to explore my curiosity.