I Am… (Not Just a Mother)

Melanie talked about how her interests and life shifted towards breastfeeding and baby rearing and while it’s her passion, she felt like other passions were slipping away. I know I’ve felt much of the same, but at the same time, I love my job now, and my interest are driven by that love.

But at the same time, I still manage to hold onto many interests, and realized that there are still many things that make me ME, even if most of my focus is still on parenting and dedication to my children.

So hi, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Christie. I’m a mom, but I am also many other things:

I am a geek.
I love Star Wars with a passion and collect Boba Fett figurines, which never leave the packages. I’ve read all of the Lord of the Rings books, watched the movies a ton of times and just about any time I’m on the computer and not on the web, I’m playing Lord of the Rings Online (I’m Morendriel on the Elendilmir server… look me up!).

I am a gamer.
Aside from playing LotRO, I also love many platform games, especially dark, suspense puzzle games and scary things. Often they scare me enough I stop playing, and I’m also not very good at puzzles and especially bad at strategy and I hate challenges, so I use cheat codes and guides to solve puzzles. My husband hates it and thinks I ruin games for myself.

I am a lover of music.
I’m not particularly musically-talented. I was first-chair trumpet for years but haven’t played in over a decade, and I’m not ambidextrous enough to play the piano, though I can obviously read the notes and know the corresponding keys. I love to sing, and can end up liking  just about any song as long as I can learn the lyrics and have fun singing it. My voice isn’t great, but at least I can score well on Rock Band and Sing Star, which I love as well. My family exposed me to a huge variety of music as I grew up, so you can find many Motown songs on my playlists along with ska, old country, and lots of rock and alternative, but my true love is the pop of the mid-to-late 90′s, like Lisa Loeb or the Cranberries.

I am a book addict.
I read for anywhere between 5-60 minutes every single night once my kids are asleep. I love sci-fi and fantasy especially, and am on a major vampire kick right now. My parents always blew money on us in bookstores, and my husband and I can’t leave a Borders store without spending at least $150. I buy tons of books on a whim all the time, and almost always read every single book I buy as well, cover-to-cover, except the really, really bad ones. I have a hard time getting rid of books too — I’m a book hoarder. People who say they “don’t read” freak me out. It’s as foreign to me as saying you don’t eat.

I am totally addicted to coffee.
Cliche coming from someone who lives near Seattle, but it’s true. I have counted 22 different places to get coffee within a 10 minute driving radius from my house, and I utilize that knowledge frequently. When I quit smoking, I think I replaced that entire $100+ a month just with coffee. In fact, one of the things that worries me most about our upcoming move and monetary situation change is not being able to have coffee regularly. I suck at making my own lattes.

I am incredibly disorganized and messy.
Amy calls herself “Undomestic”, but I think I’m almost anti-domestic. Cooking is incredibly hard, cleaning is like torture, I can’t remember where I put anything ever, I don’t have the forethought or spatial judgment to organize anything well. I always start things that I can never finish, often because I lose the pieces or forget what I was doing before I finish (or even before I start). I forget to bill my work almost monthly and somehow manage to miscount what I’m charging them for just as regularly.

I’m a big weirdo.
I love being different. Not because I’m trying to get attention or want to be unique, but just because I don’t care one bit what is popular, in style, or anything of that type. My sister wore black cat ears to school and I wore fuzzy bunny ears. It was fun. My hair’s been every color of the rainbow INCLUDING rainbow colored. I love Crocs, and I have a punk-meets-hippie style that I really love, and none of it has anything to do with what anyone else thinks. I’m just as likely to wear a pink, girlie shirt and put my hair in pigtails as wear a black shirt with a rhinestone skull and put on heavy eyeliner. I think being silly and weird is so much more interesting than always worrying what other people think, and I honestly feel bad for people who are afraid to stand out or being unique or are always worried about what’s popular or “in style.” I love that my face is very expressive and enjoy wiggling my eyebrows for fun.

So there, there’s 7 things about me that are true, current, and have nothing to do with my children. Sometimes when I feel like all I do is take care of them, I remind myself that even despite that dedication, I still have many things that make me uniquely me, that are true ALL the time, whether my hair is unbrushed and oily and I’m wearing the same jammie pants I wore two days ago, these things never aren’t true. I’m still me, no matter what happens, and I don’t have to find a babysitter or wait until my kids are grown to remember that I still have my own unique personality.

Now that I’ve talked about me, how about you guys? Using “I am”, tell me things about yourselves that have nothing to do with your kids.

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Tags: feeling like you have no time to yourself, mothering, personal interests, time for mom