Identity

  
The Daily Post as WordPress has challenged us with the topic identity. About six months before I turned fifty in 2009 I started to question my identity. I began asking the simple question, Who am I? Why? It was a time of change. I was now an empty nester in an unhappy marriage. I had no career other than mother and wife. If I no longer was needed as a fulltime mother and no longer a wife, who would I be? 

Six years have passed and I am still asking the same question. My identity was wound so tightly around being a wife and mother, I had left no room to be just me.
Now I am a divorcée and I hate having to check that box on a form. It feels like a disease. It’s a label that says I failed. I couldn’t make my marriage work. I am also a “mature” adult having passed the midway point of 50. Again another label I don’t like. Although I do understand the blessing it is to be granted another year of life.

We are complex beings much to eager to label people and put them in a box. It’s not for their benefit but our own. How can I know if she’s a threat to my marriage if I don’t know if she’s married? How can I know if she’s too old to join me in an activity? How can I know if she will be a burden and expect too much from me if I don’t know what she does for a living. Of course the answers to those questions have no bearing on what the possibilities are. But as I said, labels help us keep our own world in order.

So I sadly label myself and in doing so I’ve trapped myself in a small box and haven’t been able to find the door to get out.

Identity Daily Post