What the hell happened to us?

I've been having an interesting conversation with my friend Amanda through e-mail the last couple of days. What's interesting about it is it's a conversation I've also been having with other friends of mine who are roughly the same age as I. Apparently, modern 30-something wives and mothers are plagued by dissatisfaction. We feel like we're not realizing our full potential and feel like there's so much more still left out there for us and it's just out of our reach. I've concluded this funk is created by the fact that we're at an age where we assumed, when we were younger and idealistic, that we would have been a whole lot more than we think we actually are and we're frustrated by that. Add to that, the fact that we understand we're still young enough to pursue something that's got to be caught. We've been able to quiet that voice in the back of our heads while we've been raising our children, but they're in school now and we have some freedom of time not devoted to another person and it allows that voice to come back screaming like a banshee. The voice that yells, "You are more than this!"

I don't say any of this to discount the importance or meanigfulness of being mothers and wives. I'd have to think long and hard to come up with a job a woman could perform that is more important than being a mother. I'm not talking about having children, either. I'm talking about being a mother. But let's face it, mothering is an outwardly directed activity. It's about helping another person realize their full potential and find their place in the world. And we all feel like we still haven't figured out our own place to our complete satisfaction, so we sit here with a sense of emptiness and wanderlust. But it's not all doom and gloom, my friends. I've started writing again and I've started sending stories out again and I've been thinking about that book inside of me that's still got to come out. So for all my sister mothers and wives out there, as corny as it sounds, tomorrow is another day and we've still got plenty of time to be the next big thing we're supposed to be. Only the decision to do something stands between us and the future we want.