Leaving things behind...

I'm really busy, today.  I'm packing up our tumbling apart car with all of our worn and loved blankies and our new, family sized tent so that we can go camping in the rain.

I was just thinking, though, while I stalled... eating a bowl of cereal instead of finding a hammer and rinsing all of the spider webs off of the tarp.

I was thinking about being high.

Sometimes it sounds pretty great.  To be young and awful again.  To get wasted and be naked and full of abandon.  To stay up all night, feeling like the queen of some alternate universe where everybody worships madness and feeling.

I was thinking about how it's been 6 years since I've done heroin.

I don't have a hard fought story about rehab and sobriety.  In fact, you'll never hear me mention the word "sobriety," because that's not how I feel about leaving that drug behind.  I don't feel like it's still a battle inside of me, that I'll always be an addict.  I might think it sounds nice, sometimes.  I definitely might think it sounds easy.  But it never sounds like something I might actually do, or even thinking about doing.

I haven't, not even for a moment, considered doing drugs since the moment I found out I was pregnant with my first baby.  It was the easiest choice in the world, for me.  I could choose myself and my shitty troubles, or I could choose my babies and all the glory and light they deserve.  There has never been a moment of struggle, not with being sober, I mean.  I've struggled with my sanity and my self-worth and rejection and disorganization and failure.  I've struggled plenty, but not with staying away from drugs.  I couldn't give less of a fuck about heroin, and it meant a lot to me, at one time in my life.

It wasn't about what people might think, either.  I have a long history with people thinking bad things about me and my choices and capabilities.  I won't go as far as to say that I don't care what people think, because I want to be a positive thing, in the world.  I want to make people feel happy about living.  I want people to have better lives, for knowing me.  But, as far as somebody's opinion of the things I believe and the choices I make... I mean.  Some people's opinions of me matter, and a lot of people opinions of me might, I don't know.  I've never made any of my life choices based on whether or not somebody might be shaking their head at me, behind my back.  I didn't give up my old lifestyle because I was afraid I might look like a bad mom.

I gave up that lifestyle because I knew that if I didn't, I would BE a bad mom.

Being outspoken and having kooky hairstyles are choices that people roll their eyes at, but they don't make me a bad mom.  Telling the truth about where I've come from makes some people nervous about me, but it doesn't make me a bad mom.  Refusing to buy my children pink, plastic toys with huge boobs and pretty eyelashes causes some people to label me in an unflattering way, but I'm still a good mom.  Even if Barbie thinks I should lighten up or I'm going to turn my girls into fat lesbos, or something.

Choosing myself and my shortcomings over the happiness of my girls would make me a shitty mom.  Abandoning my girls emotionally so that I could avoid my past and troubles and manufacture a good feeling would make me a shitty mom.  Exposing my family to the possibility of trouble, to poisonous people, to any circumstance that could separate us, would make me a shitty mom.

There's a big difference between making unpopular or weird choices, and making shitty ones.  I'm allowed to be myself, I'm allowed to have come where I came from.  I'm allowed to say, "I used to be a junky, but I gave it up for my kids."  I can cut my hair any way I want.  I can wear whatever I want.  I can be whatever shape I want to be.  I can say what I want to say and believe what I want to believe.  And so YOU better believe that every kooky, weird and unpopular choice I make is because I'm a fucking amazing mom.

I do everything I do with eyes that are seeing my daughters when they are 30 years old.  It's okay if they say someday, "Mom never let us have Monster High dolls and everybody else had them."  It would never, in a million years, be okay if they were able to look back on our life together and say, "Mom didn't think of us before she thought of herself."

I don't know what the point of all this was.  Maybe I'm still stalling.  I just love my kids, you guys.