Who am I, if not needed.
by Danielle Cross
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My youngest is about to finish school.
I've known this day was coming for eighteen years. I still wasn't ready.
I was twenty three when I had Marley. Evy Jude came a few years later. I was still a child in so many ways, learning who I was at the same time I was teaching two small people how to be in the world. Nobody tells you that when you become a mother young, you don't just raise your children. You grow up next to them. Every first they had, I was quietly having some version of my own.
Everyone warns you about the practical parts. Nobody warns you about the identity part. So much of who I became was built around being needed, at specific times, by two specific people. Now that need is changing shape, and I'm left wondering who I am underneath the role I built myself into so young.
I've made art that connects. Brands that carry my work. Pieces I'm proud of. And still, some mornings this year, I haven't known how to answer the question, who am I, when I'm not needed the way I've been needed since I was barely more than a girl myself.
We talk about the sentimental version of children growing up. Nobody talks about the disorientation.
I don't think I lost myself raising them. I think I built a self that included them, at an age when I hadn't finished building my own yet. That was never wrong. It just means there's a version of me now that has to exist on her own again, and I'm still working out who that is.
Some days I feel like the artist I've always been. Some days I feel like I'm meeting myself for the first time in years. Both are true.
If you're in this too, I don't have the answer. I don't think we're meant to arrive with one. We're meant to arrive slowly, figuring it out as we go, the same way we did the first time.
Ready?
DX