Stuck

I love my life. I love Gabrovo. I love the mountains surrounding it. I love my husband. I love my son. I love that Nikola is running an ethical business and I love that I am a professional writer.

There is so much to love in my life that I actually feel bad for admitting this:

This is not the life I wanted. 

Growing up, I was wild and free. Just how wild and free? Bordering on skipping right out of this reality for most of my adolescent and adult life. I went to unbelievable places. I met amazing people. I worked crazy jobs.

I never imagined myself the stay-at-home mom, providing support to a husband that works 10 hours a day. 

The feminist in me has to cringe. That same woman who spent 3 years challenging misogyny in the conservation corps world is now living the traditional gender role of the meek, second-class wife that I didn’t even know I was rallying against all of those years.

I cook and clean.

I smile demurely when the immigration officer has Nikola write that I am a satisfactory wife and he is pleased with the way I take care of the home and our child on my immigration forms.

I have made the home my domain, to the point that my husband doesn’t know where things go and doesn’t feel comfortable instilling his own organization scheme in our abode.

I have this absurd, insatiable nesting urge for a house that I own and can fully expand in. That I can decorate. That I can feel good never leaving.

I don’t know what other life I would choose, if I hadn’t fallen in love. If my biological clock hadn’t tripped and I hadn’t produced this amazing, exquisite little person. If I hadn’t stayed in Bulgaria. Would I be doing something greater? Something more? I sometimes wonder if there is anything beyond this little bubble that I have created.

None of this would be a problem, if I was not feeling a bit of frustration and a lot of anomie at the moment. Stuck. Unconnected. Floating, but no longer free. Stuck in a current of a million lives before mine.