Needs Improvement

I'm suddenly overcome with yearnings to be different. It's silly, because I'm finally in a place in my life where I have all the things I've been searching for, for pretty much my conscious life (or at least since my teens) - most importantly love, but also a home, a vocation, and promise for the future. Outside looking in, everything is rosy. If I wasn't me, I'd want to be me. Actually most of the time I still do. But over the weekend I was smitten with admiration for how sensible and strong and wise my mother is, how much I'd like to have the aura of warmth that she has, and to approach things with her grace. I feel flittery and nervous next to her, even when I try to be calm. I would like to glow through the rest of my pregnancy and make motherhood look easy and natural, be the kind of mother to my child that my mother is to me. But I worry that I just don't have it in me. And the fact that I'm worrying is probably proof that no, I don't, because it's exactly the kind of existentialist crisis that I specialized in growing up, and that my mother is too sensible to ever fall into.

Failing that kind of grace, I would at least like to be an interesting person, with a lot of ideas and things on my mind, and a variety of unusual hobbies like the friends we saw yesterday. This isn't new; I always feel, after spending time with them, that I should be more like them. They're musical and talented, support a bunch of social causes, have already traveled the world, and have a home full of fun things like Lego and children's books (although they don't have children). Everything in their home has a story, and most things were gifts from their wide and varied group of friends, from the Chinese instrument on the wall that was a wedding gift, to the salt shakers from a friend's Peace Corps stint in Peru, to the crayon drawings on the refrigerator from a nephew. I'll never have as many friends as they do. I even envy the quick, instinctive understanding of one another that they have - it is as far as I can tell a perfect relationship. Next to them I feel like the only interesting thing I've managed to do lately is get pregnant, and I feel terribly un-artistic.

Probably both the strength and the interestingness are things that can be achieved through practice, or at least improved. I will simply have to work on it.