Where Is The Life That I Recognize?

I read Under The Palms blog today (find the link to her blog on my sidebar) and was struck by how it reflected much of what I have been thinking and feeling the last four or five years especially.

I have a job interview coming up that could mean a significant shift in my life. If I get this job then it requires me to relocate to one of the cities in which they have offices. One of those is the city of my birth, a city I never thought I would ever live in again. This city is an 18-hr drive from where I currently reside.

That means -- if I get this -- that I would have two weeks to pack up seventeen years of shared "stuff" and move out of my house. Find a new place to stay in the new city. File for divorce. Leave my child behind with her father and see her on the weekends and/or fly her up to spend weekends with me. To be a weekend parent. To leave my friends and my family behind. To leave so much.....

I'm terrified. I want it, yes. I want this for a while, not forever -- for a few years at most, until I gain more experience and can find employment more suited to me and to maintain my lifestyle. I am guilty as hell at leaving my husband behind to shake up his life like this. I know he doesn't truly understand and he will never be able to no matter how much I explain. He knows a lot of it, but knowing it -- hearing it -- and "grokking" it are two different things. I simply cannot impart my perspective to him. Thus, he is left feeling confused, abandoned, unloved. God, I hope he knows that through everything, he was never unloved. I just hope he can also realize that love alone just wasn't enough.

And what of my daughter? What am I doing this to her for? For what might be......what.....a midlife thing? Are my issues worth tearing her family apart? What kind of fucking mother am I if I can't wait for another five years? I don't know! GOD I DON'T KNOW! But I have waited, this should have been done when she was five or six, I can't wait any more, and she'll be okay, I am not giving her enough credit, or me. I can still make sure she knows I love her. Can't I? So many things I think, back and forth, back and forth, until I feel unbalanced and nearly insane. Do I choose me? Do I choose them? What is ~right~ here?

I know also if I were a man then the prospect of leaving my child would be a necessary evil and it could be justified and laid aside. But I am a mother - a badbadbadbad mother for leaving her child! Deep down I feel bad. But this is a choice, and I am scared to death that my daughter will resent me in the future for choosing me over her. Just this morning I told her that I might be leaving if I get the job and though she said "I'm all right with it," I could tell she wasn't. I wanted to bend my head and cry until there were no more tears left.

Can I do this? Can I?


((Song: "Ordinary World" by Duran Duran. Lyrics here:
http://www.geocities.com/ladyxanax13/Lyrics/OrdinaryWorld.html))