When I was a very young mother (and I was very young) my entire identity was as the mother of my kids. When my daughter was in hospital (in a different city to where we lived) I had to travel to see her but leaving my son at home with parents. I distinctly remember (in amongst all the angst of having a critically ill baby) the 'loss' of travelling without a baby or toddler in tow. I didn't quite know what to do with myself. (As an aside - the hospital that she was in - which was so far away at the time and seemed to take endless bus travel to get there .. is up the road from where I now live. Of course it is now medium/high density housing now but they have kept the beautiful and imposing sandstone facade.)
Anyway ... as I grew older and so did the kids I became weary of being so and so's mother - but that was okay because then I had a professional 'face' I could wear. That 'face' became increasingly important and when I resigned and went to study I went through the whole "I-have-no-identity or who-the-hell-am-I" routine all over again ... I was too old to play the student ... was the mother of adolescents (nuff said) and was doing relief teaching - another sure fire way to shoot down any sense of self-worth.
The professional 'face' changed slightly (different expression more than new face) and I was recognised as an expert in a very very tiny field. (Ex= has been ... spurt = drip under pressure). In the top 10 in Australia ... not terribly meaningful when there were probably only 11 of us. Then a series of 'new' areas ... where I learned a lot - writing books, making films, writing curriulum (of course) - all of which came in terribly useful later. But it was in the APS ... and the glass ceiling was alive and well and I was bumping against it after just a couple of years ... with 25 working years to go!!!
Off I went to the wider world. A friend/mentor/colleague said to me that I was the "Africa expert" - the sulky little girl inside me whined and said (under my breath of course, in the tradition of sulky little girls) "But I don't want to be the Africa expert". Same friend/colleague introduced me at a conference once as an expert in several different fields ... with the above quote in mind - about a drip under pressure ... I figured that what she really meant was that nobody else had stuck it out for as long - in other words I was the last(wo)man left standing!
The next phase was that of a freelance consultant. Now there is an identity (or at least a stereotype): we are perceived as high maintenance - mostly a matter of over-crowded TORs and a limited time frame. When I came home once a year the identity was very clear cut ... daughter, mother and grandmother and because of limited time in-country this was a full-time identity.
But now I live in Australia ... and while I have a clear-cut identity when I am working that is very often tied to an absence from home: when I am home I don't really have any identity at all. I look like hundreds of other middle class "women of a certain age", my interests are predictable so any identity is banal to say the least.
So here is the question: are we nothing more than the sum of our parts - is our identity only that of our work and our relationships? And what happens when this is not enough?
