Some women have their families early. Some, by circumstance, don’t. Some choose not to and choose to do the career thing.

At some point in our lives, our priorities and desires change. Or, we have a desire to get the hell out and do all those things we wanted to do. It’s totally normal. That’s the human experience; there’s no guilt in that.

There is no reason why you can’t follow your dreams within your marriage. Dolly Pardon’s answer to the question “How do you make your marriage work and for so long?”, she said, “We take separate vacations.”

It’s okay to plan for a vacation, by yourself, or with your girlfriends. You don’t HAVE to go on vacation with your family. That’s not selfish. That’s a renewal. Everyone deserves to have a life. What do you want to teach your children? Live your life; you can do all those things you want to do within the life that you currently lead. It takes more time, but you can do it.

As for what I wish I had; I wish I had a family, a loving husband, a loving mother, and I wish I was in management at work rather than continuing to consult and be in services. I wish I owned my own home; I wish I were out of debt; and I wish I could travel overseas more, rather than going to every damned state in the US for work travel. Trust me; work travel sucks!

Do it now so you don’t have regrets later.

And, nothing wrong with a tiny bit of debt to help you feel settled back into life.

I am getting even more and more excited to see you in NYC. I know you will love it. :hug:

I think your friend is very very wise indeed. I also think that you need to pay attention to your ‘restless feelings’.

I think I remember reading that you were a young mother, which means you really didn’t have the chance to experience life independently, focusing on your needs, wants, and desires, as you needed to focus in on the needs of your new family…your children and husband.

And I think as women, we’re often socialized to focus in on taking care of every one elses needs, and forgetting about our own.(I think this is slowly changing tho.) What I have seen often happen is as the children become older and much more independent (read: no longer ‘needing’ mom to fill every Need for them), and ‘mom’ (entering into middle age) starts reflecting back on her life and finding extreme dissatisfaction with it, realizing they’ve often put their own needs and wants to the side ‘for the sake of her family’ and somehow feeling they’ve lost ‘who they are’ in the process.
To call that a “Mid-life Crisis’, I think is cliche, short-sighted and trivializes it, as I think it’s more of the Developmental Stage we go through.
However, some people, (both men and women) think they need to leave the marriage they had built their life around, inorder for them to ‘re-discover’ who they are and what they want out of life.
I do not agree with that.

You are not the same Woman/Wife/Mother that you were 2 years ago. And you *won’t be the same* Woman/Wife/Mother in two *more* years either. The same thing applies to your husband. We continually grow as people, but we have to allow for those changes. It’s like a renegotiating of your roll as a woman, wife, and mother.

And that, Britt, can still be done within the context of your marriage/motherhood.
Your husband will need to be open to this and allow this renegotiation of your roll, without viewing it as much of a threat. In my opinion, I think that many marriages fail at this point because one recognizes the need to renegotiate who they are in that marriage, but the other views that as a threat to the stability to the marriage. The one ‘threatened’ then either allows ‘way too much space’ (read by the other as ‘not caring’) or out of fear, starts to hold on too tight (making the other feel suffocated).

So, plan a trip to New York.
Is there a class you’ve always wanted to take? Then register for it.
Have you always wanted to learn Swahili?
Then take a language class.
Is there something you’ve always wanted to do?
Then do it.

There’s no reason why you can’t develop more of what you want/do/be within the context of your marriage/motherhood.

And as you work through your personal struggles and develop more of ‘who you are’, not only will you recognize that this can be done within your marriage, you’ll also be a support for your husband if he also struggles with this for himself.

And isn’t that the true Beauty and Essense of Marriage?? Allowing and supporting eachother to become the Very Best that each desires to be?

Good luck to you Britt.

~ZZ

I’ve always found the grass is greener on the other side.

At least until you get there.

My mother, who had been married most of her life from the time she was in her teens, taught me that we come into this world as a complete being and so we shall leave it. Everything we do and feel is up to us. It is our choice. We choose our attitude and our feelings. It may not be a conscious choice every time, but it is still our choice. She told me that I do not need a man (or a partner – Mama was pretty with it and open minded for her age) to “complete” me. She said there is no such thing as “the other half of yourself” the way the romance books describe it. Instead, she told me, there are people who compliment you to the extent that the grass looks greener, and the sun shines brighter, when you are with them.

I don’t think you’re dissatisfied with your life. I think you have a healthy appreciation for the things you’ve given up to have what you have. That appreciation just breeds a little envy and self pity on occasion when you’re tired and when you’ve had an opportunity to go somewhere and do something that was sooo much fun you couldn’t bear it. But you wouldn’t give up your kids, and your husband, to have TC08 every day. Because then, you would give anything to have the kids and the DH.

As for me, I would trade you any day. My kid is almost 19 and I wish she wasn’t. You have a nice house. I live in a dumpster (or rather a condo-ish version of a dumpster.) You have a husband who can make a decent living. I have man in the custody of the state. You’re short and cute and have a pretty decent shape. I’m none of those things. I can barely walk, barely breathe because I need a knee replacement and I have asthma. I would trade you… except I would miss my 19 yr old, no matter how nice it would be to walk a block without struggling to breath.

You’re really not as dissatisfied as you think you are. You just have look your life from another perspective. Then you’ll remember why you are who you are and why you’re THERE.