..."You are not who you think you are. Hardly anyone is."

Ok. Well, obviously someone told me. (Thus the quotation marks.) But not until I was 28. Not until I read it in a book and subsequently realized how much time and energy I had spent in my life pursuing something it appears I'm not meant to have a firm grasp on; who I am.

"I know myself, but that is all," Amory, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise cries in a triumph, of sorts, at the very end of the book.

And maybe therein lies the catch. Maybe you can know yourself. But at the cost of knowing absolutely nothing else.

I wonder.

I remember reading This Side of Paradise in high school and loving it. Recently I read it again and you know, not that I didn't love it, but it was almost as though I was reading an entirely different book. Proving the statement I opened with? Or maybe proving I am not the same person I was.

Who did I think I was back in high school? Well, maybe we should go one step further. Who did I think I was in Middle school? That's actually an easy question to answer. I was the smart girl. The high-achiever. The student who was asked again and again to present her work to the class. The student who subsequently (duh) became known as teacher's pet. But thinking about it in recent years I've come to realize I was less the smart girl and the teacher's pet because that's who I wanted to be. And it was more a case of default. I was not popular. I was not pretty. I was not really athletically inclined, my grade school abilities having temporarily deserted me with the onset of puberty. So, ipso facto, academia it was.

In high school that changed somewhat. The awkward, uncertain and insecure tendencies of the 'tween years faded and a little bit like the ugly duckling turned swan I came into my own. But intelligence and eloquence still remained huge aspects of the "who I am" that I presented to the world.

Just out of high school I got my first job working at a coffee shop. And I loved it. As any 18-20 year old quickly finds out when they enter the domain of the working in the end no one really cares how much you know. It's how hard you work that matters. And I found out I could work hard. And in working hard, I could not only earn a salary, I could come out of my shell. It didn't matter if I got straight As or what my ACT numbers had been. It didn't matter if I remembered how to diagram a sentence or could recite the elements in the periodic table. What mattered to the people I waited on day after day was whether or not I listened. Whether or not I cared. Before getting married I would have answered the "who am I" question with a statement that centered around my job in the public and how much interacting with all kinds of people each and every day meant to me.

After getting married I found quickly myself as a newlywed, living in different city, without a job or a car, struggling to meet and get to know ANYBODY and wondering why I seemed so alone, so utterly and totally lost. (A very common tale, I'm afraid.) Then I got pregnant. (Another very common tale) and before I was really able to come to terms with all the drastic changes in my life I added the most drastic change of all. I became a mother.

Everything I thought I knew about myself and about the world got turned on it's head. Who I used to be, whether or not it was ever accurate, seemed so far away it might as well have been someone else. Suddenly I was swimming in a sea of hormones and sleep deprivation and guilt and worry and spit-up. Don't get me wrong, I loved my daughter so very, crazy much. (Still do.) But that in and of itself was part of the problem. This love that comes into your life when you have a child is so unlike anything you've ever experienced before. And though you may be half insane because you haven't been out in days and you're still wearing maternity sweatpants and your last shower is an event you can't even remember and you just want to scream from the mundane "feed, burp, change"-ness of it all, your child looks up at you and smiles for the first time and everything is forgotten. All of it. Nothing else matters and the world, just as it is, dirty, baggy sweatpants and all, is perfect.

Which is real, you wonder later when you're looking back? (Like I am these days; with a daughter closer to 4 years old than I can believe and more grown up and independent than those intense first 2 years led me to imagine as possible.) How it is? Or how it seems? The wreck I was so often reduced to one moment? Or the so-in-love-with-my-child-nothing-could-faze-me mother I became in the very next moment after that?

The answer lies, I think, in the words of a very moving book I just read. (And highly recommend.) It's entitled One Hundred Names For Love and it's the true story of a woman caring for her spouse after a severe stroke leaves him unable to speak.

At the end she writes "I am in a phase of life with responsibilities I could not have imagined during my boy-crazy high school years in the heart of Pennsylvania, when the Beatles tunes suggested that love was as simple as "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Like the teen years, this is also a passing phase. Be fully awake for it, I tell myself, pay attention to all it's feelings and sensations, because this is simply another facet of being alive, of life on earth, and then there will be another era when Paul will be gone and you won't have these responsibilities and worries."

Phases. That's all that life is. Knowing who you are is a never-to-be-attained reality because remaining in any one place for more than a mere moment in you life is also never-to-be-attained.

These days the books I read are (generally) on the lighter side and the world of periodic tables and diagramming sentences is a distant, foggy memory. My intelligence and eloquence have both stagnated. Instead, I know all the words to the "Cat in the Hat" songs, I can recite "If You Give a Pig a Party" and I can't remember the last time I called a toilet, anything other than a potty.

I don't get out much on my own. My circle of friends revolves around other moms and we get together so our children can learn how to play and share. I'm not exactly the "can talk to anyone, anywhere about anything" barista I used to be. Mostly I just find myself wanting to talk about my daughter. But seeing as how not everyone is as enraptured with her as I am, more often than not I just keep my mouth closed.

Even though I am still very much a stay-at-home mom my daughter is older now. She needs me less. I have more time on my hands. I can think about questions like "who am I?". I can come to the realization that I don't often know who I am. Nor do I always recognize who I used to be. I can even catch sight of my own reflection in a mirror and be surprised. (Because in my head I still see myself as the boyish and awkwardly immature 13 year old with short hair and glasses I was so long ago.) And I can write a blog entry about it all.

But in the end, it is just a phase. Tomorrow is not only another day but tomorrow I am another person, different than who I am today; whoever and whatever I decide that may be.