A few years ago I split up from the father of my kids, and abruptly found myself in new territory. In this new world, roughly 50% of the time (usually a little less) I had no obligations to anyone but myself.

As a person who aerosolized her coffee on the last individual that asked about my hobbies, this discovery of time was disconcerting. I had so thoroughly lost myself in motherhood, in trying to further my career, and yes, in hiding from cracks and fissures in my relationship, that I did not remember what it felt like to be an individual.

Honestly, two years out it’s still hard and a little foreign feeling. And I ask myself if I live a severed life.

Watching the characters in severance zip in and out of different personalities with the apparent ease of an elevator ride left me pondering why it was hard for me to move in and out of my different identities smoothly. I also wondered if my innie is the Mom or is my outie the Mom, and who is the person who is not “Mom”.

Do I want it to be easier? Easier to not miss my kids when they go to their Dad’s house. Easier to connect with myself when they aren’t with me. Is there something beautiful about it being hard. I love my kids with so much of my soul that even the friction and pain of hugging them on the mornings when they will go home to Dad is somehow meaningful.

And as much as I love them and miss their jokes, tantrums, hugs, and quirks when they are gone, I know that I sleep better, treat my body better, and read more when they are away. There is a deep visceral recognition of the value of this time. Something I didn’t and couldn’t fully recognize before I became a mother.

Sometimes I wish it was easier. But I remember that a wise therapist told me that love isn’t aesthetically beautiful, it feels beautiful because there is friction, there is work, there is transition.

Matriscence has entered our collective vocabulary and much has been made of the idea that women become something else when they become mothers. In popular culture shows like Night Bitch and Working Moms show us the ways that our lives our warped and upended by motherhood. And then again the culture tells us that we go through another transition later maybe as a result of motherhood or a long hibernation of our non-mother selves (see All Fours by Miranda July).

These cultural outposts show us big transitions, but I suppose I’m stuck in the muck of small transitions. Every other week when my kids switch houses, every night when I turn out their light and retreat to a vanishingly small window of time that is not dedicated to them. Every morning when I get dressed to go to work, and every evening when I return home.

I carve myself out of unmoving commitments to work, to schedules, to keeping the trains running on time. A thousand forms, ten thousand emails, 100 newsletters, and I am always perpetually behind. And all of this sounds grim because I really am on the fence about whether I have my shit together so to speak.

But I still try to carve myself out. I find meaning in all my commitments, and so they are part of me too. They claim my time and shape who I am, and yet I am constantly chipping away and smoothing the curves around my life. Trying to find space, to find some ease in constant change.

I suppose my life is the opposite of severed. Everything is all mixed up all the goddamn time.

My boyfriend has a tendency to use the kitchen table as place to store things. Keep in mind we live in a NYC apartment with my two kids and our dog. Our kitchen is definitively european-sized. It cannot accommodate Costco shopping runs, it barely has enough room for our toaster oven and our blender. We don’t have a microwave. Suffice to say using the kitchen table as storage clearly drives me insane.

I found myself ranting last week when attempting to cook dinner and finding the kitchen table covered in sundry items that could have been put away. Several of them were tupperware.

I harumphfed over to the tupperware drawer to put them away only to discover… unmitigated chaos. The tupperware drawer of my life runneth over.

There are always too many lids, never matching the right container. There are seemingly too many and too few tupperware storage thing-a-ma-bobs at the same time. Everything is wrong.

I think if you have kids you probably have some deep subconscious awareness of the chaos that swirls around you, hiding in tupperware drawers. Even when everything is seemingly orderly and calm, you know that entropy is doing its work to methodically undo all of the ordering and planning and putting away of things.

In the middle of my rant the categorical truth of my statement about our tupperware drawer really hit home, and we both burst into laughter.

There is no moral to this story. Laughter helps. Entropy continues. Tupperware drawers will never be organized.

I have never once listened to Metallica of my own free will. Yet it’s a little after 7 am on a recent morning and the sounds of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica are drifting down the stairs from my kids’ room.

My 6 yo son, Zaire, wanted to rock out after finishing his cereal. Now I am finishing my coffee and packing snacks and wondering why I am listening to Metallica so early in the morning. How did we get here?

Naturally, it began with the Beastie Boys, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” Used in the soundtrack to the Secret Life of Pets, Zaire would rewind the movie to watch the scene where the pets are crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to this song. Having listened to what felt like 200+ times, it felt like the right time to suggest that the Beastie Boys had other songs.

The next hit was “Fight for Your Right”, which for a long time Zaire insisted was actually “Fight Till You Get It Right.” I somewhat prefer his version to the sentiments communicated in the original lyrics.

We didn’t stay confined to the Beastie Boys catalogue for long. One day I was finishing a rare Peloton ride when my kids interrupted me and heard Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A few longer car rides turned him onto Gun n’ Roses. Before you ask, his favorite song is “Nightrain,” along with the classics “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Paradise City.”

There is something magical about watching Zaire experience music that he loves. The other evening I was driving him home from speech therapy, and Nirvana’s “Love Buzz” came on after “Lithium”. He hadn’t heard this one before (it is kind of a deep cut), but he got about 30 seconds in before he asked for the name of the song and for me to start it from the beginning.

In the rear-view mirror I could see his face give a little smile and his head move to the beat. And I could almost touch that feeling he was experiencing. When you hear something that feels like it was written for you.

He’s discovered so many bands on his own from Rage Against the Machine to Local H to Green Day. There is something deeply human in our taste for specific music. And I love watching Zaire learn to love different songs. Even when the songs he is loving are Pantera and Slayer songs. And I’m grateful in some strange way to the algorithm that recommended so many songs that I would not have been able to introduce him to myself.

Of course, I have my doubts as a parent. When do I enforce parental controls? How do I talk to him about what the music is about? Will I be able to teach him about the context and meaning of these lyrics? Am I spending enough time working on his reading, writing and math?

There isn’t a profound insight to end this with. Instead, I mostly have questions.

Is it uniquely human to develop a taste for specific music? How much control do we have as parents over what our children gravitate to? How much control do we have over what we consume? Is there joy in the eventual distance created between a parent and child as they grow into their own individuality? And isn’t there something human about connecting with art, and meeting and communing around that art? Isn’t there always an opening for more of our own individual discovery?