I'm not a monster.

Thank you, Norma.
Norma Quintana is a photographer, like me, although these days I mostly tend to forget I was ever a photojournalist, ever somebody else than a walking milk supply, happy meal cook, all-purpose maid, small event organizer, truck driver and toddler theatrics and song master, ever somewhere other than in a 29-foot trailer parked at the back of a circus in a lot after another that look like the last one, ever feeling other than exhausted and under-appreciated, unworthy and misunderstood, ever feeling other than ignorant of the rest of the world stretching with the sweet glowing aura of the unattainable outside the confines of my 18-month-old's round eyes and two-month-old toothless smile, ever somebody else than a full-time Mom with a double stroller and a minivan, ever someone other than a sometimes totally desperate trailer wife.
Norma came by yesterday and we talked. I love visits, they're like a window into the world of normal people living normal lives out there. They also provide entertainment, like going to the movies, which is one of the things I never can do anymore.
Norma and I talked about the circus, of course, she's been photographing Circus Chimera for a long time and we toy with joint projects, and then about motherhood too - she just adopted a three-year-old girl from China after raising her own two children, now grown, - and that's when she made me sane again. What she told me about taking care of her two babies back then made me breathe a deep, long-held sigh of relief. All this time I thought I was a monster for wanting kids and then sometimes resenting this strange new sidelined life, resenting the fact that I couldn't do much anymore while my husband went on having a good time as usual, for wanting kids and then crying with frustration over them and my freedom past, for missing my work so much, for feeling guilty over not feeling happy, ecstatic and oh so wonderful about being a mother, as everybody kept saying I should, and they grow up so fast, enjoy it!, and here I was and time seemed to have ground down to an agonizingly slow succession of endless housebound days.
Turns out I wasn't entirely alone.