Contingent identity

“Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves” my professor announced on the first day of class.

Great, I thought. This means I have to listen to a bunch of peoples names and locations. This is equivalent to enthralling conversation in a chat room where everyone announces their s/a/l in a big random list that I will never remember.

“Also,” my teacher continued “tell one thing that is interesting about you”

My ears perked up. My boredom was lessened and I was ready to by captivated by peoples interesting attributes.

We started at one end of the room with Kathy “Hi, my name is Kathy, I am from Tyler and I guess an interesting thing is that I am married with 2 children”

No Kathy – that is not interesting. I thought sarcastically to myself.

By the time the announcements had reached me almost everyone had said that they either did not have anything interesting about them, or that they had a husband/kids.

It was my turn now

“Hi, my name is Chelsea, I am from Tyler and ….” I was thinking about saying my interesting thing was I liked porn … just to see what would happen, but since that wasn’t true I decided against it.

“I can play the piano” I exclaimed, happy to have something to say about myself.

“ohhs” and “ahhhs” rippled throughout the classroom.

We finished the rest of the students' interesting things with more about being married, some about having a dog and one girl (who I thought was hilarious) said that an interesting thing about her was that she had no kids and was not married nor did she have any prospects.

By the time we were done I was wondering about identity. Does being married and having kids so consume you that you have no time for anything else? Or do you loose yourself completely and just become the “wife”. I know that God says for us to be one with our spouse but does this mean to loose all sense of yourself and your individual identity?

I am not encouraging people to be selfish or that you have to ‘find yourself’ before you can be happy. I think that being happy consists of doing things for others. However, I do think that even when you are married and have kids that you need to have something that makes you interesting other than that sole fact. I am not knocking motherhood or being married or anything like that. But something interesting means that maybe other people might not be able to do that, or perhaps some random fact. Lots of people are married and have kids (as we learned from the classroom example). Now, if you got married when you were 16 – that is interesting. If you have 9 kids –that is interesting. This is because it is not the norm.

I don’t just want to be Chelsea the wife and mother. I want to be Chelsea the wife and mother who is hot, and can play Mozart, and paint like a mo’ fo’ and is pretty darn hilarious and might even be intelligent (don’t know about that one yet).

So, I am calling all wives, mothers, and girlfriends to find something interesting about themselves. That has nothing to do with your male counterpart. You don’t have to have a talent to be interesting. How about “I collect toy trains” or “I have been to Egypt” or “I can hold my breath for 1 minute and 45 seconds” Anything that you think makes you different from other people. I know there has to be something …..