Melissa Mowry
Cinderella & I
Before I hit the uphill climb of my long, winding driveway, I take a steadying breath and lock eyes with myself in the rearview mirror. Back to reality. My ascent is slow, plodding. As our beloved home emerges in the frame of my windshield, all I feel is a sinking sense of dread.
I have always been something of a homebody. Naturally, I assumed that by the time I returned home from my first graduate school residency—seven days on campus, eating cafeteria food and sleeping in a dorm room—I would be longing for the comforts of home. But the longing I feel in this moment is not for this place, for these people. It’s for a life I made somewhere else, for the woman I got to be in that life and the people who know only that version of me: Melissa the aspiring novelist, not Chase and Sam’s mom or Adam’s wife or any of the other titles I hold in my real life. For one full week, I got to be Cinderella, twirling through the ball in her finest gown. But now the clock has struck midnight, and I am once again a mother in her 30s, rolling home in her mid-sized SUV that was once a gold-rimmed carriage. The gravel crunches loudly under my tires, announcing my arrival home.
Does it matter that the life I’m returning to is not one of indentured servitude at the hands of ugly stepsisters but one that includes a loving husband, two wonderful children, a beautiful home? It should. But at home I am someone different from the woman I got to be this last week, the woman who laid on her back in sunny courtyards, talking idly about her favorite authors while the sun danced its way across her closed eyelids, the woman who traipsed home after long nights chatting with friends, tired and loose-limbed and grinning into the growing darkness. I slide the car into park. The front door slams open and my boys scramble down the porch steps, arms open wide to receive me. I kneel down in the grass and let them crash into me, the force of their love like a wave that catches me off guard with its intensity. The wave that follows hits me full in the chest. A deep sadness that nearly knocks me off my feet.
My family welcomes me back into the fold as if I’ve never been gone. Within minutes of my arrival, we’re playing a new card game the boys learned while I was away; they keep having to prompt me when it’s my turn because my mind is elsewhere. An hour ago, I was that other version of me, eating breakfast at my favorite new cafe, beholden only to myself. But suddenly I am here again, in this world where I make the breakfasts, an hour-long car ride my only buffer between these two vastly different realities. For them, it is simple: I was gone and now I’m back and all is right in their world. For me, it’s much more complicated. I left home and rediscovered a part of myself I thought was lost forever. So what do I do with her now?
I make a shopping list, defrost a package of chicken thighs from the freezer. I take a shower and luxuriate in the full pressure stream, so unlike my dorm room showerhead. We play in the backyard, gather eggs from the chicken coop. At night, I tuck my kids into bed, telling them how glad I am to be home with them. I missed you so much they say, wrapping their skinny arms around my neck. In bed, I curl up inside my husband’s arms, my skin hungry after a week of sleeping alone. But I can’t sleep, even in my king-sized bed with the central air conditioning whirring overhead, the pitch blackness outside. Somehow, I slept just fine in my twin bed with the crinkly mattress and the broken AC, the glow of the street lamps filtering through my curtainless windows. When I finally fall asleep, the cat vomits on the rug and my husband hauls himself out of bed to find the carpet cleaner. Cinderella’s spell is well and truly broken.
The next morning, my mom calls to ask how my homecoming went. I tell her I feel weird, that it’s going to take me a little while to get back to normal. Maybe a new normal, she says, and while Covid left me with a particular hatred of that phrase, it feels applicable here. But how do I braid these two lives, these two versions of myself into one? Is it even possible? Cinderella became a princess and left her old life behind, an easy decision. But I want both lives, though it feels like too much to ask. Some people don’t even get one fulfilling life, I remind myself.
***
It’s the morning of July 4th and the birds are chirping in the trees outside my office window, my husband lightly snoring in the next room, my children asleep down the hall. I feel myself slowly reacclimating to this world. The waves of despair are smaller this morning. Maybe tomorrow, the sea will be flat. Today, we’ll haul out the flags and sparklers, sing the national anthem with our hands over our hearts and tip our faces up to the sky to watch as the fireworks burst overhead. But I already had my independence day—a whole week’s worth, in fact. And someday soon, I will again. But today is not that day, and maybe that’s the only way it works right now, for my two lives to remain clearly delineated. Cinderella and the princess; the pumpkin and the carriage; motherhood, marriage, and domestic life in a separate world from warm cafes, sunny courtyards, and late nights wandering home in the dark.
Back to one reality. And then, when it’s time, to the other.
Melissa Mowry is a Connecticut-based writer and the voice behind “Your Attention, Please,” her Substack about reclaiming our attention in a world that wants to keep us distracted. Her work has appeared in Coffee + Crumbs, The Huffington Post, and Love What Matters, among other outlets. She is currently earning her MFA at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island.
Back to Mother/Writer Table of Contents