My Much-ness

Just finished reading this post over at Jen and the Giant Peach. This beautiful girl... woman... lady... (oh my goodness, what are almost-30-year-olds suposed to call one another?!) anyway, she was a dear friend in college and is still very dear to me even though we are far apart in location and in the paths life has taken. I've been waiting with baited breath for a while for her to start blogging and she has finally started her adventure in the blogosphere. She's mostly focused on her upcoming wedding (who wouldn't be?) but she recently did a more personal post. Go read and return.
Any of y'all relate? I have also felt this way recently, as you may know. I was fine for the first two years of marriage. Still in the blissful land of getting a kick out of calling one another husband and wife, my identity hadn't really changed all that much. Being girlfriend and being wife were sort-of similar. Wife was a much more intense version, but there were some perks too. I didn't feel like my entire identity was called into question... until... I had Eden.

Mommyhood is exactly what I wanted and a title I intended to don and relish all along, but somehow, now that I've arrived, this place is monotonous and often too tedious to be enjoyable. While trying to decide whether or not we should upgrade to a van or a larger SUV, I was again slapped in the face with the struggle I involve myself in everyday to be the hip mom, the mom that other people are surprised is a mom, the mom that thwarts the attempts of "the dowdy monster" and stays (or becomes, in my case) stylish and fit. Jennifer's post made me think of Matthew 16:25. Here it is in the Amplified.

"For whoever is bent on saving his [temporal] life [his comfort and security here] shall lose it [eternal life]; and whoever loses his life [his comfort and security here] for My sake shall find it [life everlasting]."

The Sara interpretation: Every time I get caught up in trying to make my life what I think it ought to be, I leave behind what is truly important. If I could just learn to focus on the eternal, I would feel totally fulfilled and satisfied in this life.
My desire to pursue the thing I think God placed in my heart (dance, the use of dance for worship and the ability to teach and choreograph) is frustrated by my inability to do anything related to it at the moment. My children leave me with little energy, little time to myself and no opportunity to take or teach a class. I've often shed tears over the intense desires I still have to be involved in dance. My body is completely unable to do most of what it could in college and my mental knowledge of technique, history and terminology has eroded away.
 I've asked God why He tortures me with the desires to choreograph peices with movements I can't even do and with groups I don't have access too. Why am I so exhilerated by teaching and have no students? If I had no children, I could possibly be fulfilling myself in all these areas.
Argh!  The rest of my original post was lost because I was trying to do something fancy....  It just basically said that maybe all of the above was good because it might cause me to run harder after God instead of the things that I think I want to do or the things that I want to define me.
blech!  I said it better the first time.