My dear husband gave me the chance this week to go to the library sans the kids. Made me ecstatic wandering the stacks without having to check every 30 seconds what the dear girls have gotten in to. Okay, only my 2 year old. The older ones are pretty responsible.

Still, I wandered looking for something to read (I even took my trusty list of recommendations, but none of them really sounded “right” at the moment. Speaking of recommendations, someone posted a comment a while back about an author who was a “modern day Jane Austin”. I know I wrote the name down, but can’t find it anywhere, and am too lazy to go searching through my blog looking for the comment. If you’re out there… PLEASE tell me who the author is!)

I discovered that Sue Monk Kid’s Secret Life of Bees was in, and it’s been on my list for a couple of years. But The Mermaid Chair was right next to it, and frankly, it sounded more interesting to me. So I got it instead.

First, let me say that I think Kidd is an excellent writer. Beautiful prose, very evocative imagry. And very Southern, which I loved.

But, this book made me peevish.

The story in short: Jessie is feeling despondent in her marriage and finds answers/escape/salvation when she visits her mother (who had cut off a finger with a meat cleaver on purpose) at her childhood home on Egret Island (off of South Carolina). It’s more complicated than that, of course, and it involves a monk. But that’s the basic jist of it.

I was talking to my husband about it after I finished last night (I liked the ending, by the way), and he suggested that I felt peevish because it’s asking some hard questions. And ones I relate to. I’ll be married 13 years this August (13 years on the 13th!). Am I happy in my marriage? Yes. Am I still my own person, though? Will I end up in 7 more years feeling like Jessie: trapped, despondent, an extension of my husband and children rather than my own person? How do I avoid that? I lay awake while feeding the baby early this morning thinking about all the ways in which I could find something that is myself , that isn’t “mom” or “wife”. And I haven’t found the answers yet.

I thoroughly admire what Jessie did in the end: she jettisoned her old life and found a new place for herself in her marriage, in the world. (I don’t approve of how she went about it, but it’s only a book, and it’s silly to pass judgment on fictional characters anyway.) I hope my life doesn’t come to that, though. I want to be able to keep what I’ve got, but find some… solitude of being, I think is what the characters called it.

But, then, isn’t that what we all want?