These days, I am feeling as if I am a bit of a cliché. I was sitting with a new friend the other day when she casually mentioned her observation about how many forty-something divorced women there seemed to be. While the comment was innocently made and had absolutely nothing to do with me, I felt it deep in my bones.

I am a forty-something-year-old divorced woman, and it is an identity that annoys me. I do not want to be known as “the divorced woman.”

But simply because that is a part of who I am, does that have to define me as a whole?

I’ve spent quite a bit of time pondering this, and I refuse to allow myself to fall into the trap of accepting that…because I am so much more.

These are just a few pieces of who I’ve been:

• A girl that grew up in rural North Louisiana
• A piano player that would get lost in music
• A teenage band member that loved performing
• A young college woman trying to figure out who she was
• A young married woman
• A new mom
• An active mom of littles
• A homeschooling mom
• A victim of domestic violence
• A “church lady”
• A mom of teenagers
• A woman that cooks and entertains
• A betrayed woman
• A divorced woman
• A mature college student
• A late forty-something woman beginning a new life
• A survivor

Not one of those things define the whole of me. Every single one of them is simply a small part that makes up the whole of me.

At this point in my life, these are the only things that won’t ever change:

• I am a woman.
• I am a child of God.
• I am a mother.

I think that sometimes we (maybe just me) get stuck in accepting one definition of ourselves, and we forget that who we are ebbs and flows with our personalities and our life experiences. It can be difficult to recognize that we are more than our circumstances.

But it is possible.