Identity Theft

by Lina Rehal

In the mid 80’s, I was a young housewife and mother. My days were filled with cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping and laundry. I drove the kids to and from wherever they needed to go, participated in bake sales, attended PTA meetings and never missed a Little League game. I tended to the family pets, coordinated birthday parties and planned the family vacations. I was a nurse, teacher and disciplinarian. That was what I had become.

My husband was a contractor. He coached Pop Warner Football and was the “go to” person for the kids when I said “no” to something they wanted. At that time, he was building forty-three houses in a sub-division close to where we lived. Every day, he worked with his crew at the site.

Once the first few homes were sold, the families moved in. It began to look more like a neighborhood than a construction site. The children of those first families watched him dig giant holes with heavy machinery and asked him countless questions. He was a part of their new surroundings. They all liked him and called him by his first name.

I usually dropped by several times a week to check on the progress of the project. I took pictures and chatted with some of the neighbors.

One day, as I was driving down the newly paved street, some kids rode past me on their bikes.

“Hi, Mrs. Ralph,” they all yelled in unison.

Mrs. Ralph! They think of me as Mrs. Ralph, I said out loud to myself.

I suddenly realized that I had no identity of my own anymore. I had become an extension of my husband. When did that happen?

Up until that moment, I hadn’t given it much thought.

When I got home, I started thinking about the girl I used to be and wondering what had happened to her. I remembered how she loved to dance, listen to music and go the movies with her friends. Memories of the young carefree woman who worked as a secretary before she got married and her dreams of a knight in shining armor flashed through my mind. Somehow, she had faded into a corner of my memory bank as I transitioned into a woman whose identity had been stolen by time. My knight traded his white horse in for a front-end loader. My dreams had turned into fairy dust.

For the next couple of hours, I looked at old photo albums and dragged out my high school yearbook. I found the girl I remembered on the pages of those old books. I laughed at the clothes and hairstyles, before returning my memories to their place in the hall closet.

Later that night, when I read the children a bedtime story and watched them slowly drift off to sleep, my identity crisis passed. I realized that being a wife and mother was exactly what I wanted to be at that time in my life. I was happy in that role. I had achieved my most important dream.

Indie author, Lina Rehal resides north of Boston with her husband. She has been writing short stories, essays and poetry most of her life. After a successful career as an executive secretary and an office manager, she is now living her dream of crafting romance novels. Her four published works include, Carousel Kisses, a collection of nostalgic stories, October In New York, a novella, Loving Daniel, her first full-length novel and Jillie & Sam, her latest seasoned romance. She is hoping to self-publish two more novels later in 2019.