I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to view the event. It came up so suddenly there was no time to grapple with the implications. It’s been two years now. While I can’t un-ring the bell, I also can’t help wishing, wondering and regretting. I understand. It was a reminder. A pretty harsh one but how else would I have stopped and listened? Nothing waits forever. I wouldn’t decide, so they decided for me.
I was planning to let them wear out, shrivel up and fade away, like me. Having them perform month after month, still doing their job allowed me to avoid the real issue, even though refusing to decide or choose is still a decision. I was simply letting them go their own way, exercising their free will, as it were.
Then, as now, it feels unreal. I wasn’t expecting them to take their free will seriously. I don’t necessarily miss them because the “them” of this piece are an abstract notion. That doesn’t stop me from missing what they meant or were supposed to mean, understood too late, like so many other things.
*
My mother said all she ever wanted was for me to be happy. Trouble was, her idea and my idea of what would make me happy never seemed to match. If I had a husband who worked, came home sober every night and who didn’t beat me, she thought I shouldn’t want for more. I, on the other hand, wanted so many different things, I’ve lost count. She thought I needed someone to take care of me the way she had dreamed of someone taking care of her. In my mother’s eyes, marriage was shelter. It was also the only thing she knew. For generation after generation, the idea had been passed down: women were supposed to marry, have children and take care of the home.
It was never that I didn’t want marriage and children. I simply wanted them in my own time, on my own schedule. And I didn’t want them as a substitute for something else. I wanted them in addition to, as part of the whole. Not because I couldn’t do for myself or be good on my own. Unfortunately, she was stuck with the idea. She had no other experiences. Forced to quit school after the sixth grade because of her mother’s death, she had no choices. She went where life put her. The world changed…No, the world exploded in the years between her birth and mine. Prohibition came and went and a couple of wars. Cars became common as well as television sets.
I reaped the benefits of those changes.
Or, at least I think I did.
My attitude wasn’t my mother’s fault. Oh, she contributed the way all good mothers do. When I was a child, she allowed me my curiosity and my ambitions. They were cute and who did they really hurt? So, at age nine, I wanted to be an attorney. But then at fourteen, I wanted to be a high school history teacher. Truth is, I wanted to be a lot of different things and I’m not exactly sure why. Insecurity maybe or the desire to be anyone other than who I was.
Some days I think it would be ever so nice if life progressed in a straight line. Perhaps it is as simple as being a Libra (or simplistic), the sign of the scales, always searching for the right combination of one thing or the other.
As a teenager, I was cocky and quiet, smart and funny, confident without any genuine reason for that confidence. Everything worked for me. It wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination but when I really needed something, I could make it happen.
I graduated from high school in 1975. By then, college was no longer reserved just for the well-to-do. Poor kids, like me, and students who were only slightly above average, like me, could end up with something more than a trade. I left for college, then, with the belief I was going to get just what I wanted. I expected to work hard and was ready. I’d had plenty of practice. I was sure if I followed a particular path, I’d end up a success, whatever that meant.
I went off to, not just college, not just a university but to The University of Iowa. And fell flat on my face. No, not really. Not completely, at least. Pretty damn close, though. College was harder than I ever dreamed.
After four years, I was worn out. I thought about graduate school. Would have loved to have gone to graduate school. But I knew I didn’t just lack the energy, I was 100% certain I would fail. I didn’t have the emotional ability to survive that kind of failure.
The end of school meant a job. So of course I couldn’t get hired. Anywhere. Not for a full nine months. My mother supported me. Bless her soul. I was a nasty little shit towards her. There is nothing harder on a person’s self-confidence than learning no one wants anything you might have to offer. To top it off, when I was finally working again, it was at the same job I’d had in college. I hadn’t made any progress at all.
I had big plans once.
