“I am paying
attention to small beauties.”
Sharon
Olds, “Little Things”
NOT THE LIFE YOU
IMAGINED
You always thought you were smart, you planned well, you
would have everything you want. Many people have a preconceived notion of the
life they want and believe they can make it happen. Now that I am approaching
seventy years old, I see that as a fast and fleeting illusion. Shit always
happens and sometimes compels you to find new and diverse ways of assigning
meaning to your life and making the best of what you have. This is no easy
task, but what is the alternative?
Let’s start with career choice. Your decision is often based
on what you think you are good at. This diminishes the possibility of exploring
other aspects of yourself. For example, you have a quick and methodical mind
and are good at arguing your case, so you decide to become a lawyer. This same
lawyer (I know dozens of them) has countless loans and is often compelled to
take a high-paying job to pay the loans back. This precludes the possibility of
doing a service-oriented job, which might be more gratifying in the long run.
And what, if this same lawyer, loves to write, and not just briefs, but poetry
and fiction. Several of my MFA students in the Creative Writing Department are
unfulfilled lawyers who want to return to their passions-the creative arts.
Making a living is not necessarily the life they imagined.
Some people move onto forming a partnership, sometimes a
marriage. The person you select in your twenties may not satisfy you quite the
same way ten years later. Certainly, so many marriages end in divorce, but is
that always the solution? Is it possible to work on your differences, to
compromise, to dialogue, communicate and accept these differences? It may not
be. Can it be the person you have selected does not communicate well? There is
always counseling, though perhaps-at the end of the day, your partner is no
longer right for you. You imagined “till death do us part” bur reality is
different from the fantasy of happily ever after.
Sometimes children are born into these marriages. Children
have their personal inner clocks, so some negotiate the split between their
parents seamlessly, while others do not. It may be a balancing act children
have to walk when their parents end their marriage hugely mad at the “other.”
Parental angers may seep into a child’s life, but this can even happen when
parents stay unhappily together.
And what about the child who is born with challenges? Some
of these are apparent in the very beginning when the infant is not meeting his
or her milestones; some become evident later on, during toddlerhood. Parents
find themselves mourning the child who could have been, rather than focusing on
this is what I have. It is not the life a parent imagines when birthing a
child—nor are the challenges that creep up later on. The mental health of a
child is always precarious, for some more than others. Adolescence, in
particular, awakens a parent’s worst nightmare: seeing your child anxious,
depressed, unable to cope, contemplating and succeeding at suicide Even what
seems to be an apparently well-adjusted child can suddenly sink into despair,
and move into a deep and dark abyss.
And then there are the children who choose a different path
then their parent’s, who choose to embark on “the road less taken.” For a young
person, for example, whose educated parent’s dreamed of the control they have
over their child’s life, only to discover it is elusive. Every day there are stories
of children leaving the safe haven of their religious, conservative homes,
abandoning the dream of family that they would stay put and pursue what has
laid out for them, and the child ups and leaves college, the farm, the home,
the religion and politics they were brought up with. Conversely, children who
grow up in “hippie” households turn to a conventional lifestyle. Things do not
work out as planned, and sometimes the outcome is much worse for the adult who
thinks he or she can control everything. When a child makes its own choices;
when a partner leaves; when sickness or death of a partner or child occurs, the
grief is overwhelming and the thought : IS THIS THE LIFE I IMAGINED?
The answer is a resounding no. I suppose I knew this at a
very young age, when I grappled with a mentally-ill mother, a father who
divorced her and an unstable stepmother. I felt the hardship of my life and the belief
that so many people had it better. I tried to exert those familiar controls as
an adult and parent but found myself on a roller coaster of a ride. Yet
somehow, along the way of living a life
with some wonderful moments, but also
many challenges, I discovered behind every closed door are secrets,
despair, attempts at control, some successes, some failures, moments where
every person wants to lay down and weep and say now what?
There are no solutions or answers to when life throws you a
curve ball --which is too often. What I have tried to do, not always
successfully, is to face my reality, acknowledge the pain when it is there,
focus on the joy of the little things. I can look at what I don’t have or
choose to focus on what I have. I try to rely on what my husband says about the illusion of presentation—behind
every closed door is another person’s challenges, so I may as well live with my
own. In the process, I look at what I love with what I have, imperfect as it
may be. I try, as best as I can, to stay anchored to this, to what Sharon Olds
says in her poem “Little Things”:
“I
am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying
attention to small beauties,
whatever
I have—as if it were our duty
to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to the world.”
