Monday, January 16, 2023

Not the Life You Imagined

 

                        “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.”

 

 

 

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