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| 87 Weeks |
"I mean I'm not one of those women who live through their children."
"...me neither..."
"But, dare I say, they gave me purpose."
"...everything comes together..."
"It's not that I-was-nothing-until-I-had-kids thing."
"...right..."
"I found balance."
"...calmness..."
"Confidence."
"...tiredness..."
"Courage. To discern. I want to be great at some things. Completely drop others. I see my mother behind me and my girls in front of me. I'm a part of something bigger than me."
"Yeah. Like, I'm not a weirdo because I stand naked in front of the TV munching cereal for dinner. I just do that. Who cares? Don't we all? I watched
Teen Witch the other night. There's a MUSICAL number in it. So funny. Remember that movie?"
(
Pause.)
"No."
I can remember the exact moment I decided to pursue writing skills. It
was an act of rebellion against an old promise. "Don't you EVER write
about this!" Sometimes a promise isn't worth keeping, and without too
much harm or apology, you've got to blow everything up. That's the
hardest part. But when you get to the middle of your life, you've done
enough damage to know what's worth destroying and what isn't. Sometimes
you're wrong. Sometimes you hit the button and realize it was whimsy.
And the hard lessons flow. These past few years, I've been lucky enough
to throw bombs at the right gates. I've been rewarded for having the
strength to take risks, for being spontaneous. I'm not saying I haven't had moments where I
find myself at the mall wearing only tights and a fitted t-shirt. (True
story. I wasn't drinking.) I am still tossing explosives at things that
ricochet. It stings. But the stings and lessons are more useful to me these days when
they're small. (Look in a mirror before leaving the house in a rush.) I am feeling
more and more like the hero of my journey.
Before Ren, before the many lives before this, we‚ I, moved upstate. I'd had an epiphany and decided my leap out of the city would land me in the country where our former urbanite friends had moved. This was not a "we" decision. This was that obnoxious moment in a marriage where half of you becomes dictator of the whole. Greg complied. He didn't have much of a choice. To this day I firmly believe this was the right thing to do for us both, even if it meant torturing everyone while I broke apart our life as we knew it. This decision single-handedly lead to Ren.
First, I needed a job.
Days after Hurricane Sandy, I was standing on a crowded, snow-covered Bushwick, Brooklyn platform; noticed a "Bard Alumni/ae" pin on a backpack pressed against my chest; and thought about our friends who went green and out of the scene. I awkwardly snapped a picture of the backpack button from an angle under my chin, and forgot about it. Three weeks later, sitting on the subway, I stumbled across the blurry image while scrolling through pictures on my phone. I started to hit delete, then stopped. That moment captured resembled a tiny dream. A private one. A memory about a little piece of hope—the fantasy where you wake up in an entirely new world.
Within the hour I was in a skyscraper behind a corporate desk reading an email from those same friends. I hadn't communicated with them since before the hurricane, except to say we were OK. There was an interesting job posting—one in the alumni/ae office at Bard College. If I'd been eating I'd have died from choking. I wrote a victorious cover letter to human resources and began hounding the right people.
What is an "alumni/ae?" Is Bard named after Shakespeare? I've secretarially sat at many desks in a wide variety of industries deriving most of my life's income. As long as I wasn't assistant to Puppy Killers, Inc., I pretty much typed for whomever wanted to pay me. Uncannily (but, no, not really, all things
considered), the people for whom I happened to work also knew the people for whom I wanted to work. I got an interview and went upstate to meet superiors. They made an offer a few weeks later, a friend happened to have an empty house I could rent, and I was driving for the first time in 13 years a few weeks after that.
Today, I am the person who orders those fantastic "Bard Alumni/ae" buttons. I have desk drawers full of them. This story can't be written any better. It's a classic. One glance at a subway stop led me to my purpose.
