Since 2010, I've been struggling with one change after another in my life. To be honest, it's been going on since I was 17 years old. I've been struggling ever since my mother was taken out of my life.
When I'm hard on myself, I tell myself that it is ridiculous and unhealthy to be consistently drawn back to a date now 20 years in the past. When I'm strong, I tell myself it was the catalyst for a whole long list of lessons learned. I learned young and well that life is short. And I knew early what it means to sum up a life. What matters is not how much money you earned, what clothes you wore, what address you had. At funerals, no one mentions what kind of car you drove, how many bedrooms your house has, or how much you weighed (in most cases). What people remember was how you LIVED, how you treated others, if you "always had a smile for everyone" or volunteered in your community, and if you helped other people out. My own grandmother's epitaph included a young cousin who stood up at her funeral and talked about how she always had time for a cup of coffee and a chat. My other grandmother raised 9 children, who talked fondly of how many yard sticks she broke disciplining the 5 boys, all of whom towered over her. My mother was remembered to me, more than a year later, as the inspiration that caused her nurse in those last days to set aside time to become a camp nurse (which is where I encountered her). My father, whose obituary read like a laundry list of community accomplishments, left us a poem that summed up his life as something of a religious mystic in accountant's clothing. I have been reared by people who spent their lives focused on other people.
So, now I ask, "Where does that leave me?" I was groomed at an early age to go out and be a productive, active member of a community. At age 37, I find myself without any community. Really.
I am underemployed enough to be counted as unemployed by anyone except a census-taker - which makes me an out-of-work writer/secretary/customer service representative with excess education, in the process of getting more over-educated, who is struggling in a troubled marriage, has no home church, an almost totally unformed direction in life, with several chronic illnesses and the serious possibility of fertility issues. So those glorious poems I wrote in college about being "the mother of mothers and mother of fathers" are now pretty much reduced to b***s**t. I am not only struggling to make ends meet - the ends aren't even within sight of each other anymore.
I feel like Jaye from Wonderfalls. If you haven't seen the show from 2004, you should see it. It never found it's place (I don't think it was ever given a real chance), but it's pretty hilarious and includes Lee Pace, which is always a plus. I'll warn you, though, it's quirky.
Ahem...so, pity party over. This is what I see when I look with dark, dingy, A Scanner Darkly kind of way. But being me, I prefer happy endings.
I imagine that these are my "bad old days" days. That in 20 more years, I will be looking back and remembering what it was like to come through this to where I will be then. Maybe I am feeling like I am running out of time because my parents had short lives (46 and 58). If this is only midway for me, I have almost 40 more years to go!
Right now I have the time I wanted for so long to have to go back to school (which I am doing!) and learn some valuable, practical knowledge (which I'm doing - I am getting a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration to balance out my dual English/Journalism degree). Once I finish the degree, I am free to move anywhere I can find a job with my newly minted Bachelor's Degree! And I have a great deal of experience in many areas, which makes me a more versatile employee. I am free to go where God wants me to go! No home church means, again, I can pick up and go wherever. And my husband and I are working things out in our marriage, so it could end up being stronger than ever. None of my chronic illnesses are life-threatening in and of themselves. They are all manageable with diet and exercise and some medications.
These struggles I've been going through are teaching me compassion and understanding that I don't think I would have had otherwise. Until you go through unemployment, underemployment, struggling with illnesses and childlessness and being dependent upon the State or your relatives, it's hard to imagine just how hard that is on you psychologically. We like to consider welfare recipients as free-loaders in the United States, but it's like adding insult to injury. You already have to ask for help. Then you get insulted for it and told by politicians that you just didn't try hard enough. I feel like I have been given a unique opportunity to understand both the haves and the have-nots. I was a world-traveler by age 16 and had a taste of what upper-middle class was all about. I was given Upper Middle Class sensibilities. However, I was also taught to never turn my nose up at honest, hard work, and I married a man who is a proud self-defined redneck who grew up on farms and in trailers. I grew up somewhere in between. I'm proud to say one grandfather was a Master Carpenter and the other was a machinist. My grandmothers were a nurse and a teacher-turned-stay-at-home-mother. My parents were a teacher and a teacher-turned-librarian. I get to be a State Clerk-turned-something else. I just haven't decided what I'm turning just yet.
I knew a really interesting 80-year-old woman. She's the kind of woman I want to be in 40 years. She traveled to the Middle East to see the Holy Land (at 80 years old) and rode a camel. Now, that's an image I want to shoot for. I want to be 80 and ride a camel in Egypt. And as an homage to my mother, I'd like to play a game of Chess with a Turkish man while I'm there (when she was in England in the 1960s, she surprised a Turkish man because she could play).
When I was graduating college for the first time in the late 1990s, there was a great spoken word song out on the radio called "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen" by Baz Luhrmann. It's almost 14 years ago now. Being 40 years old seemed so far in the future. I imagined I would find my path in life by then and it wouldn't apply to me. (At that time, 40 seemed soooooooo far in the future.)
The YouTube Video says the lyrics are from a famous essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune. That whole column can be found, here on the Chicago Tribune's Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column,0,4054576.column. It's worth a read.
Like I said, I like happy endings, so I'm going to close this entry with my favorite line from it.
"Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't."
