All at Once
Monday, May 04, 2009
It was a terrible year. I knew it was a terrible year when on New Year’s Eve, I saw a group of individuals coming out of their celebrations saying, “Next year has to be better, it cannot keep going as badly as this.” The following year did seem to be hard on everyone. Personally, I had a boyfriend walk out on me, lost my job, and dropped out of a masters program to which I had for years dreamed of getting in. I called my former teacher from high school one weekend, upset, frustrated, and about ready to put a hole through my wall.
“I seriously think I’m going to have some big life changing event just to get out of this horrible situation. Maybe I’ll become a lesbian.” I joked at him. Knowing that with his own homosexuality, he would get a kick out of this.
“No, don’t become a lesbian. You’d look terrible in flannel.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at his bluntness. He asked me what good was happening in my life and I struggled to come up with something. He asked what my new apartment was like and I told him about the plumbing that had broken three days before, and how I didn’t know where the money was going to come from to fix it. I burst into tears, saying, “This is not how I envisioned my life to go when I was in your class during high school. Not at all. What happened?” It was a struggle to get it back together, but I knew that if I kept sobbing into the phone, my teacher would never be able to comprehend a word I was saying.
“We’re living in the age of angst. There, Age of Angst, that should be the title of a book you write. Anyway, everyone’s having a hard time this year, not just you. And that’s ok. Sally has been having to take the past two weeks off. Her husband died two weeks ago. It was either a terrible accident, or, well, you know. He was always slightly bi-polar. So now she’s left with two young children, and very angry. I didn’t think she would be angry as much as grieving, but now anger is a large part of it.”
I stared at the phone, stunned, my jaw half open, before I felt the need to cry again for a former teacher of mine who was in extreme pain and heartache. During my year, she had just gotten married and the two of them were newlyweds, happy and faithful and full of the silliness that can only come out of a new marriage. She had no idea that this would happen. There wasn’t any sign of it. There had been friends that we all know who we have a pretty good notion from the get go that they’ll be in trouble sooner of later down their lives, but not Sally, and certainly not Sally and her husband as a couple. An early death and possible suicide was the last thing any of us could or would imagine for her.
Truth be told, I honestly thought by the time I reached the age I was, that I would be married. Actually, growing up with movies such as the Little Mermaid, I thought it would be perfectly acceptable to get married at the age of 16. Of course, I also thought by now I would own my own pony, business, and would have completed law school. None of which, of course, is true. Turns out the pony needed too much food, the great idea of a business still has not come yet, and if things stay as they are right now, I really have no desire to go to law school. Life happens without warning and while some desires of ours are automatically built inside of us from day one, reality gets in the way, or at least rolls us into a person we never thought we would be.
Perhaps it is a sign of youth that we can look at someone and say “well, that will never happen to me. He would never leave me like she was left. I will be able to stick to my ideals throughout, and eventually get exactly where I want to go.” Of course, things hardly work out according to our plans. Anne Lamot, says “If you want to see God laugh, show her your plans.” And it does seem that that’s often the case.
But maybe this is all for the best that it couldn’t be any other way. When we are little, our parents tell us that we will have a life beyond our wildest dreams, and regardless of what we may think that means, at a young age we do indeed; at least I have had a life that far outweighs anything I could possibly imagine, and all of the dramas and thunderstorms ensured that the lows would be lower than I dared think about, and of course, the victories would be more surprising in the end.
In recent months, things have gotten a little bit better for me. Not much, but we’re going somewhere now. And I often think of Sally in my quiet moments, wondering how she’s doing, thinking of her teaching high school and raising two children on her own. Definitely not what any of us would sign up for in the beginning. With all that in mind, perhaps it is best we don’t know what’s in store for us when we are young. It would probably be too overwhelming to look at it all at once.