I have heard that there is a blog meme going around which has people writing letters to their 16 year-old selves. I mention this only because my recent extended absence from this writin' hole has a bit of something to do with me-at-16. It's true.
A few weeks back I went scrummbaging and rumbaging through the drifts of holiday decorations and useless crap in my attic looking for proof that I once lived in the house that my parents once lived in, which they do not do any longer. To compound the inherent trickiness of the quest, I myself did not live in that house full-time because my parents, the two non-step parents, the bio-parents, had no longer lived together for quite some time. This had been a parent-step-parent house, one of two. Divorce is complicated and complicating.
But! In the box, the horrible box, where I keep my high school memories tucked away there was a high school transcript with the needful address printed at the top and my needful maiden name as well, which was a mercy.
But it was my high school transcript. And I looked at it.
I will tell you several facts about my educational career. One is that the G.P.A. itself wasn't all that bad. It was above a 3.0 and below a 4.0. I got a perfect verbal score on my S.A.T.'s and an aggregate that was nearly as impressive, I was a National Merit Scholar, I aced difficult subjects, and I got into every college I applied to, all of which were very respectable and, at the last, hopelessly expensive.
I also failed art, despite having a talent for it. I got a D in 9th grade English because...? I have no idea. It probably had something to do with the fact that I never did homework, really and truly almost never, prior to the class just before the class in which the homework was due. I got drunk and smoked pot and snuck out to smoke cigarettes and rode in cars with boys and was, on the whole, a sad, hateful, intolerable human being.
Which is nothing unusual, really. Nothing special. Nothing to wring one's hands over 12 years later.
Still, what struck me about the transcript, what stared back at me from that sheet of officially stamped paper was just...loss.
I have nothing to say to my 16 year-old self that my 16 year-old self would have wanted to hear from herself at 30. At 16 I thought that being a high school teacher would be a fate worse than death, and at 30 it is an attractive possibility. At 16 I was totally consumed by depression and desperate for affirmation, trying on adulthood through the close dark of a parked car, a young man, and a cigarette. At 30 I see that adulthood is much more closely related to exactly what I couldn't touch back then, which is the ability to set aside what you want in order to secure what you need, and what the people who depend on you need. At 30 I see that you can't be grown up until you are, no matter what kinds of costumes you wear, no matter if you are taller than this line, no matter if you've been let on the ride.
I wouldn't have wanted to hear that. It wouldn't have helped. In truth all I could tell myself is that the worst hadn't come yet, but between then and where I'm standing right now the low point would come when I was nearly 20. It would be bad, too, heart-scarringly so. But the really bad bad would be so bad that it would make everything get better, slowly.
And things are fine, now; I have two gorgeous, healthy children, I have no debt, some money in savings, and I know how to make good soup. I have long since stopped personally relating to The Wall.
Perhaps everything is not totally fine: lately I've been struggling, intensely, with feelings of failure and of having not lived up to my potential. Ironically now that I have made an enormous amount of progress towards genuine happiness in my life (this life that has been so much harder to live than it ought to have been thanks to an unlucky break that had me sunk in depression for over a decade during the essential years of my adolescence and young adulthood), and now that I have an interest in developing some of the talents that I hang on to from the end of a very long string, like a kite, I have no ability to do so.
It is self-indulgent, I'm afraid, but these last weeks I have been figuring out how to accept the fact that being a full-time carer for my young children has put other things on hold.
I wasn't writing here because I needed to spend some time working on some issues in our family, particularly identifying some of each person's unmet needs and figuring out how to better balance them all (they impinge on one another regularly). I also needed to learn some new skills to help smooth the days with the kids and support their self-esteem and ability to communicate, and bring the household into a greater degree of organization in every regard. I needed to make some headway towards a more egalitarian partnership. In short, I have been working on making my own life a little easier, and happier.
Still, it became clear that I do not have time in my life right now to pursue some of my loftier, long-term personal goals. I have moved the furniture around the big house of my-life-as-it-is-right-now, and there simply is no room for more. It's hard to not feel like that's a failure.
For a great long while now I have struggled with feeling that on the one hand I didn't do the career thing properly, and on the other I'm not doing the housewife thing properly.
The first notion is a little easier to let go of, because I did make a conscious decision to stay home with my kids. When my first daughter was born, and for the first three years of her life, I could not imagine not caring for her full-time. The idea used to make me cry. So that's fine.
What's been harder to shake is the nexus between those two images, the Woman who Does It All! (it's telling that even typing that phrase makes me tired). As someone who would like to do art of one kind or another some day, I am seduced by the image of the stay-at-home mom who just happens to run a successful craft business or art or writing career while caring for her very young children full-time with a partner that works long hours outside of the home, and also does the contemporary happy homemaker routine: her home is clean and beautifully decorated, there is a healthy, home-cooked, local, seasonal, organic meal on the table three times a day, the birthday and Christmas gifts are handmade, the clothes are ethically produced and, whenever possible, made on the home sewing machine. Smiles and acoustic guitars and the dog never barks and the baby poops rainbows.
It has taken me some time to come up with some fair, unembittered measure of reassurance for myself. Realistically, no one is doing all of that as a full-time carer of very young children. People running a business, whether it's a craft or art or a fabric line or a book or a blog that is being sold, have child care. I wish more career bloggers and designing mothers would be explicit about that (and some are; thanks for shining a little light on the path). You need regular, protected, uninterrupted hours to do those things, which means that someone else, partner or family member or paid carer, is making sure the baby doesn't make a noose out of the yarn.
I don't begrudge anyone their success, nor do I mean to diminish it. It's just a true thing that if you're running a business, even from home, and you have young children, you're not a full-time carer who happens to have a lil' ol' side project during nap time, you're a working mom. I don't mean that to sound like sour grapes, or an implication that working moms don't do all the stuff that moms who don't pull a paycheck do, because it isn't. I just find it incredibly helpful to keep in mind when I become frustrated that I don't ever have enough time to intensively write or knit or sew or do whatever it is I think I should be able to do, that I don't have the kind of arrangement with my partner or family or paid carers that allows me to develop a career. Keeping up our home and our kids is a more than full-time job. And that's okay.
Which brings me back to me-at-16, and my sad, spotty transcript, and what I couldn't pull myself together to do back then, and my future, and this:
Mrs. Darling: There are many different kinds of bravery. There's the bravery of thinking of others before one's self. Now, your father has never brandished a sword nor fired a pistol, thank heavens. But he has made many sacrifices for his family, and put away many dreams.
Michael: Where did he put them?
Mrs. Darling: He put them in a drawer. And sometimes, late at night, we take them out and admire them. But it gets harder and harder to close the drawer... He does. And that is why he is brave.
....
Right now, for the moment, hopefully not for a whole lot longer (the toddler stage will end, sooner than I'd like), the dreams have to go in a drawer.
Please have a smile on my behalf at the irony: motherhood teaching the patience, endurance and resilience necessary to build a creative life, only to stomp on the immediate possibilty. But in order to properly care for the small people who depend on me, and to properly care for myself, I need to let go of a whole lot of silly things (like the idea of the granola June Cleaver), and I have to carefully put some less silly things away, for now.
I can't imagine anything that would make my 16 year-old self hate my 30 year-old self more.
But it's part of what makes me a grown-up.