Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Dream and the Reality

For a long time what I wanted was a life with hospital corners. Neat, tight, above all looking like a bed should. I think all I meant was that I wanted a family. On both ends: I wanted my birth family to have lasted, and I wanted to have a traditional family "of my own." I got neither wish. My birth family was gone by the time I was halfway through college. My mother died the summer between my sophomore and junior years--midsummer exactly, July 30th. I was eighteen. I loved her a lot. I was a very good daughter to her very good mother. When she died, we had no leftover quarrels to regret, no loose ends of any kind to get tied in knots over. The only problem was I was left--and that feeling hung around for decades. It still crops up sometimes, in one form or another. I do occasionally feel I am living a leftover life. I think she felt that way, my mother, after my father died. She once mentioned that she never got her period again, after he died. Not that she was still young enough to get pregnant, but still. . . Several times, I fell in love, but realized--in time!--that I loved the man's family more than I loved him. It was occasionally hard, but I walked away. By the time I met Daniel, the man I married, I had stopped thinking I would ever have a traditional family. And that's a good thing. Because I was so unhappy in my marriage to this brilliant, decent man that I knew I dare not bear his child because then how would I ever leave? (By my six-month anniversary, I knew that, hard as I was trying to stay in my marriage, chances were I would someday surrender to the reality that if I did not leave Daniel, the most intelligent man I ever met, a man who was a superb teacher and even vacuumed occasionally, if I stayed on,it would one day be too long and I would die from erasure. The disease that you get if you keep needing to delete yet another inch of your self if you are to get through one more day. So I didn't have children. (I do wish someone had taken the trouble to point out that if you don't have children, it's a sure thing that you will not have grandchildren. I long for those grandchildren I will not have.) The result is that I have not had a family of either kind for a long time, and I will not ever have a life with hospital corners. Does that mean I am alone? Yes. And no. Because God is. Here.

1 comment:

  1. Toby, somehow we all want those hospital corners. I will tell you that having children makes a different sort of mess of that dream than not having children does, but it's a dream deferred all the same.

    You are also not alone because NONE of us has that life. Even the people who really, really seem to have it. Look carefully at their hospital corners, probably the sheets are dirty. :)

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