Friday, March 12, 2010

To be continued. . .

So I have resolved to find ways to fill the void I inherited through life's natural seasons. I went to Jamaica three times this year to be alone and escape being lonely. I love the beach, sunshine and people of the island, but did not expect to find anything but a good book, clear ocean swims, a rum drink now and then and time. I needed days without a watch, car, cell phone, dean's attire, helicopter parents, young people with unreasonable expectations and faculty who act like the young people they are supposed to be mentoring. I needed a temporary "retirement" to allow what I have lived work its way through my heart and muscles and under-fit body. I discovered that Jamaican men love a round woman like me. Neville the chef discovered me and became a magical distraction from everything that hurts with a red motorbike, fresh air and solitary Jamaican roads into hilly areas of Negril. We lost ourselves in reggae blasting pool halls, a clear and isolated waterfall, salted fish, beef patties, fresh fruit, plantains, rum drinks, red stripe and laughter.
I lost myself in the rhythms of his Jamaican expressions, "good vibe," "what's up, sweetie," the speed of his movement and speech, and my own need to be myself for no one but me. I'm not very good at it yet. I have spent decades setting aside want-to's
for have-to's, though my mother would probably disagree. I am spent with restraint, delayed gratification, shame from my own failings and others' deep cruelties endured. I have run myself into this wooden fence of brokeness because I have not allowed the time or space in my life to feel it all. There is no singular source of this shattering, but splinters of motherhood, diabetes, professional demands, broken promises, gut twisting betrayals and genuine misunderstandings. In e
ach of these splinters, dreams were lost and new ones were conjured. God and my cigarettes have carried me through, but I only want to let go of the latter. I haven't quite found anger or forgiveness because I don't know the places they should be directed. All of that said, I have lived as fully as a woman could possibly live. I have had happiness beyond measure, and loved and been loved in ways I cannot imagine doing anything with but cherishing. I have my "place" in this world and yet I do not feel it. I want to be a presence for myself and only then can I be the kind of presence for someone else that I would like to be someday.
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Ventures into virtual land

I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.