Reinventing my life, again

Late to my first writing class, I looked around the table at my fellow students. I was not supposed to be a student: I was supposed to be a teacher, and had been until brain tumors and their treatments induced my disabilities and ended my teaching career.

“What do I do now?” I ask myself. Which is another way of asking, “Who am I now?”

Maybe I’m a writer, so I’m in this class, preparing to finish the memoir that I started seven years ago, with my first brain tumor.

This memoir recounts my story of moving from refusal (not denial) to the decision to reinvent myself (not acceptance). 

“How did I refuse to acknowledge the possibility that something might be really wrong?” you may wonder. I didn’t return my doctor’s increasingly urgent phone calls each day for a week after the CAT scan of my brain. “No news is good news,” some part of me thought. The memoir is about moving from refusing to hear the news to deciding it was time to change my life—or to recognize my life had changed without my input.

An inevitable sequel to that story is in what way to change my life. I haven’t lived that part of the story yet. Right now, I’m living the part where I’m trying to figure out the change.

A couple of months after leaving my education career, I went to the School of Social Work so that I could immediately become a new person. It wasn’t a bad idea. I wanted to become a one-on-one therapist for people with life-changing health conditions, something I had needed and not been able to find. It turned out I can’t do the licensing for being a therapist because the hours required for licensing don’t fit with my fatigue.

So five years and one degree later, I’m trying to figure out how and where to do work that’s meaningful to me and to people who have experienced trauma and health issues (including aging and dementia).

During my unconventional practicum, I led a weekly poetry reading group for elders in an assisted living home. I also led poetry reading and writing with another group of elders with Early Stage Memory Loss (ESML).

Now, in this search for my next adventure, I sometimes lead a writing group for young adults who are homeless. I’m also working with a local woman who is active in the Alzheimer’s community to develop poetry as an element of the Arts for Alzheimer’s program. Next month I’ll begin leading a weekly Heritage Writing class for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered people over 50. In December I’ll begin working with a group that does poetry writing in the state’s psychiatric hospital for children. I am raising a puppy.

And I want to finish my darn memoir and weasel my way into Seattle’s reputed writing community.

I guess my next adventure has begun. The search is the adventure. In our first writing class, we responded to three prompts. The second prompt, Write about a time when you didn’t know what to do made me realize that’s my current situation and made me think of one of the first times I didn’t know what to do. So I wrote…

When my dad called me at college, I answered the phone, and he was surprised to hear my voice. (I almost never answered the phone even though this was in the days before caller ID and anyone could have been calling.)

I let the phone ring a few times before answering in order to steady my voice. As soon as I answered, my father asked, “Is something wrong?”

I hesitated but then came out with the truth. “Mack and I had a fight.” (His real name has been changed in order to protect his innocence.)

“What did you fight about?”

I had waded in, so I went on, “He wants to get married, and I don’t.”

Dad cleared his throat and spoke in his most stentorian professorial voice, “Well you know, Mary, sometimes in a relationship you have to make compromises.”

I gasped, perhaps for the first time in my life clear that my father was wrong. “Compromise! Not about marriage!”

I had been waffling about this relationship’s trajectory for years and would waffle several years more. I didn’t know why I couldn’t commit to what seemed like the relationship I had always dreamed of.

Mack was cute, sweet, funny, and bright. He was smart and would head to Harvard Law School and The Harvard Law Review the next year. He came from a fortune 500 family with parents who were gracious and humble about all their money. Like I was, he was politically liberal. He was devoted to me.

Why couldn’t I say yes?

After all, marrying Mack was part of my life’s plan. As a freckle-faced, auburn-haired tomboy growing up on a suburban cul-de-sac in North Carolina, my parents and I had an unspoken plan: I would be a good student and a decent athlete; for college, I would go to my father’s alma mater; I would become a doctor or a lawyer; and I would marry a well-pedigreed doctor or lawyer.

My husband and I would raise our 2.5 children on a suburban cul-de-sac, and these children would be honorable Southern Baptists, like their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. The children would love our golden retriever. They would be good students and decent athletes. They would attend colleges of their choice. They would be doctors and lawyers and would marry doctors and lawyers: our future showed an infinite line of Southern Baptist doctors and lawyers, children and golden retrievers.

But my life wasn’t going according to plan, and it was my fault. Mack and I would eventually part and marry other spouses. He would have 2.5 children and a golden retriever. My husband and I would divorce, and I would marry a woman. Good golly. Who saw that coming?

My partner Ann and I didn’t make plans that required us to stay together but agreed about how to live each day. We would be as honest with one another as we were with ourselves. Rather than make plans to stay together forever, we made agreements: We would not share wardrobes, like many lesbians we knew. We would maintain individual bank accounts and relationships with friends. Eventually, we would work in different places. We would go to the hospital when she struggled to breathe. We joined a church, bought a house, and saved for retirement; however, much has not gone according to plan—or expectations.

We have confronted so many surprises in our 23 years together. Some have been delightful, some terrifying, some both. As I was coming out, the superintendent of our school district harassed me: not a good surprise, but not terrifying. Ann and I joined a church that honors us as a couple, and with other church members, we traveled to meet our sister community in rural El Salvador: delightful. Ann had a close encounter with a lioness when we were on safari in Tanzania (terrifying), and we hiked to “the roof of the world” in Lalibella, Ethiopia (delightful). Ann learned the Buteyko Method and conquered her asthma. We hiked in the Grand Canyon, slept under stars and bats, and rafted the Colorado River’s turgid waters. I had two brain tumors, neurosurgery, and radiation. Then three eye surgeries. I learned to walk again. I left my 27-year career in education.

Our list of surprises goes on: none of them expected, even as expectations were changing. Now we’re raising a puppy, another delight that’s a gift of Ann’s asthma cure and my unemployment.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me is how darn happy, even joyful, I am as my life goes not according to plan. I never could have imagined, nor planned for, such joy.

So who am I now? A searcher. A reinventor. A joyful one.

That’s what my memoir is about: the surprise that living a life not according to plan has been both terrifying and delightful, and ultimately joyful.

Good golly. Who saw that coming?