Funny, for a girl who always considered herself low-maintenance and absolutely allergic to vanity, my spirit pitched a wild-eyed fit over turning 49 this week. I'm a little ashamed to admit this to you, dear readers, because it goes against my often-stated belief that it's silly for women to be coy about their ages, that it's just a number. It was easy to say that when I looked younger than my years. Now? Well...... It's only through some self-recriminations, a few rebellious tears, and much quiet introspection that I realized this would be the time to reflect on what those years have brought me---where I was, and what I learned......at least as far as my advanced age would allow me to remember.
At 16, I first learned I could feel paralyzing, sickening fear when we spent that birthday driving up Pike's Peak. I literally had to lie down in the back seat because I was convinced we would plunge over the edge of the road that, in my memory, was little more than a cow path gouged out of the side of the biggest mountain I had ever seen---and we had seen mountains practically every summer of my life. A few days before, when I was still technically 15 with a learner's permit, Dad had made me drive through Denver expressway traffic, eight lanes crazy. That was gravy compared to the Peak. Several years later on Christmas Eve, with Dad driving us along the south rim of the Grand Canyon in a heavy snow, I felt the same panic, though I did and do trust Dad's driving above all others. It took another 14 years to learn what those moments were about.
When I was 18, I had the very romantic notion that if you cut me, I would bleed music---not the literal notes, of course, but the one thing that sustained me. Maybe it was true then. All I thought I would ever be was a singer, along the lines of Patsy Cline, since I couldn't be Pat Benatar. I had to make a choice: go for a music scholarship at OCU as our pastor encouraged me to do and chase that dream, or change the dream. Oh, I was so young and green; I had no faith in myself, so I changed my dream and toddled off to Rogers, where in just my first semester of my radio broadcasting degree, I found worlds more music I didn't know, and Dr. Eldon Hallum excised the Okie right out of my voice. In retrospect, I look at that 18th year as the broadest but quickest learning curve of my life.
At 21, I found that I just could not make myself fall in love with someone, no matter how nice and hard-working he is, no matter how well he seems to fit into the world one comes from. It seems odd that it would take me so long to learn that lesson, but I was always both more and less mature than my peers, and I was just on the cusp of figuring out who I was, and having a really good time doing it. I was an RA in my senior year at NSU, and after three years of college when I was making excellent grades but floundering in purpose, I found I had an ability to, for lack of a better word, soothe others. My "girls," 30+ residents (some of whom I know will be reading this), instilled in me more love and purpose than I had felt for anything or anyone but my family. I couldn't have articulated it then, but I was learning that I might not even want what I had always assumed I would have at all costs: a family of my own. Even now, I tear up to admit that. But I was not willing to chain myself, and I saw so clearly that that was what marriage to that nice guy would be.
There is no conscious memory of what I was learning at 25, because I was ever so busy living. I had finished my Masters and was teaching part-time at NSU and working full-time in Housing, running the Leoser complex. My friends and work were so much that it felt overflowing. In retrospect, I've considered 25 the last year of my "childhood," so to speak, because it was the last year I was a true innocent, one who could believe in something good in everyone. I had walked into my first classroom at 22, shaking in my gray suit and black pumps, and owned it, knowing it was the stage I had been looking to perform on all my life. With two jobs and numerous past students on campus, I knew people everywhere I went and felt that I really had a comfortable place in that little world. Until that 26th year---another August, another school year, and the devil on campus. No matter how I try to write the next sentence, it can't convey it all. I was mesmerized by a mind-reading, guitar-playing snake oil salesman. More than 20 years later, I can call up memories so sweet that they can crumple me on the floor. And yet----and yet-----I cannot give up that heartbreak. I learned what I was capable of: love so deep I could swim in it. I learned what I was made of: that I was too strong to subjugate myself to someone who was not worthy to even set foot on the sacred land I was raised on. I learned what I wanted: to treasure and be treasured for good, true things, and not the illusions that we all practice conjuring for the world. It was a long, long way up out of that hole, but those realizations are worth it.
At 30, I was set free, almost literally. After returning from a year working in Austin, where I finished the school year at UT having panic attacks almost every night, I saw my doctor in Tahlequah. Within five minutes, she had solved my life's mystery: depression. Oh, I know how people react to that, but they can think or say what they want. The panic attacks beginning in my youth? The years I spent lying on the floor in the dark, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and listening to blues music? The emotionless flat-affect that I maintained as often as possible, whether I wanted to scream, cry, dance, or sing? All characteristics that made sense as soon as I got medication. I never felt any shame about that lack of a chemical in my brain, and I learned to share that story if someone needed to hear it, to be encouraged that they, too, were "fixable." That summer was the year of the terrible Mississippi River floods in the farms of the Midwest, and I remember being shocked at myself watching the news and crying---I was never a crier at tragedies, feeling that if I cried I'd never stop. I realized that my medication allowed me to feel the grief of a situation without falling into a black hole of despair. That was all the convincing I needed after 30 years of keeping everything held back.
Beginning just after my 30th birthday, there were 5 full, busy years with my junior high kids at Roland when I learned that what was broken can be made whole again. Those sweet kids, with their trust and relative innocence, brought me so fully back to life that after a few years, I had to get back to my family and friends; I knew I was too isolated there. Newly 35, I found myself at Locust Grove, where I met challenges I hadn't found before. I had a few kids who couldn't read. The poverty level was greater than I had ever seen. I was working at night, teaching one NSU class in Tulsa and one in Tahlequah. That first semester, I worked 14 hours a day, 7 days a week....and I cried every single day. I missed my Roland babies and didn't know if I was up to dealing with kids who threw physical tantrums and screamed "F--- you!" before running out of class. But by then, I was forged steel, bent but not broken. I could face a crazy kid or two without flinching. When one of the kids had a seizure in class, and I knew what to do, their impression of me improved. I wasn't an outsider. I had no inkling, but I had found a home that I would come to love.
Another blog for another time: just two months before my 40th birthday, Laura, my best friend of 17 years, lost her battle with cancer. I don't have a lot of memory of that year, except that I set about re-inventing myself, learning who I could be to keep from sinking from the wrenching grief. I changed almost everything about my physical world except my job. A year or two on the other side, I realized that the time Mom spent with us while Laura was ill changed our relationship forever; we are a lot more tender with each other than we used to be, and we also know the other's strengths. She began visiting me on her own, coming to stay for a weekend a couple of times a year. With her encouragement, I began looking for a new church, and found my favorite one I've ever attended, All Souls Unitarian. I learned that I really was satisfied with a few close friends and didn't need an admiring crowd, but that I had to be open to new experiences and people. I still struggle with that because I'm by nature pretty shy. It takes change to help me see the bigger world, and I never want to lose sight of that.
And so here I am, still learning at an age when we might think we should have a good grasp of our lives and the world----but the learning never stops. I'm learning fathoms as I turn into a complete political junkie. I can't puzzle out why people watch reality TV, but I'm learning that it keeps them from living real, authentic lives. I struggle every single ever-living day with taking care of myself, but I try, because (I'm learning....) I don't have to give birth to the six "babies" in my family in order to want to see how their lives turn out. I learn and learn and learn. I feel and cry and then learn some more. I write it out and hope I learn. With all that insight, how can I grieve about exchanging my youth for all this....life?
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