I once told someone. “Everything I do needs to be finished five minutes before I can get to it. I would give anything for an extra day, so I could get caught up on my work.”
A few weeks later that same person called me and asked, “What are you doing?”
It was a Tuesday. I was working. Her response was a tutting scolding sound. “Why?” I asked. “What should I be doing?”
“This is Leap day, the extra day you requested and you’ve chosen to waste it, by doing the same thing you do every day: You are squandering your wish.”
What a terrible condemnation to lay upon someone, “You are squandering your wish.”
That event took place in the 1970’s before many of you were born and yet it has stayed with me for fifty years. During which time I have observed other and concluded that my problem was not unique. Most of the women I know operate by one simple imperative: What will it take to make it through another day? Between children and soccer practice, working and getting dinner on the table most of us are exhausted and haunted by guilt because our to-do list at the end of the day is longer than it was in the morning.
If we believe, like an entire generation of women my age were taught, we can have it all: a career, motherhood and family, the perfect surroundings of a perfect life.
This dream can be ours, if only — we’d work just a little harder.
Even our better angels betray us by whispering in our ears, “You’re almost there, you only need to give just a little bit more of yourself. Oh, and by-the-way, the latest lotions can take away those shadows under your eyes. You may not be old, yet, but a minor facelift wouldn’t be out of line.”
Our better angels aren’t always nice.
There was a period in my life in which I owned a company. On a slow week I worked sixty hours. On a busy week, I worked a hundred. I am not alone. The American dream has always been “know what you want and work hard to get it.” But we forget that every good quality we trumpet and hold dear, has a dark side that bites us on the ass. Case in point, the gates to the Auschwitz Prison Camp have embedded in the iron these words of wisdom, “Work will set you free.” Coffee Creek Correctional Facility also bears a similar belief. Everyone must work regardless of age, financial status, and many times health issues. Not for our advancement or the achievement of doing something well, but because it is required.
We are a country of inspirational sayings and affirmations, but some like “Are you running toward success? Or away from failure?” are designed to make us feel like failures. Somehow women are never quite doing enough.
I have come to learn that the wish I squandered (more times than one to be perfectly honest) was not about getting everything completed but about time and how, once used, you can never get it back. I have concluded that I overpack my days with events and people not because I am not enough, but I’m afraid of being alone.
Not lonely. Lonely is completely different. The time I am most lonely is in a group of people.
When I am the only one at home I turn on the television or music for background noise. I read, I write, I spend my life avoiding any introspective questions.
Movies affirm this is okay behavior. Think about The Martian or Naked and Afraid. None of those people are spending time contemplating their navels. Years ago, Joni Mitchell asked if I’d made sense of both sides of my life? Someone else (maybe Freud) mentioned that an unexamined life was not worth living. The movie Funny Girl staring Barbra Streisand playing Fanny Brice, was a perfect example of that phenomenal. When her husband is sent to prison, she spends the intervening years keeping busy. It is not until the day he is to return home that she even contemplates their life together and her contribution to his downfall.
Like the movie, I’ve ignored all the signs around me because I believed that work would set me free and I could have it all.
Boy! Were they wrong and I was a fool to believe it. | HB
Writing is (for me) many times the examining of life. Mistakes abound, but so do un-recalled moments that led to acts of kindness. Thank you for so clearly sharing your process.