How is it that life scripts are set shortly after a baby is conceived? A more interesting question might be: how long does one look over one’s shoulder or pause long enough to stare back at the road not taken, “to where it bent in the undergrowth.” The answer to the second might be that while one will inevitably be forced to concentrate on putting 1 foot down in front of the other along the main path, perhaps one may never fully give up the pleasure or pain of considering the “what if’s.”
I’ve written before that my decision at age 5 to enter the convent gave me the promise of safety and structure at the same time that it provided my family with the assurance of their respectability. Throughout grade school, when our report cards measured conduct and industry along with other traits of good citizenship, I consistently was scolded for being dreamy and lacking initiative, despite – – or because of – – my very best efforts at focusing and conformity.
So what would I do with another ‘wild and crazy life,” to quote both Mary Oliver and Steve Martin? A young friend of mine is awaiting her Peace Corps assignment to Tajikistan, and I wonder wistfully if they would take an 80-year-old… With a cane. I really loved teaching, both high school and adults, so it’s hard to imagine not wanting to do that again. Right after I left the convent, at age 30, I thought perhaps I would get a Masters in Library science, imagining that at 30 I was already old and would have to think of Plan B for my senior years – – at 31? Most of the people here at Pilgrim place have spent their careers in far-off mission fields like Turkey. One “mover and shaker” here was the principal of a school there. A good friend of mine who is now in the nursing home spent her entire career as wife and mother at a mission school in Turkey, while they spent their vacations and sabbaticals touring all of the Middle East and Europe. I would’ve loved that.
Most of all, though, I can admit to close, safe friends that I would have loved to be married. I wonder frequently what it would be like to know without question that someone loved me, or that someone was ever daffy about me, or that someone would share the burdens that come with a long life together. I was so naïve when I entered the convent that I would’ve made a complete mess of a marriage, and it was only in my mid-30s that I began to think I might have made a good parent. I am sometimes envious of birth parents, although God knows I understand sleepless nights big time. In addition, I have spent too many years as a bedside chaplain to harbor any unrealistic notions about life and relationships
Nevertheless, on a long cold winter night, when I’m feeling unprotected from the slings and arrows of living in a large community, I look wistfully at the couples who are wholly absorbed in holding hands as they get home to a warm evening together. I’m sure I romanticize their lives, since many, many of them are on second or third marriages and many more than one would imagine grieve children who have died of suicide or addiction.
In actuality, a writing group assignment like imagining alternate lives puts me in touch with a thread in my makeup; I am most definitely not a risk-taker. It’s scary for me even to imagine other paths in life I might have taken with an equal chance for happiness and fulfillment. A friend and I once drove cross-country to summer school in Seattle. We paused for several hours in Reno, promising ourselves that we would each spend no more than $25 at the slot machines. I could not bring myself to gamble, spent one dollar for a glass of orange juice, and socked $24 away for emergencies. She, on the other hand, won enough (albeit in quarters) to pay for our camping fees and meals the rest of the way to Seattle.