The great escape

Snowy afternoons, full moons, and birthdays; all good occasions for self-reflection. Waking up thirty-nine should not feel that different from waking up thirty-eight. I have been exceptionally kind to myself the last few days. Thirty-eight was the year of the great escape.

For ten years, I awoke on my birthday and on the kitchen table would be a dozen red, grocery store roses (still in the plastic, no baby’s-breath), and some hand-made cards from my children. It was the sort of predictable thing that in its first couple of years was endearing, and eventually I grew to dread. I often thought of one of my favorite quotes:

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? — I wish I knew . . . Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.” — Maggie the cat. Tennessee Williams, Cat on Hot Tin Roof

I was ready to jump off the roof. And so I did. It was a long time coming. By my mid-thirties, I had a salaried job teaching music at an all-girls’ high school. I had a husband who tried to change his nature and his life to become a family man. Our children- one boy, one girl; healthy, good-looking, smart. We all lived in a split-level house with a fenced-in yard in the midwestern suburbs. Everything you could want; the stability that is the life-dream of so many, achieved. I would have liked so much to have been happy, but I was dying. I was not living as myself.

“What can one know even of the people one lives with every day? … Are we not all prisoners?” — Sally Seton. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

I was a stranger in nearly all of my human interactions. I did not know who I was, but I knew it wasn’t the person who was living the life that I was living. Being a mother became increasingly difficult; parenting an autistic child has extra challenges that are continuously unexpected. My job left me frustrated and exhausted. I begged for communication or affection with my husband. I was rejected, and was told I was angry. I’m sure I was. I was also told I was like a man; imagine how easy things would be if that were true.

At thirty-seven, I quit my job. I stopped planning for when I would lose weight (PSA, it’s not baby weight by the time your kids are in school). I went back to college. I buzzed all of my hair off on a whim. I started to fantasize about a life I had tucked away, far underneath stacks of attempted normalcies in a corner of my mind.

Thirty-eight came, and soon after, divorce. I only needed to have brought it up, and it was executed. The separation of lives consumed much of the year. And also, my separation from my life. I divorced a partner, and I divorced my life. As months went on, it became clear to me that severance had occurred. The way people saw me, the impressions I gave; the vibe. They were no longer the same. But who was I now?

“She said with another smile. ‘I’m nothing.’

‘The hardest thing to be.’” — Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

I am thirty-nine, and I have escaped. Outside of motherhood, there is no single identifier that can easily and accurately be placed on me. That is not a conventional or popular thing for cis-women to admit, and I have seen the flash of terror in the eyes of people who don’t know how to place me. My sexuality is questioned to my face in a way it certainly never was when I was married. Part of that, I suspect, is because people need to justify in their minds why I walked away from a seemingly perfect life; the pinnacle goal for so many other women (it also says a lot about both the obsession we have with knowing people’s sexuality, and also what we assume about married people). At least, that’s what we’re taught.

On this birthday, I sit with myself. Sitting with yourself means you get the chance to acknowledge things that you have hidden, swallowed, and otherwise buried to survive in the life-costume you have constructed for yourself. There is no shame in who you used to be, because time insists that we change. It is unavoidable. There is no shame in acknowledging the things you still don’t like. Those can change, too. My heart and my brain are on fire. There is so much I could shout from the roof-tops; but I jumped off that hot tin roof and into the great unknown.