When I signed off this blog three and a half years ago, I ended with the hope that you would be inspired to pursue your own joy, to find your huckleberry moments. Afterwards, many of you reached out to say how the blog had touched you, and I was both awed and moved. It is to honor those intimate truths we shared that I write again.
You see, I have felt much like a hypocrite these last few years, and so this epilogue is part confession.
Here is what the last three years have taught me:
The pursuit of joy is a tricky thing, especially for parents.
Sometimes, profound love produces equally profound heartache.
We cannot choose whether to love. Honest love simply is.
When you truly love, neither heartache, nor distance, nor time can make you stop.
Love alone is not enough to sustain a relationship.
Did I mention the pursuit of joy is a tricky thing?
Love is not enough.
Love is more than enough.
Looking back, I see that I have been pursuing not joy, but rather a singular happiness with a specific end goal. When it became painfully obvious that the story begun in this blog would not follow the narrative arc I had anticipated, I resisted the foreshadowed ending. I stopped writing my life.
That is not to say I was still. Life was crazy busy as a single parent. I earned a master’s degree and won writing awards. I began a new career and helped create an amazing new museum that garnered national recognition. The work was challenging and rewarding. After more than a decade in the shadows of professional life, it felt great. Still does.
I moved back to the area I had been trying to come home to for 15 years, but it was a hollow homecoming. People were missing. My husband. My father. My grandparents. I was here! Finally! But they were not.
My daughters struggled in a new town to make new friends, while missing their dad terribly. He visited from out of state almost every weekend. As his travel bags littered my living room floor weekend after weekend, it seemed the only things that had changed since our marriage ended were his life partner and my financial stability. After two years, the girls began itching to move, having never known what it feels like not to. If I’m being honest, so did I.
For the first three years, life here felt more bitter than sweet. And I didn’t want to write about that.
I got stuck. There were no more huckleberry moments. There was only getting through the day. Every day. There were confusion and anger, exhaustion and anxiety. There were sleepless nights and stress and weight gain I could not stop.
And then there was a sudden and unexpected moment of reckoning. It was horrible. I cried. Hard. It was the kind of cry that leaves your eyes swollen and your head feeling like it’s splitting open.
I cried at the realization that some stories do not have happy endings.
This is something I knew before, sure. I knew it in my head. I knew it intellectually. Rationally. But I didn’t know it in my soul. And so, it wasn’t real.
The realization was sparked by the unexpected, very unhappy ending of a movie that made me feel the understanding of this truth. I was shocked. I was angry! Why would the writer choose that ending? As the tears abated, I finally accepted that some stories are just sad, and they must be finished anyway. You have to follow the narrative arc wherever it leads to discover what happens next.
And so. Here we are. Reluctant as I have been to write this epilogue, it must be done. I owe it to my girls to not waste the sacrifice of our family structure by waiting to write the happy ending I was expecting. It’s not going to happen this time.
When I was going through my divorce, I drove from Kentucky to Florida for a visit with one of my best friends, my Anam Ċara. On the long drive, I listened to an audiobook called Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. There is a passage in the book that I completely rejected at the time:
People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.
A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life . . . .
It took three and a half years, but I accept this now. Thank you, Huck, for being my mirror.
What’s next? Light I suppose. Light shining through the cracks of a heart broken and strengthened by life’s beautiful tragedies. Beautiful.
Do you remember that blog post I did about my dark chocolate days, On the Synchronicity of Motherhood, Wagers Lost, and Unlikely Blessings? Those are the bittersweet days that remind me of the forces of grace at work in this world beyond my rational comprehension. You have them too, I know. Well, somewhere along the way, I came across a song on YouTube titled “Bittersweet.” The lyrics go something like this:
And though I know it’s kind of bittersweet
Sometimes you have to accept defeat
Then ensues the peace like falling snow
Take a deep breath in and let it go
I am free
I am free
It’s time to finish this story and write my next chapter. See you on the next page. If we’re lucky, it will be stained with huckleberry juice.
I have decided to discontinue this blog. Before I do, here is one final post to tie all the seemingly disparate posts together. I hope that in it, you will find inspiration for your own life’s journey. I hope it inspires you to seek out your own joy.
The last time I posted on this blog was August 12th, the anniversary of my first day and my mother’s last day on this earth. Today is her birthday. Happy birthday mom.
This entire blog was inspired by the events I relayed here about a huckleberry falling from the sky and changing the course of my life. In that ambiguous initial post, I said that one day I might tell the full story. It is a complicated one to tell, and it is tied to most of the other posts contained on this blog. I will try to link to each as the full story unfolds, so when you see an underlined colored term, click on it to jump to the corresponding blog post. Then you can opine for yourselves the presence in our lives of serendipity and grace, which this blog has been all about all along:
We met under unusual circumstances on the elementary school bus when we were 8 or 9. I’ll call him Huck. In the moments before our meeting, I had a disagreement with the school bully that resulted in a surprising black eye. Mine, not his unfortunately. He had just ordered a girl in the seat ahead of me to sit down. Cowering in fear, she obeyed. This infuriated me, so I met the bully’s gaze and purposefully stood up.
“Sit down,” he ordered me.
“No,” I refused.
Hence, my black eye and the ensuing tears of shock and anger that streamed down my face. As I walked up the bus aisle to exit at my stop, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, this boy I would later come to know as Huck. He was laughing at me.
Without conscious thought I reeled into his seat and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, pushing it against his chest. Glaring into his shocked blue-gray eyes, I spat through gritted teeth, “Don’t. You. Laugh. At. Me!”
In later years, the school bus incident would become our private joke. As it turned out, this was not our only connection. Huck had a twin brother who was in my elementary class at school. I had twin brothers, one of whom was also named ‘Huck.’ Moreover, Huck and his twin shared the same birthday as my twin brothers, though separated by some years. An odd coincidence in our small rural town. Huck and I shared secrets.
In high school we dated on and off. Mostly off. Toward the end of our senior year, however, our friendship faltered, and by the summer after graduation, we were not talking at all, avoiding each other as best we could.
And then, on the August night I turned 18, my mom died. Huck came to the funeral. When we were at the same gathering in the weeks afterwards, I thanked him, and we talked for the first time in months. We arranged to get together one last time before we both left for college, to say goodbye. I don’t remember the evening, probably not surprising given that I was still in shock over my mother’s death. But I wrote about the night in my journal. When he dropped me off at home, he kissed me and said he loved me.
For the next year, Huck and I had an on and off relationship. And for several years after that, we had an on and off friendship. Mostly off. This was in the days of paper letters mailed to street addresses and calls from landline phones to numbers that were disconnected with every move. I lost track of him countless times. When I was feeling lost in the world, I’d call his mom for his new number and the conversations with her and then with Huck would ground me. Huck went to grad school. I went to Europe. He got a PhD. I got a law degree. After email made communication easier, we’d meet up most Christmases while home visiting family and we’d go to the Festival of Lights in Niagara Falls, catching each other up on our lives. Christmas of 1994 was our last Festival visit.
By 1996 we were both married, and by 1998 we stopped communicating completely. We lost touch and didn’t try to find each other. My husband entered into active military service after 9/11, and we began a relentless progression that followed his rising Army career. I longed to return home to the place I grew up and root my girls in the soil of their ancestors among grandparents and great-grandparents. The Army and my husband had other priorities.
When Huck occasionally crossed my mind during these years, the memories stung with a tinge of regret at how our relationship had ended. I hoped he had found happiness and was doing well, until a routine phone call with my step-mother. After the usual pleasantries, she remembered some news she had meant to pass along.
“Do you remember those twins you knew in high school? One of them passed away.” My heart stopped. “Not the one you dated. His brother.” My heart broke. I knew from terrible experience what my old friend and his family must be experiencing. I felt like I should reach out. But I didn’t know where, and I suspected my contact would be unwelcome anyway.
A few years and two more military moves later, I startled awake after one of those vivid dreams that seem more like visions. Huck. I sensed he was in trouble. I could feel it. I had a powerful urge to reach out to him. But I didn’t know where, and I had no reason to think he would want me to anyway.
More time passed. For me, my marriage felt like nothing more than its paper incarnation and corresponding obligations. I contemplated staying behind when my husband got new orders to another state. Maybe moving home with the girls to be near my dad. But as we were making the decision whether my husband would move on to his next duty station alone, the phone rang again. My father had died, leaving my severely Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother completely alone in a desolate nursing home. He had been her only constant, and now he was gone. I was guilt-ridden. I had not been there to help. In my absence from home, most everyone I had loved had died. Now, there seemed little point to moving back home. My long-time desire to raise my children alongside my extended family could now never be fulfilled. Against this backdrop, aching daughter and loving mother, I chose not to separate my girls from their dad. We moved to the new duty station together. My life was a drudgery of role playing the patriotic military wife and dutiful mother. I was dying inside, ever so slowly, one day at a time. And I was resigned to it.
Sitting among strangers in the parent viewing area at gymnastics in yet another new town, I got a LinkedIn notification of a new connection request on my smart phone. It was from Huck. Shock does not begin to describe the feeling. Surely he could not have intentionally sent the invitation. The inner workings of LinkedIn are baffling. Big Brother seems to have an eerie way of suggesting connections you actually do sort of know, but how in the world does LinkedIn know that? Anyway, I thought Huck’s mouse must have inadvertently clicked on my name, suggested by LinkedIn, and now that the invitation was sent, there was nothing he could do about it. After a few days, I clicked, “Accept.”
That’s it. No message of long lost greeting. No catch up. None of the “Where are you now?” and “How have you been?” chit chat that characterizes social media reunions. Just another year of silence, but now Huck and I were 1st level LinkedIn connections, however silent we might have been.
Another military move. Another year of slowly dying inside. Brand new neighbors and my oldest daughter noticed. Another military wife whose husband had served with mine 4 duty stations ago in Arizona and who was now assigned to our same post, noticed that something was wrong. I was not the same person I had been when she last knew me. I was no longer doing a very good job at role playing. It felt like I was just waiting to be 80 so that it would all be over soon. After 7 states and 6 moves in 10 years, I felt homeless, disconnected, and alone, a stranger in my own life.
Part 2 – Grandma
My grandma was an Orphan Train rider, and being a foster child left her with a deep lack of self-worth, something she would recover only late in life. After years of genealogical research revealed her past to her, she would comment with exuberance, “I found out that I am somebody!” But when she was a young woman, she did not yet feel it. When a young doctor she met at nursing school expressed long-term interest in her, she turned him away. I remember her telling me about him, saying that she didn’t think she was good enough to be a doctor’s wife. She returned home and married her high school sweetheart, my grandpa. They had two children, a girl and a boy. They named their son after my grandfather’s father, who had died of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 when my grandfather was just 15 weeks old. That son, my father, would go on to give the name to one of his twin sons—the name shared by Huck.
My grandmother and I were always close. She used to take me swimming at her pool club, and I remember one day conquering the length of the pool without touching the side or bottom. My grandmother rewarded me with a new pair of shoes. Grit was something she understood well.
After my mother and I becameestranged and more so after she died, my grandmother filled that void for me, as best she could. Consequently, as she lay dying of Alzheimer’s in the fall of 2013, my sense of loss was profound. Both my parents were gone, my grandpa had died while we were stationed in Arizona, and now grandma. Moreover, the family cottage my grandparents had hoped would be in the family for generations, and which I had considered the only stable home I had ever known, was being sold by my aunt. I had loved that place truly and saying goodbye to it had filled me with as much grief as my parents’ funerals.
In late September or early October 2013, a nurse called to say we might need to consider ‘comfort care’ for my grandma soon. The doctors were trying a new drug to get her to eat, but they didn’t know if it would work. I needed to get to New York to see her.
A crazy set of circumstances involving a rescheduled military school for my husband that conflicted with a reserved family vacation in Wisconsin, a federal government shut-down, my Arizona military spouse friend backing out of the trip at the last minute, and my husband’s gracious offer to make a trip to see grandma possible, had me plugging addresses into Google maps to find the best route from Wisconsin to Western New York. I would be making the trip alone.
The drive took me across Michigan, where I now knew from LinkedIn that Huck worked. I told my husband that I would like to stop and see him on my way through, and he agreed, not even questioning why I would want to visit an old friend I had not seen in nearly 19 years, nor even communicated with in more than 15. I don’t know that I understood it myself. Perhaps something in me sensed he would ground me again.
On the road to Michigan, I prayed. Well, I guess that’s what you would call it. I am not a religious person, but I believe there are forces of grace at work in the universe. Without getting too hokey, let me simply acknowledge that I have experienced signs from my mom and my dad to let me know they are around still. Had it been possible, I would definitely have sought their counsel directly rather than prayed for guidance. Oh, how very many times over the last quarter century I have wished I could just talk to my mom. But, you work with what you have, and I didn’t have any older, wiser relatives to ask in person. I have heard that we all have spirit guides, and I believe in some higher power that many people call God. And so, it was to any and all of these spiritual folks that I directed my heartfelt plea.
“Please, help me. I am lost, and I do not know what to do. Please, help me.” I had never prayed before for anything specific. Not once. Honestly, I had not prayed much at all about anything. But on occasion, like after passing a horrific car accident, I would ask vaguely in my head for comfort to those impacted. Or, I’d ask for peace for a friend who had lost a parent. My prayers were limited to that sort of general grace, directed at a nonspecific power.
This time, however, the consequences were too great for vague prayer. I was contemplating what to do about my marriage. I recognized that I was not doing well, and I began to wonder whether staying in the marriage was doing more harm to my girls than leaving would do. Since my own parents’ divorce and the devastating distance that caused from my family of origin, it had been a sacred personal rule of mine to never ever divorce the father of my children unless my life was in danger. I would often say that my husband had to be beating me before I would even consider divorce. And my husband wasn’t beating me. On the contrary, he was a very good man, whom I respected and admired. More importantly, he was a fantastic father.
So, for me to consider leaving, I thought I needed a clear sign. Like my grandmother, but for different reasons, I also had an appalling lack of self-worth, and I did not trust my own judgment. To leave my marriage, I wanted someone else to tell me it was the right thing to do. And so, foolishly, I prayed to hear a specific song during a specific time.
To understand why I prayed for what I did requires explanation. There were many private reasons for the trouble in my marriage, which I will not go into here. One of them, however, was a tension between my past and my present. In marrying my husband, I was rejecting everything I had once been and known. His was a foreign world, and I a tourist. As much as I wanted to be a part of that world, and as much as I wanted to be his wife, from the very first moments of our union, I yearned to return home to my roots. I wanted him to come with me. He didn’t. I wondered whether I had made a mistake. That nagging sense had sucked at our marriage for years. And here I was, about to see a man who symbolized everything I had left behind. If I had married a boy from home, it would have been Huck. Unlike my grandma who rejected the foreign doctor in favor of the hometown boy, I had done the opposite. My choice agonized me. Had it been the right one?
While on that vacation in Wisconsin a few days before this prayer, a song happened upon the local radio station that caught my attention. It was by a Buffalo band, oddly enough, and called Come to Me. The lyrics made me think of Huck. It’s a song about friends who apparently split, reunite to start again, and in the third verse, get married. Because of the specificity of this last verse, I chose it as my requested sign regarding my own marriage. I asked the Divine to show me what to do. If my path should take me out of my marriage, then please play me this song while I was with Huck. Some abstract love song open to interpretation would be insufficient. I wanted to hear the reference to marriage. I could not leave my marriage for anything less specific because too many lives would be affected by my decision. I needed a specific external validation of what I sensed in my soul to be true but which I lacked the courage to acknowledge.
Seeing Huck again was a breath of fresh air. It was as if the shell of my life cracked and I remembered I had once been a girl who conquered a pool and challenged a bully. Reflected in Huck’s blue-gray eyes, I glimpsed myself as he saw me on the school bus all those long years ago, raw and full of grit, with tears streaming down my face, standing up for myself. I did not hear Come to Me.
Driving away from Michigan on my way to see my grandma, I was relieved. Thankfully, I had not heard that song, because leaving my marriage would be nearly unthinkable. I didn’t want to have to think about it. I didn’t want to make my kids and husband unhappy. In retrospect, I see that what I didn’t want was to be responsible for my own life.
But as I drove to New York in a rainstorm on my 17th wedding anniversary, this self-awareness had not yet arrived. I was blissfully ignorant, actively giving thanks to the universe for not playing that song. Thank God. And at the same moment these thoughts sprang forth from my consciousness into the great unknown, a fat round blue balloon fell out of the sky and hit my car while Toby Keith’s Huckleberry played through my car’s speakers. (For those who don’t know, a huckleberry looks like a blueberry.) These three things occurred simultaneously–the relief, the Huckleberry song, and the blue balloon falling from the sky.
Apparently the universe has a sense of irony. Do you know the Toby Keith song? It’s about a boy and a girl who ride the elementary school bus together and date in high school. Sound familiar? Guess what happens in the third verse. Yep. They get married.
The universe doesn’t tell you what to do. It tells you to look within your own heart for the answers you seek.
I arrived at the nursing home a couple hours later to find my grandma seated in the dining hall for lunch. Gone were the days of her trying to eat the colorful packages of sweeteners at the table, paper and all. Those were the mid-stages of the disease when my dad could still take her out to restaurants. Now she never left this sorrowful building. She needed to be spoon fed her mush and encouraged to drink the fortified Ensure. For years her conversation had been limited to a few repetitive phrases. “Should we go downstairs now? I think my family is waiting for me.” And because her hearing was gone, she’d often just look at my mouth moving uncomprehendingly, shrug her shoulders and say, “I don’t know.” I had not heard her utter anything other than a variation of these few phrases in years. But this day, as I sat down beside her, smiled, and gave her a hug, she looked directly at me and uttered this surprising new statement without preamble, “He likes you. I don’t know if you like him, but he likes you.” Her head nodded wisely as I looked at her with surprise. Was she referring to Huck? No, how could she be? And then I proceeded to spoon feed her the mush on her tray, my heart overflowing with love and gratitude and sorrow for this beautiful woman, full of grit, who had once been my grandma.
Leaving the home a while later, a flock of starlings took flight from the side of the road, but rather than swoop away from me, they enveloped my car, causing me to hit the brakes for fear of smashing them. My dad. The last person my grandma recognized, even when she didn’t remember that he was her son. The man who would force a smile for his mother and then sit in his truck afterwards with tears soaking his beard. Sending me birds to let me know he had been with grandma and me in the dining hall. Just like he sent the robins when I decided to embrace the writing life.
Part 3 – The Family Curse
A few weeks later, I was back at the nursing home with the women of the family. My aunt, her daughter, and I had gathered by my grandma’s bedside so that she would not die alone. But for endless agonizing days, she simply would not die at all, this woman whose physical strength clung fiercely to the world. This is how we women had some time to catch up. While my aunt took smoking breaks outside, I slowly told my cousin about what was going on in my marriage. And of course we all reminisced about grandma and grandpa quite a lot. They had been happily married for over 60 years. Two peas in a pod. Betting each other quarters on the outcome of the Sunday football games. They are the ones who had built the cottage. I suppose like most grandparents, they were the bedrock of our family. It seems that grandma’s choice of her high school sweetheart had been a good one.
My aunt had not been privy to the smoking break conversations with my cousin, so it seemed oddly coincidental when she mentioned that my grandma had always wondered whether the women in our family were cursed to choose between two loves. There had been that doctor for her in nursing school, and my aunt had faced a similar choice. Like her mother, my aunt rejected her serious university boyfriend to marry her childhood sweetheart. The summer at the cottage when the college boy was sent home brokenhearted is a family legend.
I had heard these stories before, of course, but I had not heard that my grandma wondered whether my cousin or I would be plagued with this same choice. Pondering things like curses did not sound at all like something my grandma would do, but given my predicament at that very moment, upon hearing about it in the lobby of the nursing home, I swallowed hard. My cousin shot me an incredulous glance. At the next smoking break, she encouraged me to talk to my aunt. She had been suggesting I do this all along, but it had seemed callous to burden my aunt with my troubles as she watched her mother die. Now, it seemed like I should talk to her.
Grandma, meantime, was clinging valiantly. The nurses encouraged us to go out to lunch. Some people prefer to die alone. An aid agreed to sit with her, and we left. Over lunch, my aunt listened attentively as I told her about my life and my marriage. When I was done, she asked a few pointed questions and then proclaimed unequivocally, “You cannot stay.”
When we arrived back in my grandma’s room, the end was near. Tears spilled from closed eyes over smiling cheeks onto our clasped hands. I felt a wave of such profound love surrounding us all that it was hard to breathe. It lasted a few moments, and then grandma took her last breath. She was gone. Afterwards, my cousin commented that it was as if she hung on until after I had sought my aunt’s counsel. My aunt and I are not very close, as she lives in Canada, and so this was likely to be the only time I would ever speak to her about such personal matters. She was the only older woman in my life whose advice I could seek, and I needed it. After all, I had been reduced to praying for songs. My aunt’s concrete opinion was a godsend.
Part 4 – Joy be to you all
Sitting in a counselor’s chair some months later, I reluctantly spoke about most of the serendipitous events discussed here on this blog, including how I stood at the front of a church when I was 19 years, 8 months, and 10 days old and uttered sacred words my mother was meant to say, words that made me godmother to her namesake when I was exactly the age–to the day–that she was when she became mother to me. I was reluctant to do this. For one thing, even I am suspicious of these moments, despite the fact that I have experienced them. For another, I thought this professionally trained woman would think me a fool. Rational people do not accept such stories. I explained my reservations and then proceeded for the next hour to talk about the inexplicable coincidences in my life. In the middle of my session, she interrupted me, explaining with worry that her clock had stopped and if she didn’t get another one, she knew she would be distracted by thoughts of the time and her next client. Afterwards, as I was putting on my jacket, she explained that today was the anniversary of her former husband’s death and that the clock had stopped at the exact time he passed–to the minute. She smiled and said, “These things happen. And I am a rational, intelligent, professional person. They happen.”
Ultimately, after much professional counseling, talking with friends, and soul searching, my marriage did end. Not because a huckleberry fell from the sky. Not because of an adolescent love. Not because of my aunt’s advice. It didn’t even end for all of the reasons my marriage was unhappy. Plenty of unhappy marriages last until death after all. My marriage ended because I finally found the courage to hack my own path through life’s brambles. I am still on that path, and not much is clear. Precious little actually. The road ahead is fraught with uncertainty and not a little amount of loneliness. But that’s okay. I know uncertainty and loneliness already. They have been my longtime companions. Now, they are tempered by hope, and that makes all the difference.
How did I arrive at this decision? I decided that waiting to be 80 wasn’t doing my kids any good. By staying in an unhappy marriage so that I could always be physically present for them, I was actually depriving them of a good mom—because I wasn’t really there for them. They deserved better than the shell I had become. I decided that waiting to be 80 was dangerous, because the depression and despair would take its toll. When my father prematurely died of a heart attack at 64, brought on I suspect by depression and stress, I shivered to see my own fate. His death, my conversation with Huck, the huckleberry, my grandma, all of it kicked me in the gut. It changed my perspective. Consider this question. Which of us would not die for our children? We all would, without question and without hesitation. But you know what? Dying is the easy way out. And dying is exquisitely hard on those you leave behind. I know.
So, the question should not be whether you would die for your children. The question should be, will you live for them? Will you take responsibility for your own life and show them what the pursuit of joy looks like? Will you teach them by your example how to strive for it and how to pick yourself up off the ground when you fail–because you surely will fail–and strive again?
I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t know if God or astrophysics is the reason. Here is what I do know. I am here. Right now. And for however long I get to experience this human presence, it would be a shame to squander it. I can honor my parents and grandparents by living the life they wished for me. Although I can’t know exactly what they hoped, I have a pretty good idea that it was the same hope we all have for our children—for them to choose paths that lead them to joy and love. It’s what I am trying to do now with the hope that my own children will learn from my example.
Why end today? Well, this blog is about serendipity, is it not? I already mentioned that today is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 64—the same age as my dad when he died. And today is more. Today is the day Huck lost his twin brother, the twins who share a birthday with my own twin brothers, born to the mom whose birthday is today.
Make of all these circular connections what you will, dear readers. They are indeed my Huckleberry Moments. Go listen for yours.
In keeping with the Scotch-Irish heritage that my grandma’s genealogical research uncovered and my love of history, I leave you with a 17th century Celtic verse. May joy be to you all.
Of all the money that e’er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e’er I’ve done
Alas, it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be to you all
So fill to me the parting glass
And drink to health whate’er befalls
Then gently rise and softly call
Goodnight and joy be to you all
And all the comrades that e’er I’ve had
Are sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I’ve had
Would wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Goodnight and joy be to you all
So fill to me the parting glass
And drink to health whate’er befalls
Then gently rise and softly call
Goodnight and joy be to you all
After a decent start with blog posts at least once a week, I have been reluctant lately to post again, and so I’m sitting down at the keyboard to figure out why, prompted in part by a WordPress Weekly Challenge asking bloggers to write about why we write. I think I have the shape of my reluctance, but it’s this vague amorphous sense that I can’t quite articulate. Whenever that happens, I start writing to see what comes out. Here goes….
This little writing hiatus is not for lack of encouragement. Quite the contrary, actually. There’s been lots of encouragement, which I guess has been an eye opener. Hold up. People are actually reading my thoughts. Lawyers from my professional life. Fellow military spouses. People I don’t even know. But what did I expect, publishing a blog? It’s what a blogger wants, right? Riiiiight. Yeah, I didn’t really think about what that would actually feel like, probably because I didn’t really think anyone would actually read what I wrote.
And the hiatus is not for lack of material; there’s plenty of stuff scratching to get out. I suppose my hesitancy is due to lack of courage to open the door. What am I afraid of? Hubris perhaps. Scorn. Ridicule. Contempt even. I am afraid of being made to seem a simpleton, a dreamer, a narcissist. Who am I to speak when others remain silent? Are my experiences so unique? Of course not. Maybe that’s the point.
Why write publicly in the first place? To connect. To speak the thoughts others keep silent and in so doing, confirm to the reader that she is not alone, an anomaly. Someone else out there in this wide world thinks that way too. I write in a futile attempt to describe indescribable feelings using the meager symbols we call letters. And why share these thoughts and feelings? Why connect? To remember that we humans are all on the same journey, regardless of race, gender, nationality, or economic status. We all love, fear, hunger, seek, find. We are all born from a woman’s womb and we all die. In between, we all get to experience this fantastically complicated human life. Whatever our differences, we’re all here on this earth together, now.
I am afraid that some of what I write will cause a potential employer to not hire me. Law firms are not traditionally bastions of progressive thinking. Huckleberries falling from the sky and dead relatives sending messages? Really? We’re not hiring this chick. She’s a wackadoodle. I get that. It’s a risk I take. I attended a panel recently discussing the interplay between writers’ day jobs and their writing lives. I asked how a writer could keep her writing separate, if it could potentially harm her day job. “Use a pen name,” I was told. In this era of social media when Google wants to link all of my split personalities together, I cannot figure out how to keep it all separate. I’m not that tech savvy. How LinkedIn knows to recommend that I connect with my daughter’s classmate’s mother’s husband, whom I’ve never met, is beyond me. Keeping my pen name separate from my real name seems a lost cause. This point was driven home after my Serendipity in Seattle post was picked up on Facebook by a professional colleague and reposted within a national military spouse attorney group I’m involved with. Some members of this group hold senior level positions of influence in my professional world. And now they know, should they care to look, some of my thoughts on military life and serendipity. Fantastic. But I put it out there in the first place. Why?
Maybe because I cannot not. Maybe because I am a writer at heart and that’s what writers do. We bare our souls, consequences be damned. We put it all out there for readers to judge, with the hope that the symbols we string together will connect us as we journey together through this fantastically complicated human life.
Whew! What a week. Huckleberry Moments for sure. But they require some context, so please indulge me a little backstory before the serendipity. Warning—this is a long post. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy.
As you may know from this blog, I have a legal background and I’ve just recently begun writing out loud. What you don’t know is that for several years, I’ve made a spectacularly unsuccessful bid to return to the legal world full-time. And unless you’re my husband or my best friend (who may be the only two willing to read this entire post!), you also don’t know the two big writing projects that have been rattling around my head for years.
One is my grandmother’s story, the same grandmother for whom I was driving across Ontario the day the Huckleberry fell from the sky. When she was eight years old, being neither an orphan nor homeless, the Children’s Aid Society took her and her siblings from their rural town of Friendship, NY and brought them more than 300 miles away to New York City where the children were then separated and sent on Orphan Trains. It is a story the likes of which are not discussed in the Children’s Aid Society’s historical accounts of its public service.
The other story is a historical fiction set on a colonial commercial site where I once worked, with northern slavery as one theme. I envision multiple protagonists, including an enslaved woman named Massey, and I want the story to span time somehow to show the connections between the past and the present day. More on the stories later.
I began my career as a New York lawyer in “Biglaw.” For societal reasons beyond the scope of this post, these firms bleed talented women like a gash to the femoral artery. Once out, it’s very hard to re-enter. The On-Ramp Fellowship is a new program that seeks to “replenish the talent pipeline in law firms with experienced [female] lawyers.” Four Biglaw firms are participating. I applied, expecting the same (non)response as my dozens of other applications over the last few years. But guess what? I made it through all the preliminary phases and had a screening interview scheduled for Monday morning, the day after I returned from my first ever literary conference. It was my first interview for an attorney job in 13 years.
The literary conference was the big annual event for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP14 for short), and it was in Seattle this year. Insane. Three days, 10,000+ attendees, hundreds of panels, with more hundreds of exhibitors at the bookfair. And me. A middle-aged mom self-consciously wearing skinny jeans for the first time, who used to be a decent lawyer, now with nothing more than a newly minted blog, a couple of stories waiting to be told, a string of rejected legal applications, a hidden muffin top, and a decision to make. I couldn’t wait.
The first session began at 9:00 on Thursday morning. There were 24 different panels to choose from in this one session, each with a handful of panelists. I did not research any of the hundreds of presenters on any of the panels but rather chose based on the topic to be discussed. First up was a panel entitled “Structuring the Novel.” I had in mind that epic story with multiple protagonists set on the colonial commercial site. It’s too big, too unmanageable, and I do not know where to begin. Structure. Yes, that’s what I need. The first presenter began talking. Tara Conklin, she introduced herself.
Would you believe that Tara Conklin is a former New York lawyer who worked in Biglaw? Turns out, she published a New York Times bestselling historical novel, focusing on themes including northern slavery, with an enslaved female as one of multiple protagonists. The story spans time, with a modern storyline that links present with past. Huh. Funny that a former New York Biglaw attorney, who wrote the kind of story I hope to write, should be the first presenter at my first ever literary conference. What a coincidence. For the first three years of writing The House Girl, she worked at the firm by day and wrote at night. Maybe I can do that too. Maybe I don’t have to choose between law and writing. There was my first Huckleberry Moment. I was excited for the next three days.
Of all the hundreds of panels at the conference, there was only one in the entire directory that I starred. I didn’t just star it actually–I circled the star. You know, just to make sure I knew it was important to me. It was on the afternoon of the last day, and again I did not research any of the presenters. It was entitled, “Out of History: Transforming Research into Literature.” I had in mind the boxes upon boxes of my grandmother’s documents that clutter my home office, including her hand-written account of her experience with the Children’s Aid Society as an Orphan Train rider. Before Alzheimer’s stole her mind, my grandma and I would talk about her records and her story. She knew I would safekeep them and treasure them for the priceless gift they are. You see, I’ve always appreciated the past, which she very well knew. When I was eight, she made me a skirt and bonnet so that I could dress up as Laura Ingalls Wilder for Halloween. Working at historic sites since then, I have dressed up in colonial garb many times in my adult life. Having the privilege of preserving and passing on the stories of the past is a sacred honor in my book. Getting to dress up is just a bonus.
Up to this point of the conference, none of the 12 other panels I attended had used any media. But when I walked into the room for this Out of History panel that I had starred, a book cover was projected onto a screen. The book’s title was Orphan Train. Huh. How about that? A bit more unsettling was that the nametag of the woman talking to a friend in front of me was the same as the author’s name on the book cover. Christina Baker Kline. Really? Had I just walked into a panel where an author of a book called Orphan Train was going to speak? I sat and waited.
As she began her presentation, she spoke of ghosts and echoes of the past. My heart pounded against my ribcage. She spoke eloquently of a mass forced migration of children in the late 19th and early 20th century, orchestrated in part by the Children’s Aid Society. My breath came fast and goosebumps erupted down my arms as a cold chill shivered up the back of my neck. When my vision suddenly blurred with unexpected tears, I nearly got up and left. (What kind of ninny cries at a conference?) But I was transfixed. Her voice was barely tremulous yet strong, which gave the impression she was passionate about her topic. She spoke of children lined up by height on train platforms, plucked out by strangers to live in new homes. I listened to her tell a version of my grandma’s story. The audience members gasped and shook their heads. She said that only a small number of riders were still alive today, all of them women, but that their descendants were numerous. I closed my eyes and breathed in through my nose, out my mouth. The nametag swinging from my own neck with the rise and fall of my chest, Christine Bacon rather than Christina Baker Kline, belied my attempt to appear outwardly calm.
My mind would not release a scene from four months ago. I sat simultaneously on a hard banquet chair in that conference room in Seattle and on the soft edge of a hospital bed in New York, holding the hand of one of those few remaining Orphan Train riders as Alzheimer’s finally and unmercifully let go. The strongest woman I have ever known is now one of those ghosts Ms. Kline was talking about, and I am her descendant, the keeper of her story.
Ms. Kline spoke about her research and mentioned in Q&A afterwards that in the vast majority of accounts she had read, the train riders seemed glad that their lives had turned out the way they had and were almost grateful. If not for the Orphan Train, they would not have had the lives they did, the children they did. My grandmother’s account seems devoid of that sentiment. Rather, she was angry and wondered how this travesty could have happened. She wanted answers she would never get in this life. She wanted people to know what happened to the Orphan Train riders and that none of it was okay. None of it at all. She wanted her story to be told.
At the very end of the panel session, the authors all spoke of how serendipity plays a role in both their research and in the historical stories they choose to tell. I thought it odd they should choose that word to describe their process. I heard my soul whispering (or was it my grandmother’s?), and I promised then and there that I would write her story. Serendipity indeed.
That night I left Seattle, a copy of Writing Historical Fiction purchased in the last minutes of the bookfair tucked into my bag. Less than 24 hours after arriving home I was on the phone with the interviewer for the On-Ramp legal fellowship. We discussed the results of various assessments I had taken as part of the application process, and as it turns out, I am a good fit for law firm life. Not only that, but as I answered the interviewer’s questions, I realized that different parts of me want to be both a writer and a lawyer. Why not? After all, most writers need day jobs to pay the bills. Tara Conklin did it. I heard her say so at AWP14.
My grandma taught me that strong women can do absolutely anything they set their minds to. She had her story. It’s time I lived mine. What will be yours?
Huckleberry Moments 