Here I go again, comparing my life to someone else’s life. How easy it is to get lost in self-flagellation when comparing one’s life with the curated lives we see on social media. How easy it is to get lost in examining what we feel are our failures in those moments, in comparison to someone else’s life.
But had I stayed on any of the paths that I was on and veered from would I have been happier?
I was a young mom who married her high school boyfriend with a fairy tale view of life ever after. If I hadn’t taken the roads that I took, I would not have had the adventures of my teens and early twenties backpacking, back country camping, rock-climbing, white-water rafting, searching for adventure sleeping in pastures, deep forests, and beaches on the east and west coasts beneath the stars. Spending my twentieth birthday atop Beauty Mountain. Trekking along Junkyard Wall countless times. Walking across Natural Bridge. Backpacking Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Seeing the Gendarme before its fall and the high desert plain (where the streets have no name) at Joshua Tree and 29 Palms.
I would not have met my first great love who saved me in so many ways, being the first person to really see me and stay by my side, encouraging me to read everything he put in my hands and write outside of the myopic and cryptic, loving me deeply through his own failings and mine.
I would not have taken a leap of faith into a second marriage I questioned in its drive to suburban domesticity that felt like it was clipping my wings, submerged in the vapid mundane until all hell broke loose with that husband’s addiction and mental illness, recalling saying to myself and then my therapist, it’s better to stay with the devil you know than the one you don’t. Yet despite holding on with fingertips on the cliff over the abyss for a decade, that marriage was destined to fail too.
I would not have had my oldest child from that first marriage or the following two from that second marriage. I would not have known the sweetness of the selfless love that I gave.
I would have never met and loved a complicated, wise yet simple man who brought the neglected woman back to life, who had succumbed to motherhood, duty, and trauma bonding, lingering in a kind of conventional, non-committal holding pattern for another decade after the second marriage had ended.
And, I would not have at forty-nine, met the love that I was always meant to have.
I did not go off to New York to be a writer and then back to L.A., followed by globetrotting, as I imagined I would as an eleven-year-old staring out the tenement window into the high rise on the hill filled with glamour in the apartments above Prima Vista with its stunning city views that I longed for. I had not become a foreign correspondent or author of adventure novels by the time I was forty. I had a conventional domestic life for a time and then struggled as a single mother, under-employed until my children were raised.
In that suburban life, I had the sublime purity of holding my babies in my arms, of passing on my love of art, music, and literature, of volunteer work and girl scout troop leading, of trying to create good humans to send out into the world. I had days of endless routines with talk shows and kids shows murmuring in the background, of chauffeuring and chaperoning and leading, of being the moral center, squeezing morning pages and scribbled notes, poems, and stories in between parental responsibilities. I had become a journalist and writer and held other jobs along the way, albeit setting them aside for chunks of time as the demands of my choices took priority.
And then the last one was gone and there was silence.
I was set adrift and then I let go. My story is not over yet. I’m not yet to John Donne’s pause of the comma between breath and death. So, I built a new life, at first solo and then with my new spouse.
So, I don’t have thirty plus years of marriage under my belt with a husband who could have stayed the course for the path life took me in and I didn’t have the career of my dreams. But I have had intrepid adventures and deep setbacks and now have a husband who has weathered six years, enjoying all that empty-nest life has to offer, despite the serious things that sometimes happen in midlife – his heart attack and strokes and my breast cancer. Stronger and truly loved, hopefully our story ends like Noah and Allie many years from now. I’m still a dreamer.
When I feel bad, or like I somehow failed with my ventures down different paths from the socially ideal, when I see the verisimilitudes on social media, I re-center myself with thoughts that I would not have been happier if I had caved to social norms or avoided any of the paths that I took. I remind myself what I’m seeing is a curated version, not the truth. And I wouldn’t be in the happy place that I am without the roads that I took to a career and personal life that I love on Our Humble Road.
Our Humble Road 