Being Myself, Being Enough

For some reason I'm prone to cloaking myself in confusion about who I am and what I'm meant to be doing.

But today at least, that's a lie. I’m not the least bit uncertain; I know exactly who I am and what I want. I want to work on an extended memoir and complete it. I want to start a web page and blog. I want to serve other trauma survivors and artists and people struggling to own and define their creativity. I want to care for my son and marriage and family and friends and health.

I want to be myself, and it makes me angry that I can’t remember a time when I felt like that was enough.

Self-Less, Self-Full: A Tale of Two Grandmas

Grandma 1:

Once in while I’d stroke Grandma Burkey’s cheek, soft as the leather of my old deerskin purse. She was tiny at 4’10”. She’d be wearing a dress that fit snugly over her round body, perched on a chair with her hands folded in her lap.

Like most grandmas, she came with a repertoire of food: shoo-fly pie, funnel cakes, Dutch potato filling, apple dumplings, fastnachts. She was best known for her “Easter Eggs”: melted dark chocolate laced with paraffin, poured over freshly-ground coconut, wrapped around peanut butter. These four or five inch long delectables had to be stored in the refrigerator so the paraffin wouldn’t melt; we drooled over them for days, waiting for Easter.

One day, when she was babysitting, she glanced up at the ceiling and said, “There’s Ishkabibble.” I squinted but couldn’t see anything. He must be very small, I reasoned. It made me think of Timmy, when he tied a string to the leg of a housefly and it buzzed circles in the air.

Grandma Burkey was nice, never wished to complain. She sat in the rocking chair that took up most of the tiny living room of her government-subsidized apartment, knitting and crocheting afghans and doilies and teapot cozies and Christmas ornaments and little dolls. Only once did I see a crack in her pleasant self-effacement: when my little sister painted herself and our hardwood floors with permanent India ink. Grandma muttered with fury as she scrubbed her down in the tub.

Grandma Burkey never made it past 8th grade. She was probably relieved when her husband, a domineering alcoholic, died of a heart attack at 40—she never dated or married again. When the doctor told her an artery in her brain was poised to burst, she entered a nursing home, occupying one half of a vinyl-floored room. She hated her roommate but relished her role as the queen of the craft room and favorite of the staff.

She lived in the nursing home for another 30 years. She was 92 when she died.

Grandma 2:

Isn’t this beautiful? Grandma Slack picked up an eggplant and held it up in the air. It was beautiful: its graceful curves, its deep black-brown-purple sheen.

Choice?

I feel like a failure, like there’s something wrong with me for being unable to sustain my energy and excitement for teaching. Like someone who deserves to be kicked out.

But here’s the truth: I choose to vacate a system that relegates part-timers to the “housework” of the English department—the lowest level comp classes, the 2-credit research writing classes with high labor and low financial reward—the courses the full-timers don’t want. The draining emotional labor of trying to carry students in financial, mental health, and academic crisis through to the end of the semester.

I choose to have control over my schedule, to feel appreciated and generously rewarded for my skills and effort, to foster my own creative ambitions and meet my own emotional needs.

That's at least part of the story.  The other part is that it still hurts. 

Self-less, Self-ish, Self-full

The money is leaking away. I have to go back to teaching. But when I imagine myself in front of the classroom, I feel empty, wordless. How will I do it?

My stepfather was a born-again Christian. But he didn’t buy the new-age platitude that one could simply wait for God to provide. No, he went to work every day for 40 years, a clerk in the US Post Office. Did he love his job? You wouldn’t think so. He was intelligent, well-read, capable. But he had a “servant’s heart.” He did whatever God told him to, he said. And he did it with joy and humility. When they wanted to promote him to supervisor, he refused. I want to stay with the men, he answered.

Is this an answer for me? To do whatever God asks, with joy and humility? Today I simply don’t know. I only know that the thought of having to do any work that distracts from my writing and art feels like a punch to the gut.