When I was finishing up graduate school at the age of twenty-five, I had a dream about being thirty-two. I had blossomed into a confident, gracious person and all my nerosises and character flaws were gone.
If my fifty-two-year-old self could have a chat with my twenty-five-year-old self, she's say, "Good luck with that, Cara."
Just when I think I've got life figured out, I find myself in a new situation that makes new demands and challenges of me; I have to reach inside myself for skills and gifts that are either underdeveloped or I didn't know I had. Just when I thought my career was going great and that had my life mapped out as a single person, boom, I fell in love and got married. Then I became a mother--talk about having to reach inside yourself for strength and energy you never dreamed you'd need. (I speak of those sleepless baby years.)
Right now I feel like I'm standing in a port with my two teenagers. The wind is picking up, and their ships are going to come for them soon. They'll be setting out towards their own horizons.
There's my horizon, too--the older I get, the bigger my horizons seem to get. Through marriage and work, I've made trips to Europe, worked with people from all over the world. I knew the world was an amazing place when a co-worker from Singapore announced to me on the phone one day that she had been to Iowa years ago visiting her brother who was attending a university there. "Lots of corn. That's what I remember," she teased.
I'm trying figure out what to do with the increased physical and spiritual spaces I have in my life now that my children are getting older. Three years ago I began my first novel. Last spring I became determined to get into better shape and then came the opportunity to take riding lessons. I still have this fantasy of taking up the Celtic harp, too. (Well, you never know!)
For many women, the first half of their lives becomes subsumed by work, the demands of motherhood, the demands of an unequal yolk in marriage. I lost time to write when my children were young--between working full-time and trying to be a good mother, I simply didn't have the energy or time to write. When I finally felt I had the time to do it and I gave myself permission to pursue that which gives me joy, I returned to part of my soul that gives me such joy. Some people see photos or paintings as they walk through the world. Others hear music. I hear words and poetic rythyms. I hear characters talking, feel their longings and pain. I must tell stories in the same way others must sing.
My mother is a gifted musician--surprisingly, she told me once it was over a decade before she sat down to play the piano on a regular basis after she married and started her family. She too was subsumed by the demands a family--the brave lady six of us! After my father's death, my mother played in a Dixieland jazz band for a few years. She got out there, had fun, and her musical abilities expanded. In her 40s, she went back to college and got her degree in music education. I know that education really broadened her mind. In her early 70s, she bought one of those electric piano/synthesizer do-hickies. All those buttons and switches--looked pretty intimidating to me. A year later when I came out to visit her again, she'd figured out how to use the thing--move over Yanni. I was astonished.
Once her children were older, my mother had the time and space to rediscover her talents--to discover her own unexplored country. My writing, my health, horseback riding, yoga--these are paths to my undiscovered country. I hope to keep exploring until my last breath!
