Letting Sparks Fly
It would be easy to say it simply started when I turned sixty, but it would be a lie. There had been a growing sense of urgency for many years, decades to be honest . My creative self lay on a shelf gathering dust. It is not like I ignored it all together. I dusted it off and played with it once in a while but not enough to ever get a sense of fulfillment much less mastery in anything I attempted. And that absent sense of mastery was also a problem in and of itself. Damned hard to take one’s creative self seriously when you are always the beginning student, particularly at midlife and beyond when one has become rather used to being good at SOMETHING. My soul had moved on, though my life had not. That said, there IS something that happens to women as they approach sixty. Suddenly our mortality is yapping at our heels and we find ourselves estimating over and over how many healthy productive years left. And as that realization takes hold, a new acute hyper-awareness of our time that sets in. Time becomes a bank account and it only goes so far. We look at our time budget and realize, not overnight, that we cannot accomplish what we have yet to squeeze out of this life as well as tend everyone else’s. This awareness started slowly in me. It grabbed hold as I struggled more and more unsuccessfully to find the time I needed to explore my creative urges.
It would be easy to say it began when my one and only child went off to college. But the truth is that sending one’s child off to college is hardly liberating, as it takes a few years before they stop drowning and a parent can sleep without worrying about the next phone call or email or text or worse yet…no word at all.
It would be also way too easy to say it began when my husband’s career demanded that we move more than once in a few short years. Those moves dislodged me from my own career path. I told myself at the time that after thirty years of being a psychotherapist I was ready for something new. THAT wasn’t a lie. But I wasn’t at all prepared for the massive blankness of “so now what?” that followed.
And somewhere in the mix was a long illness…a brush with the big C. A recovery from illness but not a recovery of the fiercely independent woman I once was. And though my body recovered, I felt the urgency of my displaced and misplaced and untended creative self going from a gentle tugging at my soul to raging scream…an alarm so loud it could not longer postpone it or ignore it.
Then there was my kitchen remodel. Okay, I know that sounds pretty mundane but the remodel profoundly changed me. I started the remodel as one person and became a very different person in the process, somehow “remodeling my psyche”. Perhaps as a former psychotherapist, I, more that anyone, was shocked that taking on this project could have changed me so much. I choose to be both the contractor and the designer to save us m0ney, which it certainly did, however I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Got in way over my head and yet felt oddly alive, as if I hadn’t gotten up and stretched myself for way too long. I became very efficient and suddenly I had not a moment of time to waste. Not a moment to indulge others or my time wasting inclinations. And when it was all over (and it turned out damned well I must admit) I was a changed person. And no matter how much I tried it was clear I would never be able to fit myself into the pants of my old life. I had tasted a mission. I had made the vision in my mind come to life. And I wanted… no, I needed….no, I HAD to have more.
Suddenly, I began to realize that no matter what I did, there was never going to be the time I needed for my creative self to the depth that would be satisfying to me. I could not take seriously the time I was putting into my creativity because it was not a serious amount of time. It was dabbling and it felt like a waste of… you guessed it…time. I raged. I became depressed. I whined and complained one hell of allot. And I began to understand why so many women get so very angry late in life as they wait for someone to give them “their turn” and it never happens. My patience wore very thin. I measured every task and every interaction against my internal ticking clock. Until I reached the point where I believe all real personal change comes from. A point of “I will do anything, sacrifice anything to change this”. The place of a cornered animal that is willing to destroy anything or anyone in it’s way. Sure isn’t the nice girl or was raised to be nor the rational careful adult I had become.
My husband, I confess, got the brunt of it. He had grown accustomed to the overly competent wife that kept everything running smoothly, despite her complaints. But within a few months of my sixtieth birthday he suddenly found himself living with that cornered raging animal of a wife. It didn’t help he found himself suddenly working at home which in my frenzy became “just one more person in my f***ing way”. He mentioned one day that he was beginning to dread coming downstairs from his office to see me and get his IV fix of caffeine. We both began to worry what I might say next. At that point I knew it was time for me to leave. Not him specifically…just him as well as everything else that I could not possibly stuff in my car.
Of course the gods like to mess with you when you decide you are in desperate need of change. My car repeatedly refused to stay repaired for the big trip. Actually, it keep flooding inside with water. So much for Noah’s Arc. The great flood kept repeating in my personal arc despite several mechanics best attempts to stop it. Finally in utter frustration I took the car in and traded it in. Would have taken just about anything for it and I bought a new escape vehicle. My husband, concerned for his own self-preservation’s well as his vital manly parts did not try and stop me. Things started to break down at the house. The taxes suddenly needed last minute attention. I had a tooth that out of nowhere abscessed and needed to be pulled. And I deeply sliced open my thumb with my new mother’s day knife set as I prepared a last minute dinner party. Any other time these obstacles might have slowed me down or perhaps made me rethink my plan altogether. But not this time. I have always suspected that we are the entertainment for the god’s, as the Greeks believed… that our suffering and problems are the great sit-com in the sky for them. Having heard all sorts of stories of human suffering in my decades of private practice, I am not a believer, as some are, that these sorts of obstacles are put in front of us to teach us something or even test our resolve. If that is the case, then someone is one mean-ass sadistic teacher. No, I believe, these things are some higher power’s entertainment. And I could hear laughter that was not mine at every step I took towards running away from home.