My story is really not so different from those of many of the other fifty-three-year-old women who seem to be wandering around the continent in a daze. I came from a wonderful open-minded family. My mother was a liberated Bohemian who could have gone either way sexually but married my father, whom she adored, instead of running off to a wildly liberal life in New York with the rest of her friends, who were writing poetry and sleeping with each other. My mother was college-educated and graduated from the University of Chicago, which was more than a miracle for a woman of the 1930s, and she has always been the most important person in my life. It really has nothing to do with the fact that she now lives with another woman but it's because she is sincere, kind, brilliant, and has never stopped loving me.
My own children, two grown men now, have managed to sail through life with complete ease. The older boy, Damien, has no memory of his father, Dean, who simply disappeared from our lives and has not acknowledged his son's existence in almost three decades. My younger son, Joshua, chose to live with his father, something that almost broke my heart, but he remains as much a part of my life as his older brother. Somehow—probably because my mother was always there to help me, and my sons act more like her than me—they have chosen to ignore my faults, my exotic and erratic behavior, my inability to stay with any partner for longer than, well, in some instances a night or two. I consider it a mark of success that they accept me no matter what I do, and for that I am proud of whatever part I had in making them so open-minded and accepting. I believe such traits are anchors of the soul.
My mother, Claire, was incredibly open with me, partly because I was an only child and she raised me to be more like a friend than a daughter, but also because she truly believed that is how children should be raised. She told me everything, and I do mean everything, about her life. My mother slept with three men before she married my father, sluttish behavior to say the least in the 1940s. She smoked marijuana in her college dormitory and anywhere else she could, and she believed, even from an early age, that it was fine for women to love each other. When she met my father, she had already had an affair with a married woman, Betsy. However, with her sexual liberalism still intact, she bumped into my father, a banker of all things, in the lobby of a shoe store and that fateful meeting ended anything wild and crazy for her—except raising me, of course.
Imagine how pissed off she was when I got pregnant about fifteen seconds before high school graduation. Oh Christ, I was so stupid, and I chose the most idiotic male in the world to help create my first child. I wasn't in love with him, but I felt like it was time to see what sex was all about. Dean, who had been professing his love to me repeatedly for three years, happened to be handy. I could have done anything, had an abortion, not married him, run off to Cincinnati, but in another fairly stupid move we got married, moved to Kansas, where he had already been accepted into Kansas State University, and tried hard for about three months to act like this was how life was supposed to be.
I left him when Damien was less than a year old, and moved back in with my parents. My mother loved that, my father wanted to kill Dean, and I just wanted to enroll in one of Wisconsin's universities and get in on some of the college action myself. I was not a very nice person after that for quite a long time. I was swept up into the '60s life as if I had been lit on fire. I discovered birth control, cheap drugs and a liberated lifestyle that allowed me to remain in a daze for a good four years. While the rest of the world tried to explain away their sinful behavior by saying they were trying to find themselves, I didn't much give a rat's ass about that. I was just having a great time.
While Damien was learning how to walk and talk and count, I was spreading my legs and watching ceiling fans in every dormitory, frat house, backseat and front yard in Madison, Wisconsin. I owe my mother so much for not only being patient during those years, but for giving Damien the same foundation of love and support that she gave to me. My first choice for finding myself seemed to be giving myself away—and I thank the Goddesses every day that my mother was there. It wasn't until years later, when Damien was a young man and I had come back to the land of the living, he told me he was almost eight years old before he realized that I was actually his mother instead of Grandma.
In the summer when I was twenty years old, I slipped out of the house one night and didn't come back for four months. I had managed to reach my senior year in college—and following a particularly ugly demonstration on the steps of the Wisconsin state capitol building—I met up with a group of six hippies who were headed for California and invited me to join them.
We left at dawn, because someone in the group supposedly had received a message from a supreme being that we would have good luck if we left just as the sun rose over Lake Mendota. That gave me just enough time to slip into my room, grab my diaphragm, three T-shirts, a jacket and $50. I never bothered to say good-bye to my baby, never walked into his room to see him curled around his blankets and the big teddy bear that was always with him when he slept. I never ran my fingers across his forehead and put my lips to his before I walked off into the night with my hippie consorts.
In Vernal, Utah, I did manage to write my mother a note and tell her that I was headed to California and would be back before school started. One July morning from a dirty wayside in Montana, I sat and scribbled a postcard to her and this is the only clear, solid, retained memory I have from those months on the road. I'm certain that we must have been someplace close to Havre when I scribbled around the edges of that ratty postcard. Perpetually stoned and horny, I straddled a long bench, looked at a rolling set of hills that were most likely the Bear Paw mountains and wrote, “Mom . . . the sky is my pillow . . . my heart stretches so far . . . I can feel you . . . caressing my son, my heart, these souls of my life . . . I'll be back . . . the journey is the destination.”
Thirty-six years later, that postcard is still taped to my refrigerator. A glimpse of it stalls me every time I look at it, and I think about wasted moments, about the necessity of self-discovery, about making certain that all the lights in my own heart and life stay tuned to the proper frequency. I meandered many miles those summer months. I tripped through Haight-Ashbury with the rest of the world, sat on a San Francisco hillside and watched sailboats parading out to sea. I fell in love at least fifteen or sixteen times. Sometimes the entire experience seems like a mirage.
I did come home at the end of summer, but I didn't come home alone. I brought along a new husband and I was expecting another baby. How ironic that a young woman who rebelled against every tradition invented by our society would end up embracing motherhood and marriage—the backbones of what our male-dominated society designed to keep women in check.
If my mother had been the kind to say, “I told you so,” I'm sure she would have told me that I had really screwed up royally. But she didn't, and not a day has gone by during the past thirty years when I have not thanked the She-God I have come to worship in thanksgiving for allowing me the good fortune of being hauled from Claire's fine womb.
My second husband, Peter, turned out to be a hell of a lot better human being than I deserved. He was crazy in love with me, excited about being a father, and he actually had a college degree, which meant he could get a real job and support us. I loved him too, in a goofy sort of way, and to this day our time together remains one of the best memories in my life. We moved into a small apartment in Madison, and he took a job at the engineering firm where he still works today. He threw himself into fatherhood and domestic life as if his trip to California had been nothing more than a sad mistake.
My mother helped with Damien, and although I gave birth to Joshua a month before graduation, I somehow managed to get a diploma and a degree in social work, which had been a passion of mine since I did the Helping Hands badge in Girl Scouts. When I walked through the graduation line not far from the steps of the state capitol where I had started my California hippie adventure, my life seemed a paradox to me.
After that I tried really hard to do what everyone thought I was supposed to do. Peter worked and I stayed home and shit, I really tried hard to make everyone happy and to be a good mother and follow all the rules but I was so goddamned miserable I made the rest of the people around me miserable too. What was it? Why couldn't I be happy? I had no idea. I just knew that what I was doing, the kind of routine and stifling life that I was leading, the lies that had begun to spill from my mouth, all of those things were killing me. I had fallen into the deep, dark hole of tradition, of social norm. Taking care of children and punching the time clock and paying the bills had turned me into the very person I had railed against becoming for the first twenty years of my life. I had stopped thinking. I had stopped listening to the inner voices in my soul that were crying for me to be who I really was—a wild, free, nontraditional woman.
This realization made my decision to leave seem natural and normal. This time when I left I didn't disappear in the dark. I took the boys to my mother's house and told her that I had to leave again for a while. She put the boys down for a nap, and then took me into her bedroom and made me lie down on the bed. She held me for the longest time without saying anything. Then she started to talk.
“If you don't go, if you don't leave now, you will regret it for the rest of your life, like I have regretted it,” she told me as I stopped breathing, stopped crying, stopped the beating of my own wild heart.
“As much as I love you and as much as I love your father, I should have never lived like this either,” she told me. “We fall into these patterns of traditional behavior because they are comfortable and because so many people are counting on us and because a tiny part of us is scared we may not make it. There are so many things I never finished, so many places I never saw, so many things I turned my back on.”
I was astounded. As much as I thought I knew my mother, knew who she was and what she was made of, I had absolutely no idea.
“Like what, Mom?”
“Sandra, you are very much like me. Your heart, the shape of your soul, the way you can get lost in the world . . . oh Lord, you are truly my daughter.”
“Mom . . . ?”
She hugged me hard again. “That woman I told you about, the one that I was with when I met your father. Do you remember that story?”
“Yes.”
“I've never stopped loving her, Sandra. Never ever stopped loving her.”
I wasn't sure then exactly what that meant or had to do with my leaving but within moments, I shuttled out the door and drove to Milwaukee. I checked into a no-name hotel and found a job with the county in about fifteen seconds. I came back right away for the boys. Peter had sensed my restlessness for months and was ready for me to be who I needed to be. I settled into an apartment on the funky east side of Milwaukee. It was the first time in my life that I was really alone and really away from my mother.
Our lives settled into a routine then, one that gave me no time to think. I worked and took care of the boys, and then went back to work the next day and did it all over again. When Joshua was six, Peter asked for a divorce and he wanted custody of the boys. By then I had come to realize the joys and sacrifices that gave me title to the word
mother,
and I was devastated to think that I might lose the boys. But Joshua wanted to be with his daddy.
I could have died then. I could have taken some pills or flung myself off the top of my apartment building. But Peter, bless his goddamned little heart, saved me. He figured out that I could transfer to the Madison County office, he helped me buy a condo; eventually we worked out an arrangement that ended up not being much different from life in Milwaukee. Through all of this, I kept my life in a constant holding pattern—never daring to feel, never daring to try again, never wanting to listen to what my mother had been trying to tell me for the past thirty years.
By 1982, the boys were well on their way to being grown, and my life in Madison had settled into a fairly secure routine. Peter had drifted into another relationship, and I was very happy for him. Although I had bedded and dated numerous men, there was absolutely nothing serious in my life except my work and my sons. Then I met Sarah.
Sarah Jorgenson was a Madison civil rights attorney. She first contacted me about a woman in town who was in desperate need of help. I agreed to meet her one afternoon, the temperature just cold enough to require a jacket. Perhaps that should have alerted my inner senses to the possibilities that lurked just ahead of me. Sarah rose when I walked into the coffee shop, recognizing me from a photo that had recently been in the newspaper about my work on a state legislative committee. She slipped lightly through a crowd of college students and grasped my hand as if we had known each other our entire lives. I had never, ever seen anyone so beautiful.
Physically, Sarah was a wisp of a woman who wore her black hair pulled tight to the sides and then long in the back. For someone with such naturally dark hair, it was shocking to see eyes as blue as a summer sky and skin just about the color of the wheat that grew less than a mile outside Madison. What I loved about her from that first second was the way she moved. She was sure of herself, confident of everyone around her, certain that what she knew and felt and touched were real and true.
I was thirty-three that year, and Sarah was a year older. Unlike me, she had never married, unless you can count her extreme devotion to her profession. She had never given birth to a child, never spent years trying to find herself. Until I met Sarah, I had never been certain of anything in my life, yet when I looked into her eyes and she touched my hand that very first time, I was never more sure of anything.