Onlies Havin' Onlies

On Sunday I was struck by the realization that I only had one call to make for Mothers’ Day this year. Technically it has been two Mothers’ Days since my maternal grandmother, G.G. (z”l), passed away, but last year I was closer to the initial grief. So, this year I just sort of noticed that it is now only my own mother who I call on this day. 

G.G. met The Bean when he was only a few months old, so he won’t remember her except through the stories we tell him. And what will we tell him about G.G.?

When I was very little G.G. was magic. She played the piano, made milkshakes for breakfast with a raspberry juice marbled heart on top, and let me put as many towels as I liked down the laundry shoot at her house. She told stories about growing up in the South and about sneaking into the living room at night to read books she wasn’t allowed to read during the day. She was the youngest of five sisters, named for her mother, Gera, and loved college.

She met my grandfather, R.B., as a student in his econ class. They wrote notes in the margins of her tests and she “complained” that this meant she couldn’t contest a B he’d given her on one exam. They had four children, my mother the second child and oldest girl. They moved from their childhood homes in West Virginia and Alabama to Virginia and  then New Mexico and then Montana. But all my life I knew them as the Missoula grandparents. 

G.G. took me clothes shopping and out to fancy dinner for my birthday every year after my mom and I moved to Missoula. I was a little older, but G.G. was still magic. And yet, I could also sense and sometimes began to directly experience that G.G. was what some might call a difficult person. 

So, what will we tell The Bean about G.G.? When I think of that question, what I really mean to ask is how do we explain family, in all its complexity, especially the parts we don’t and might not choose for ourselves? I suspect that just as I came to a realization that G.G.’s magic wasn’t wholly positive, The Bean might realize that there are members of his family who have different views of each other than he has.  

I loved G.G., I was hurt by her, and I learned from her. My mothers’ day was marked by a bit of emptiness this year. Only one call to make. 

Two months ago I wrote a post about my disappointment at not getting to do something that I felt would dramatically improve my quality of life. That thing had become a symbol of freedom for me—an alternative to an overwhelming feeling of stuckness that has been following me around since I finished grad school three years ago. At its high points I feel completely trapped and without agency in my own life. I feel like I have no choices, nowhere I can go, and nothing I can do. I feel like I’ve let down every woman on the planet and fulfilled the prediction of my first grad school advisor who told me that it didn’t matter which courses I chose to take because I would just end up following my husband around anyway.

That’s a lot to feel and feelings are important, but they’re just that—feelings. When I found out I couldn’t do the training I wanted to do, I started back up Stuck Mountain running fast uphill. Good thing I’m so out of shape because at some point I was like Hey, fuck this! You should be fucking pissed! 

I was so pissed that I applied for a new job, interviewed a week later, had a second interview a week after that, and I’m now two weeks into a new job. Now, it wasn’t that I hated my last job. I didn’t. I just also didn’t love my last job. I had amazing colleagues, but I was finding the day-to-day work more and more wearing. And I had started to wonder if I wasn’t dragging down the office. All of that is a bit scary to admit on the internet, but I think it’s worth being self-reflective and able to recognize when something isn’t a good fit anymore.

So, I unstuck myself. I’m still not doing the thing I felt desperate to do, but like I said, that thing was a symbol. In the transition, as life feels too busy and a bit unmoored, as I settle into a new place with new people and face changes to our daily home routine to compensate, I hold onto the realization that the real value in this process is that instead of feeling powerless, I did something. It’s not what I thought I would do, but I’m quite pleased with the results.

Several months ago I was in a yoga class and one of my favorite teachers was talking about freedom, “We may be seeking freedom in our lives. The reality is that the freedom we desire already exists within us. You are already free.”