i

This is why people talk about the weather, I say, wiping my eyes.

I much prefer these conversations, you say, kissing my years.

Theoretically, so do I. Except when they hurt this much.

I can’t quite remember how we got to existential angst — except that all paths seem to lead there these days. Do you remember how we got here? You mentioned human trafficking and I talked about idiosyncratic causes — and cause fatigue, so many things to do battle for, what do you choose — my lack of the activism gene — I know there’s no such thing, one of my few brags is that I know how genes work, still, it’s a useful turn of phrase, I don’t think I have the activism gene — we inevitably went to end-stage capitalism, my brief (oh so brief) sting with an Antifa cell (don’t ask and don’t start a dossier on me, it was pathetic), your attempts to redirect my tears by talking about how small actions touch people, transform them, make life better for them, and surely that’s enough, that matters (but nothing matters and if nothing matters why does this matter) and then my navel-gaze, clumsily articulated, statement that I used to believe that the best way to make an impact on the world, to shape it, in however a small way, most effectively was to live the life we wanted to live.

And I lived that life — I lived in cooperative housing so my family would have community and housing security without me having the chain of a mortgage wound around my throat, I freelanced so that I would have the freedom — I choose the word freedom, not ability, consciously — to be my children’s primary caregiver and also not be dependent on any one employer (or any one person). I attachment parented and homeschooled my not-quite-neurotypical brood while paying rent and getting food on the table writing and it was a really good life.

No regrets about the past really — but regrets about this: What did it accomplish, really? It ended and now I have a mortgage. Children in school. A Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 (sort of) job-job.

I’m just like everyone else, I’m living the life I never wanted — in many ways, a life that feels out of synch with my core values.

I sold out. (And, if you think about it, not for very much either — for housing security. The end.)

Cue the tears, cue the existential angst.

ii

My eldest, who, to be painfully honest with you, has told me that he wishes he hadn’t been homeschooled because school would have “taken the rough edges off” his weirdness (I prefer the word uniqueness) (also, I don’t know how he thinks he would have survived school, especially the elementary school years, but, ok) (also, he’s not weird, he’s pretty much exactly like me — does he think I’m weird??).

And he thinks I homeschooled them all because of ego.

I suppose it’s true in so far as I thought I could do better than a random teacher with a class of 30-40 kids in a system I consider highly flawed. And it’s true that my angst right now is about ego. The path less travelled etc etc and at the end of it, what do I have to show for it? Long forgotten articles, books no one reads and that failed to pay the rent, a child who wishes I had made other choices — another who’s absolutely thriving in said highly flawed system, indicating he’d probably have thrived in it from day — how exactly have I changed the world, their lives, anything, by those early hard choices?

God knows I’m not changing it. Mortgage. Job. All the usual dependencies, restraints.

It is ego. Who am I, after all, to have these delusional ambitions?

An insignificant speck of dust on an insignificant planet in an insignificant universe.

You counter by pointing, again, to my children and repeating that it is the “peopling” that matters. The lives we touch, the children we raise, the people we help. True enough but not enough, you know? Especially when you feel that everything around you is on fire. During the prairie summers these days, literally.

iii

I try to bring myself back from the angst and the tears to the positive. I gave my children the childhood I thought would serve them best for as long as I could. I gave them love and security and freedom to be themselves, to find themselves. I supported my family — and myself — by writing for a living since I’ve been 17. Isn’t that something, isn’t that worth something?

You see all those “I” sentences above? Yeah. It is all about ego. My ego does not want to be unimportant, unnecessary.

And we know what the solution to that is, don’t we?

I really hate it when life throws up evidence that the Buddhists are right.

iv

I’m sitting in the sunlight-flooded living room of the beautiful townhouse I own via an extortionate mortgage that I could afford because of a Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 (sort of) job-job in which I’m still earning my living writing (and thinking, which is harder) and in which I do have an opportunity to touch people’s lives and hearts and make a difference. I start my days writing from the heart, I spend the day with lovely people writing from the mind. Sometimes, I write again from the heart in the afternoon and one or two evenings a week, I help people who want to write bring their stories to life.

And stories matter.

Even if I don’t.

v

There are still tears as I write and this time you’re not there to kiss them away. I’m not sure I’ve solved anything for myself. I have not dissolved the ego, I have not forgiven myself, I have no arrived at peace — or even glimpsed the way to peace.

But I remember that there are three children in the world who know that they are loved and that I’m there to drive them to school, work or the ER when they need me, no matter how bad the roads are. And that I always have snacks for them. And if I squint really hard into the past, there have been one or two articles in the past that shaped public policy and public opinion. And while my books don’t change the world, they do give their handful of readers pleasure. And maybe, occasionally, point the way to freedom.

Take that, ego, and be satisfied. Let me lead an ordinary life.

With fewer tears.

xoxo

“Jane”

PS The writing instructor’s notes to self: Bad headline, too may run-on sentences, chaotic structure. The CTA doesn’t really follow from the lead. Rewrite, tighten up and ramp up the positivity to give the reader something beyond your teary navel to focus on. Don’t hit publish until you do. What are you doing? Why are you hovering over that damn publish button.

Jane: Sometimes, the revolution/reframing starts sharing the shitty first draft from the heart. 😉