October 13, 2021
The Journey Begins
I love what Nell Painter said in her book, Old in Art School, about why she would change careers, leaving behind an extremely successful one as an academic to return to school at age 64. She said quite simply, “Because I wanted to.” But earlier this year as I prepared to move to the West coast for grad school, whenever I gave a simple answer to that question, nearly everyone not close to me needed more. More reasons. More rationale. Of course, I couldn’t tell them the truth. Bless their hearts. I was so happy to escape that north of Atlanta suburb. But I couldn’t tell them I wanted so desperately to get away from THEM and their tennis clubs and their old-boy politics and televised mega-churches bringing their Christ to Africa on a quarterly basis and their fervent belief in their righteousness. I had spent a couple of decades applying armor to feel safe around them and I couldn’t wait to unhinge it and get out. I wanted my life back.
Doing the intense work of raising two children, I had lost my self.
I had moved to the South from Manhattan where, after being old in undergraduate school, I was carving out my life as a freelance writer. I had made connections. Published a few things. Was gaining traction. I thought I could continue to write in balmy hot Florida, and I did for the first few years. But gradually, with a move to an even deeper South, the juggle of two kids in the suburbs, the house (another child), the calendar, the endless driving in circles, all conspired to suck the time from my life in the manner of the Yiddish saying, the days are long, but the years are short. There was never time to do the work. Rather, there was never time to focus on that kind of work. I did other work.
But now, at my age, the years are shorter than ever.
Which is what propelled me to make this move. Thanks to COVID, with my business slowly bleeding out, I had about ten solid months to think about me and ask myself, “What’s next?” I had always asked my fitness clients who came to me wanting to lose XX pounds, ok, but what happens after that? Because that’s where the real work lives. When my baby had finally settled on applying to PhD programs, I checked that box, resuscitated an old dream and then I applied to a couple of programs myself, and here I am. I can’t tell yet if I’m excavating, sculpting to reveal, or creating an entirely new self, but I’m already seeing glimmers of something.
It’s definitely a different experience to be older than anyone else in the classroom, including my professors, but it’s not one that’s entirely new to me. Because I didn’t have my first child until I was 36, I’ve always been the oldest, anywhere, anytime. PTA? Oldest. Room mom? Oldest. Book fair volunteer? Oldest. Cross-Country board of directors? Oldest. Even with my clients, 98% of the time, I was the oldest. What’s new here, is that my classmates, my peers, are mostly my kids’ ages. And I do not want to mother them. It’s just weird.
Granted, it’s been great when they’ve helped me set up university gmail accounts, or while watching me wiggle through Moodle, asking, like my girls, if they can just take my phone and do it because “it’s faster.” So polite, not saying it’s because I’m so slow…so old.
It also helps that they are all brilliant in their own way, and very creative which is what you hope for in an Art program. But when you’ve been alive through so many government administrations and wars and economic highs and lows and have read and seen feminism and equal rights and racism shift, evolve, contract, and expand, and watched trends everywhere recycle themselves, you see things they don’t. They simply can’t.
I feel it every time I open my mouth in a class. My comments usually hit with a thud. The professors get me. Usually. But the kids look somewhere between aghast and unable to process. Like their wheels stop turning. Does not compute. They just don’t have a file for that. So, I end up feeling like I exist in a bubble. Does the bubble protect me or does the bubble protect them? Maybe it’s my Truth-bubble. I’ll try that name out for a while.
Is my Truth-bubble an advantage for me or a disadvantage? Or does that very question reduce it to a binary male gaze? Why does it have to be either/or?
It must be both—and more.
On the one hand, I have no problem relating to the kids because they are mostly the age of one or the other of my girls, and while I’m not an expert in their milieu, I try to stay plugged in. I think the problem is they can’t relate to me. Unlike Nell Painter, I don’t want my age out there. I am certain if that happens, they will shift completely to some prescribed way of dealing with me, relating to me, talking to me. Something they bring from home, rather than something we create in our classes with each other. I’d like to connect artistically with them before we go there. That’s where the bubble is a disadvantage. It prevents us from connecting.
But it also gives me the hutzpah to push on, whether they get me or not. I’m a shy person unless I’m talking about literature or writing. And because I’ve been bottling this stuff for the past 30 years, I have cases of it to uncork. The bubble allows me to do that more fearlessly every day.
I wonder if the kids think about this: When I become An Artist, as Nell Painter named the destination of full-time creatives, will I be female, or Female, or Human, or Artist, or simply artist? Will I be Old Artist? Can I remain anonymous? And why are we still having this discussion? Gloria Steinman had it well in hand when I was coming up. If we unpack those tags, we can see the lineage, the history that each one stands on. On the Shoulders of Giants. Always. But most of them are white men shoulders. Where will I land in the continuum? I should start going to museums and the gender-bending, intersectional places that make this city unique. I need to suss out the continuum here because I know this city has its own. If only I had the time. And energy.
I am in San Francisco. This is a city for the young and hale. At least the part I live in. I am in good shape, you know, for my age, but these hills are kicking my butt. My hip flexors were killing me for the first month. Things are mostly better now, but my cardio isn’t where I’d like it to be because my apartment is a 3rd floor walkup. That’s 18 flights a day with a dog out and in three times, though my Health app only counts each walk up as 2 flights…. If I have anything else to do, like go to class or grocery store, well, just add some flights.
Being in the city is good for me. I crave the stimulation. It’s inspiring, but it is also mentally exhausting. People who don’t live in a city don’t get that. Tourists come and think they have looked at every single thing. They jam their day with experiences and want to see as much as they can, not realizing that the simple act of walking down the street requires a huge amount of filtering energy or, if your brain doesn’t filter, then processing all the signs, posters, waves and curves of the sidewalks, graffiti, building architecture, store front windows, more signage, people dressed no two alike, dogs, birds chirping, busses, cable car tracks whirring, truck brakes screeching, fire engine sirens wailing—and that can all be present on the same block—this takes tremendous energy. When I lived in Manhattan, it annoyed me no end when outsiders said people in NYC were cold. They just didn’t understand it was impossible to make eye contact with and greet everyone on the sidewalk if you were trying to get an errand done on your lunch hour. You’d have no energy left for work. The rawness of unorganized tribes of people living in close quarters, rubbing paths and needs together, should be an experience on everyone’s bucket list. But the tourists forget they all get to go home and rest, and then return to their less complex lives viewed from the comfort of their car windows. Urban dwellers hit the sidewalk.
Despite what can be an overwhelming cacophony, San Francisco is very welcoming. The attitude seems to be if you’d like to try it, by all means do—and can I help you with that? Like in Manhattan, I have already seen remarkable kindness, just riding the bus. Everyone should ride the bus sometime. Yesterday, my bus driver jumped out of the bus (at the stop) to call out to a woman who had just gotten off from the rear door and was already down the sidewalk headed for the intersection. He wanted to refine the transfer directions he had given her, and he stood on the sidewalk calling loudly to her, waving his arms like an air traffic controller to make sure she went to the right spot. Then he jumped back on the bus like nothing had ever happened. Normal part of his day. When the wheelchairs, or the walkers or shopping carts get on, everyone, including the driver, helps folks get situated, putting seats up, clamping brakes and hooks, asking if everything is ok. Don’t get me wrong. The drivers are not all saints. I’ve had a couple who are so fast, you can barely get both feet on or off the bus before it leaves the curb. But most of them take care and don’t resent their work.
I was so happy to witness that driver yesterday because the walk to the bus had been full-on urban. I witnessed a bizarre grapefruit-sized tumbleweed of human hair on the sidewalk snagged by a curling black banana peel, music blaring from a car accompanied me all the way down the block, the toxic, stomach-turning stench of roof tar cooking in a vat by the curb, the incessant hammering of the building repair—what the hell are they doing? It sounded like a pile driver—and the endless dog-poop landmines.
Like Nell Painter, I am here, but also still juggling other parts of life. My 92-year-old mother and 94-year-old uncle, both independent as hell, but occasionally needy still on the East coast; my two daughters who I miss terribly because I love and enjoy being with them so much; a business that is still limping along in another state; one dog left of the three rescues we’ve had over the years, here with me on the couch as I write. So, my creative focus cannot compete with the intensity of the kids’. I thought I would be exploring the city more as part of my education. I am very much enjoying the creative vein here. I can feel it. Its inclusivity runs deep like gold ore. But I’m frustrated. In Manhattan, I felt the stimulation and the creativity, but it always came with a side of competition. It makes sense that getting to know this place is part of my education. If only I had the time…the luxury of time.
Only one of my classmates can begin to appreciate the luxury of time. She works two part-time jobs to support herself. Time is our favorite commuter topic on the bus right after class. That’s our pattern now. We kvetch. This week we moaned about how every one of our day’s minutes are jammed with work, but also, we are both slow processors and the luxury of letting our thoughts settle and age and spark their synapses has been ripped away from us. Everything feels forced and unfinished. Not in the artistic sense that writing is never really done. In the caesarean sense of something pulled out of you.
For some reason yesterday, probably feeling the weight of being overwhelmed, rolling our boulders up the hill only to have them roll right back down, we were both questioning our decision to come here, to take on debt, to do this work. We’re both already looking for cheaper apartments, which I’m sure will be a waste of time if we do the algebra of availability, moving expense, market forces post-COVID, and the actual ROI. It’s just one of those big-ticket items you desperately grasp for as your first solution, like selling your car, if you have one. Instant cash. But what do you do next? One move and you could save hundreds. If only…Yes, we’re in the panic phase. The ones in the dorms, who simply waive a card or fob to be served food and drink, whose only task besides school is to do their own laundry if they don’t outsource it, who simply take that 5-minute stroll over to class from their nearby dorm, they don’t see any of that as having the luxury of time. Time in total immersion.
They also don’t have other people or creatures counting on them to help them survive. They can afford to be self-absorbed; their time bank is full of the enzymes that become the catalysts for creative development. I always thought that was an important part of the creative process, drawing the curtain on the outside world and making art. I worry now that because I am a mother, even though they are grown, that kind of self-absorption can never happen for me. Or it can only be fleeting and occasional. I was a die-hard pacifist before my first child was born. I argued against the death penalty, protested US involvement in South Africa, CIA involvement in Central America, you name it, I objected. But one day, standing in an elevator with my two-year-old daughter after hearing a story about a pedophile caught with toddlers, I felt my gut heat up like torch at the thought of someone harming my daughter. When I got home, I told her father that if she were ever attacked, I knew and I knew it absolutely, that I would kill her attacker and willingly spend the rest of my life in jail. It was visceral for me. Even though she had been a priority for me since her birth, I knew then, in that elevator, that would never change. So how could it be different now? Despite her being the brilliant, capable woman she is, I still worry about her mountain biking in the Santa Cruz mountains, or traveling by herself to Denmark. How can I disappear into myself to do this work? Is that a learned behavior? And how is it possible when Life interrupts whenever it likes?
For example, I was on the phone with my distraught mother nearly 3,000 miles away, just before class one day, actually standing right outside the classroom door five minutes before the session began. She was being threatened with Assisted-living placement by someone she couldn’t name, telling me that a woman claiming to be from a Federal agency had been to the door a couple of times and was calling her every day, sometimes twice. It was so frustrating trying to remind mom how to take a photo with her smart phone of the woman’s business card which she couldn’t find at that moment and email it to me. She still hasn’t sent me this information. So, while wondering about the laws in her state, or what was or was not possible, we spent a few frantic minutes conspiring to develop a plan, and then I had to hang up and go to class. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a word of the workshop because I was quite upset, doubting my decision to move across the country, to abandon her although she had encouraged me, and though resisting, repeatedly wanting to sneak a peek at Florida elder law on my phone. And it was doubly unfortunate timing because my fiction was on the table that day.
The next morning, we sorted out how to get her a new doctor, and having read the Florida law, I gave her a primer, so an hour later, we reached a level of calm. We could move forward. But that took a chunk out of my workday. Setback #1. Setback #2, turning to my workshop material, I realized I had no clue about my work critique. I had some scribbled notes from the students, notes which included “Ickkk” over a phrase describing the taste of a lover’s sweat (think “Bubble”), and I had their summary statements, but I didn’t remember the hour-long conversation. Not what the professor said, not what the kids said. Not a drop. I felt knocked over, like a hurled brick had hit me between my shoulder blades. How do I recover something that cannot be recovered? It was like watching your hard drive dissolve into a puddle with no backup. How do I make choices between my work and my family? Should I reapply some armor? How do I bear reapplying some armor when my pink baby skin is so fresh and fragile? I realized that this MFA thing was going to be way more difficult than I anticipated. Painter writes about this very thing in her book, the push/pull of her parents, but she was able to fly to the other coast several times a year to see them and help them. My pockets are nowhere near that deep. So, it’s a looming issue for me that shadows me everywhere, all day. I am always waiting for “the call.” It’s chronic stress. The pre-cursor to 21st century disease. Should I worry about that, too?
I wondered: has anyone besides Painter had this experience? In short, no. Well, not recorded, anyway. A quick search of the literature of Grad School self-help memoirs gave me some hack manuals on organizing time, stupid suggestions like taking breaks to eat nutritious meals which no one in the “flow” is ever gonna do, meditative techniques, and productivity methods, but nothing about the journey, and how complex the struggle can be. Most of the texts were of the slog-through-it, it’s-what-everyone -does genre, the old corporate/fraternity baptism by fire. A couple reduced it to comedy. The only books or publications related to women were concerned with balancing motherhood with grad school, or even worse, balancing life including motherhood with grad school. But dammit, the point of grad school is to have no balance. To immerse oneself in the work. To completely tip the scale. Which means as a mother, you are screwed. Or do these books assume the mother has a husband or some other massive support network potential and they simply need to get organized and delegate more? Those books remind me of the Organize and Simplify Your Life gurus who want you to get rid of everything and then buy a bunch of new containers for your new, simpler stuff….
Organization is bullshit when you’re my age. Take this morning, for example. I should have been writing for the past two hours. Instead, I’ve been figuring out PayPal fees, arranging for a water meter replacement, applying for a sandwich board permit, paying business bills, shutting down a Merchant Processor account, checking in with my mother. These things need immediate attention. They do not respond to organized scheduling. Thank goodness I can do all of that online. But it’s not the land of dreamy dreams I wanted for my graduate student experience.
Instead of the land of dreamy dreams (which by the way, is a color my daughter made up for a crayon in her box of 64. I invoke it often so I can see her 4-year-old face), it’s been a constant, but of course classic clash between expectation and reality. When I was making my plans last year, I only envisioned the reading and writing part. The quiet apartment where I didn’t have to do anything but work. Where cleaning might take an hour. I didn’t really ache through the move-in with only 3 suitcases and a dog. The panicked week of fingers-crossed Craig’s List buy, fetch, and haul up the 3 flights of stairs. The computer to replace the 8-year-old one (that’s 100 dog-years in processor time) not arriving for weeks. The fatigue that made me feel boneless. And while I was ready to abandon my 15-year-old business, it wasn’t the teenager I expected, ready to abandon me.
Clearly, I have a lot to learn.