On Being Family-oriented

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Yesterday was a waste. I spent the whole day trying to be family-oriented.

And I am NOT family-oriented? Ya heard? I am selfish and misanthropic! I love solace and a schedule that I dictate! I sit at home and stare at curling wicks of candles, making imprints of my thumb in the hot, fluid wax.

I slept in because my bunkmate wanted to and I went to two grocery stores because my living partner wanted to and, yes, the bunkmate and living partner is the same partner, but monogamy, while such a blessing, never kept a captive audience. So I am trying to spice up the identity. Because that is sooo family-oriented.

Grocery shopping took so long and by the end of the second shopping trip, I was breezing through the aisles, skipping the chips and pop one, not even price comparing. In between shopping trips, though, I ogled my old roommate's baby which I very much wanted to do, but I envied Becca's lovely and nurturing voice when she said her son Luke's name. Will I ever be that maternal? Will I ever stroll a stroller with pride and not with irony, as if, at any moment, I might disown my strollee. As if, at any moment, if someone asked me if this was my child, I might say, "Oh, no, just babysitting! I'm not old enough to have children!" Will I ever be family-oriented?

Do I want it bad enough?

I used to be sophisticated. And really really selfish. Even in high school, I was a young woman involved, civically engaged. I was frantically busy. I hated that my mother made dinner at six o'clock every night. It got in the way of my sophisticated projects. I scheduled time, actual blocks of time, to think about things, like theses for papers on Hamlet, whose mental state probably mirrored my own, I was so depressed. I never thought about my family and how I could help my brother, my sister. I only asked for them to leave me alone. In college, I was even more sophisticated. I relished each week with its wide open matrix of time uncommitted - all that time of my own! I became an RA so that I would have a single room that was paid for, on a low maintenance hallway, with bathrooms that smelled like Sephora in the springtime.

I remember my mother pulling into the driveway of my dorm sophomore year. The rain on our car matched the tears rolling down my eyes. "I feel like I raised both you and your sister to do well in school, to win lots of awards, but to never give a second thought to helping your family."

She was blaming me for my self-centredness, my self-impressedness. But she was also blaming herself. Her example of self-sacrifice for her family had not rubbed off on us. Instead, it had backfired, because we saw in her the pains, the thanklessness of being family-oriented. We turned on our heels and cleaned our plates after six o'clock dinner and made ourselves some Spanish flashcards.

Two summers ago, I sent two letters to two different law schools. I don't remember exactly what I wrote. If I really wrote from the deep recesses of my heart, though, they probably would have said:

Dear Law School Personnel Who Should Lower the Registration Fee,

I have spent the last year working two jobs, planning a wedding, and applying to your school. I thought, a year ago, that, by now, I would be in a better state financially. I thought I would be eager to be getting married. I thought I would be accepting your acceptance of me to law school. Instead, I am still drowning in credit card debt, I am very nervous about getting married, and I will not be attending law school.

I know that none of this merits your attention. However, had I put nearly as much soul-searching as I have into my reasons for not attending law school as I had into devising the perfect essay on why you should accept me, I imagine I would not be writing this letter at all. The truth is that I am, for the first time in my life, lighting a small taper candle for my family's happiness. The family I grew up in was not the most happy family. It was supportive and wonderful in some ways, but I would not say it was a happy family. Now, it is my prerogative to build a happy family with my soon-to-be husband. And I do not think that I can endure law school and overpriced textbooks and competition with other Type A's like myself and then, subsequently, try to build a law career and still have a happy family. I understand that many people have done this successfully. But I believe that there are other things that I can do to net happiness for myself, which, passed on like taper candles, can set a small family ablaze with happiness.

Thank you for your kind attention. I am wishing you all the best for a very successful 2005-2006 academic year.

Sincerely,
Kendra Stanton Lee

I am not in law school, needless to say, and I will not take over my family's law practice. I will, however, remember that happily ever after for my family is now. It was not yesterday. Yesterday was a waste. Tomorrow, I...we will live happily ever after...

My Relationship with My Glasses

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I left my glasses at the Indian restaurant last night and for a few moments, I hoped that they would never be found. I hoped that some restaurant troll who stole towels from hotels and who always took fistfuls of matches and mints from restaurants would have noticed my lavendar spectacles sitting all forlorn in the empty booth and took them, thinking that they might be of some use or value or novelty. I am having a fickle relationship with my glasses these days. I don't like wearing them, but I need to wear them. Am some wack combination of farsighted and nearsighted. Cannot read street signs at night. Find computer screen rawther fuzzy during day. I look better with them on, what with my little eyes the size of pistachios and the dark lines that surround them. I saw a picture of myself from the other day and I looked like I'd been trainspotting for months. All I was missing was a chain wallet and a dog collar. Oosh, gurl.

The glasses which I now resist wearing were once the ones I oft-desired as a wee lass. In 1st grade, I convinced my mother that I needed glasses (conniving little trollop that I was) even though my vision was near perfect. It wasn't enough that I was the shortest and the newest girl in my class (I switched schools in October that year), but evidently, I needed more attention which a new set of specs could surely guarantee. Furthermore, my mother had a pair of goggles that I fancied. They were pale pink with a sculpted, feathery design on the side. They were the epitome of feminine. In 1986. I remember that she made me try to read the Palmolive bottle from several feet away. I purposely read aloud each letter incorrectly. P-A-I-N-... Well, I guess that settles it, said Mom. Time to go see Doctor Eye Ogler. Doctor Eye Ogler saw right through my thinly veiled plot to get hip to the new hardware. He pronounced my vision fine, my mother convinced that maybe I was just going through a growth spurt (that may have been the one and only) and that my eyes were just adjusting.

I never cried wolf again. The genuine need for the glasses presented itself in grade 12 when my grade in Physics (I took physics tuition) was spiraling at the speed of light in a negative direction because I could not read the board. To Lenscrappers I went, netting myself a pair of gold wire-rimmed numbers. My mother said I looked like "her little owl."

The wire-rims were retired my sophomore year of college when I opted for the trendy tortoise shell plastic frames that I lost repeatedly, replaced, and wore until last year. 2005: Enter: Purple. I don't know why I chose purple frames, except that I must have been experiencing a quarter-life crisis and was not yet ready to acknowledge my role in the professional world, a world where you could cut some corners (i.e. Wrinkle Release, like manna from Heaven for a gurl who hates to iron), but in which you have to make certain decisions about what's acceptable and what's not. There are clothes that can get you hired (pinstriped suits, crisp white oxford shirts, classic black clicky heels) and clothes that can get you fired (like, for example, wearing too much thong, too little pants). Purple glasses may not get you fired, but they may not get you hired, either.

Unless, of course, the woman who hires you is wearing the same glasses. Purple is hard to miss when it is on one's face, generally, and this bosslady spotted it immediately. Once responsibilities and salaries were discussed, we shook hands. "I knew it the second I saw the glasses," she began, affirming her confidence in my abilities. Since we had picked out the same glasses and all.

Glasses are sometimes obstructions, and sometimes masks. We can hide behind them, or we can feel hindered by them. This is, of course, an age when we can poke our eyes with flimsy transparent disks or splice our cornea and burn it with a laser so that we can see clearly without the use of glasses. I think about my life, my identity as glasses gurl. Sometimes, I want to shed them, and other times, I like that storekeepers remember my face, my little Cabbage Patch doll face with the pistachio eyes, set behind a pair of purple glasses.