Susan

I met a social worker named Susan a few weeks back, and had the pleasure of having dinner with her again last night. I have a raging case of PMS, so dinner wasn't actually the pleasurable part. Her children, my children and another family's children, plus the chatter of the three couples was just too much for me. PMS for me translates into, in addition to the extreme bitchiness we all know and love, near migrane grade headaches. I was irritated beyond my ability to socialize. I was doing my best. But then, later in the evening as she said goodbye, we started to talk. Hours later, as we stood saying the final, different, 'real' goodbye, after her kids had thanked me for keeping her talking, we talked about yesterday's blog. The tiredness, and my ability to see that if I had let it have the best of me, like I have so many times in the past, I would only have set John back in his climb out of the hole that has swallowed him, and I, consequently, would have felt like shit about it. She looked a little amazed and said that I was right, that I had said it just right, and that I was smart. Then she said, 'You should have been a social worker.'
Lost in my own thoughts lately of what I can do with my life, now that I recognize that it is indeed my life, I smiled a wry smile and said, 'I should have done a lot of things.' She apologized profusely, saying that she hadn't meant to blah blah blah, just like a social worker, and I laughed and tried to explain that it wasn't taken that way, and that I've just spent a lot of time recently trying to determine what I would be good at, could do lifelong, use to support my family and be proud of all at the same time.
Sometimes I think back to a class I had with Mrs. Lusa in junior high. Some kind of social studies class where we had to act out a courtroom scene based on this set of circumstances and facts. I was the attorney and in the midst of an argument the person I was arguing against, a boy named Matt, I think, with dirty dishwater blond hair in a bowl cut, stopped acting and said with awe, 'You should really be a lawyer some day.' The audience nodded in unison, and I realized then that I could be anything I wanted to in other people's eyes, but in my own I was still my mother's stupid, lazy, incompetent mistake. I could not reconcile, at that age, the outward view of me with my inner view. Now I wonder as I grow emotionally, away from home for the second time in my 34 years, will I come out from under the shadow and bloom, or do I still fear the light? Is it possible there is no other shoe to fall? I believe in myself now, but the habitual self destruction still lurks in me like the Loch Ness Monster. No one seems to believe in it, but I've seen it rear it's head, terrifying and beautiful. It is the defense mechanism. It's what kept me alive and functioning in my totally disfunctional family as a kid. Those days, as they say, are gone. Now what will I do? Thank you, Susan, for reminding me there is more in me than I am always able or willing to see.