“I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity.  It made me edgy.” ~Robert Redford~   

We needed a new place to live as our apartment was becoming too small and the new upstairs neighbor’s way too noisy.  And there it stood – the only house in the entire county that we could afford to buy.  It could have been the answer to a prayer, or the beginning of a nightmare.  At that point in time, the verdict wasn’t in, but the rumblings in my psyche gave me serious pause.

It wasn’t a bad house by any means.  It was small and built around 1870 – with some newer features like a bathroom.  It was also literally on the wrong side of the tracks – and I should have taken heed of this on first viewing.  As we drove across the main route, I had a sense of shifting vibrations.  Something positive and light from our small town of Highland Mills was becoming murkier in the great ether as we drove south toward the hamlet that would become home.  In any event, there was a little abandoned railroad station right down the street from the house.  It was broken and bleeding with neglect and the disuse of decades - a sad and lonely harbinger of how I would come to feel in this place.  Oh, certainly, it’s not all about what you get in life – from people or a place – it’s what you give.  But this isn’t always the barometer of what you actually encounter as you peel back the wrappings of experience.

The house stood there - nearly in the road itself - with all its quaint charm apparent.  I saw the niceties.  I got it.  But what I also saw was commitment.  A settling in and a deepening of roots.  A constraint of freedom and choices.  A permanency and capitulation to the general order of society.  And keeping with my established background of over three decades of non-conformity, this was a terrifying predicament.  Somehow, I had hoped or even imagined that I would have a remarkable life.  And now it was all coming down to this – the walls literally closing in.  There was certainly much to recommend this move; the fun of painting rooms, personal quietude and seeing the girls enjoy the new space and yard would be personally rewarding.  Having our own bedroom with a real mattress and a door for privacy – for the first time in four years – was quite a big thrill.  But like many things, it was in the nooks and crevices of my spirit where a quiet warning, a subtle protest was taking place.  I was at once, cautiously optimistic and deeply horrified.

This house was a normal step in the American evolutionary model and that contributed mightily to the haunting spectral quality of the endeavor.  It went against all the feelings that came fluidly to me.  Sure, just a house – wood, beams, nails.  But nails and wood could build many things – like Queequeg building the coffin in Moby Dick. 

I got married, I had children, I paid the bills and taxes, I cooked, cleaned and baked from scratch – wasn’t that enough?  Now the bastards of conformity wanted me to buy a house in the suburbs?  Eric was enthusiastic – but all of this was normal to him, no cause for concern.  And while he was at peace, my mind and heart rebelled, but obviously not loudly enough.  Ultimately, I convinced myself it would only be for a couple of years, until I sold my first novel – and then we would move on and live the life we both had envisioned in the early moments of our romance.

So, at the end of 1990, just before Christmas, we closed on the house – the 900 square foot house on the street, in the town, near the tracks.  And thus it began – a journey through a strange world that I never wanted to inhabit.  For over twenty years, what should have culminated in adaptation, never did.

The girls began preschool and my introduction to this unfamiliar world began in earnest.  I didn’t understand the previously established rules of this new sphere, but naively assumed it would go well and so I jumped right in.  It was an opportunity to expand my own world as well as the girls’.  And certainly, with the great ease that comes with love, I focused on my daughters and their needs – that was always the most effortless aspect of my life.  But life isn’t lived in a vacuum – lots of other elements find their way through the walls of your existence.  And with the girls and their burgeoning worlds, came an army of mothers with arts and crafts arsenals tucked strategically under their arms.  I came equipped with only coloring books and time for daydreaming and silly songs.

The suburban-mom-metrics were assiduously constructed with vigorous unity, and there was little deviation from the norm.  Sure, there were different kinds of people with varied backgrounds, but the fundamentals were all agreed upon long before my arrival on the scene, and I was ignorant of the system.  You didn’t have male friends in this milieu and at my age.  And if there were any alternative or artsy-type people in my neck of the woods, I certainly couldn’t find them.  Perhaps they were out there somewhere, but they were taking cover, not wanting to reveal themselves as outsiders.  The way it was set up: you did the class-mom thing, you dressed within stated boundaries.  You talked about school, children, malls, appliances, McDonalds and Walmart.  Everyone was speaking suburban-mom in a variety of dialects, while I was talking in a Masai tongue on the Serengeti.  Wives that engaged in the common and mandated vernacular of complaining about their husbands was a language that I didn’t understand.  I didn’t have “a husband” – I was with Eric.  The boredom and suffocating sameness of it all was Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” trapped inside my head. 

They weren’t bad people, and certainly not wholly unlikable.  But it wasn’t about whether I liked or disliked someone.  It was that I wasn’t one of them, I didn’t fit and they smelled that in the water.  I was like the alien in Signs – and the water they swam in together with such ease, was my kryptonite.  I wanted to be accepted as I was, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough, or I tried too hard.  And it’s not that I went along or felt compelled by the tides moving around me.  But sometimes the current gave a sharp tug and I allowed myself to be pulled along momentarily – just for a sense of community for myself, but more importantly, for the acceptance of my children.  Always though, the attempt at fitting in was unsuccessful.  There seemed to be a centrifugal momentum that kept spinning me out of the circle every time I tried to find some common ground.   

Oh, how much easier it would have been if I could have thrown myself in with abandon to traditional wifery and motherhood.  If only I knew how to fall into line with the regiment of suburban bromides – don’t have deviant opinions or outlooks, smile brightly at all times and agree with everyone else.  Abide by the general enthusiasm for life’s trivialities and across-the-board consensus.  But I couldn’t do any of those things, although occasionally I tried.  And I felt anxious and despairing of my own flaws and particular needs that prized real conversation and exploration over the dynamic of clichés and social superficialities.  Outside of the boundaries of my little home with Eric and the girls, I felt uneasy.  At times it felt as if I was suffering with delirium.  Was I even a real mom?  Sometimes I wasn’t so sure.  My love and unwavering commitment in raising our daughters was certainly real.  But everyone around me looked the part, lived the part, spoke all the dialogue perfectly – while my fun and unconventional home life – as well as my personality - was more a cross between The Birdcage and the Fisher family from Six Feet Under.

And certainly, there’s the mindset which suggests that – who cares what anyone thinks – just be yourself, free and fabulous!  Who needs to fit in anywhere!  But in a staunchly suburban setting, with peer pressure not only on your children, but squeezing in around you like that garbage compactor scene in Star Wars, pushing tighter and tighter the prerequisite of bland affability and conformity – the escape is trickier than depicted in the movies.  And when you don’t have friends that even remotely hold the same attitudes that you do, you may as well be Will Smith in I Am Legend – you’re on your own, pal.

I was constantly questioning myself.  Why did I seem incapable of just going along and being in sync with other people?  Why couldn’t I care about PTAs, new roofs and furniture, yard work and vacations to Disney World?  Why did I have to pretend that I didn’t find all these things existentially, soul-numbingly boring – but other’s could legitimately dismiss me and my more avant-garde tendencies?  I struggled as Belle did in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast – stuck in her provincial town, but there was no castle waiting for me with the library of my dreams and a dancing candlestick (although I had found my own Beast, some years before).  And though I brought my particular slant to everything I did, I struggled with the perceived expectations - for myself, and because I didn’t want my daughters to fall into a social abyss of my inadvertent creation.  But whatever I did, I often felt guilty that I was letting everyone down somehow because I needed to be more me.  And then the conundrum would begin dancing in my head – what was so terrific or unique about me that I should want to hold onto myself and my identity so tenaciously.

Most of the time you couldn’t tell by seeing me or even talking to me how tormented I was by this place that I found myself in – by the loss of a comfortable world that fitted my temperament, disposition and proclivities.  No one could see how hard it was for me to go through the paces – mother, wife, homeowner, suburbanite – sometimes even Eric didn’t know, and he knew me very well.  The psychic toll of this suburban wasteland and social claustrophobia was a cumbersome pressure to carry as I went through my days, months and years.  I loved my family too much to be totally unhappy, but there was a nagging dysmorphia clinging to me between the world I lived in and the person I was.  We had a good home for the girls – and it was a happy one.  There was music, laughter and constant communication.  And though we continued to dance through the rooms, too often in my inner chambers, I felt as if I were walking through quicksand.

As the girls grew – the demands and jarring disjointedness increased exponentially with their school years.  Preschool gave way to elementary, middle- and high-school.  The homogeneity factories were alive and kicking, just as they existed in my youth, if not worse.  School!  Just when I thought I was out – they pull be back in!  I not only had to help the girls maintain their equilibrium, but I had to navigate myself through the bureaucracy that often threatened to crush their spirits.  The trick in all this was to give my daughter’s enough structure to make it through the institutionalized system and be able to fit in with their peers – but at the same time, make sure they retained their individuality and resistance to blind obedience.  I didn’t want them to miss out on the simple, uncomplicated joys of their dad’s growing-up years.  But I couldn’t sell them vigorously on a set of criteria that I didn’t wholly believe in either.  I didn’t want them growing up like outsiders, but I didn’t want them to be numb to the realities of the world or willing participants in a system that would just cookie-cutter them into lumps of dough.  Another juggling act for a woman who wasn’t all that coordinated to begin with.

During these years, I was free-floating, alone with disquiet in my soul as I soldiered on through the battlefields of suburbia.  I became a “gym rat” – and this probably helped me burn off some of the frustration that followed me like a rabid dog.  I made some casual friends there – mostly men, a big taboo – but we met in the DMZ – the gym.  Unlike women, men will open a door with more welcome – even if only because you’re not wearing much, and look good in it.  It wasn’t much in the way of community and interaction, but it was the sole place - even in the most peripheral of ways - that allowed space for me for a while.

When my daughter, Sara, was in first grade, she was playing at a friend’s house.  The mother asked her if I worked.  Sara said that I did.  The woman asked her where it was that I worked.  Sara told her – “In the bedroom.”  Now, before this friend of Sara’s was due to come over to our house for the reciprocal “play-date,” the mother called me and gingerly related this story to me – clearly fearing the worst.  I laughed and told her that I wrote – and that my typewriter was in the bedroom.

So much had to be done all the time – for the house, the family and just for life’s varied maintenances.  My writing had to fit into the spaces that were left – but I crammed many novels, plays and short stories into those minutes of time.  At the same time, there was a cottage industry sprouting up around me dedicated to the fledgling writer.  Magazines, classes, writer’s workshops, conferences, lectures, how-to-books and more.  I looked through it all, but I couldn’t fit into that program either.  I just couldn’t bring myself to be another in a legion of hopeful, earnest amateurs, trooping to one conference or workshop after another, all reaching for the same brass ring.  I wasn’t that person.  So instead, I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars doing mass mailings of my work to every agent and publisher – repeatedly throughout the years.  You’d think I could take a hint after a stack of rejection letters accumulated into a pile that measured three feet in height.  But I’m tenacious like that.  I don’t give up easily, though eventually I did. 

I had one short story published and even tried my hand at self-publishing but I couldn’t even do that the way you’re supposed to – selling yourself, being your own agent and public relations person.   I just didn’t see things the way they actually worked.  Perhaps my failure was attributed in part to my bristling against the system in place – an inborn incompatibility with authority or direction.  I don’t know the answer – I never have – but more likely it was the fact that my talent wasn’t commensurate with my aspirations.  Calling myself a writer was the tether that kept me from falling headlong into the void of suburbia and invisibility.  It gave me comfort as I walked along out of step with everyone I knew.  It was a silent buffer, along with Eric and the girls, that made being a misfit, maybe not all that bad – at least, not all the time.

But how long can you say you’re a writer without an audience until it becomes genuinely pathetic?  There comes a point when the disappointment and sense of failure grew as the years totaled up way past the time of realistic discovery.  Validation and success grew more unlikely with each passing query letter and rejection.

Our daughter became ill when she was nine years old and this shattered the world and everything in it.  We could have lost her, but didn’t.  The scars of fear remained throughout the years, though the child healed.  And those scars focused me forever on what was important – indeed priceless.  This didn’t obliterate my struggles, it didn’t erase the loneliness or the bitter regret over buying this house – but it taught me lessons which became etched into my soul.

Mother was there through the years.  We included her in all of our life ceremonies and milestones, and much in between.  I would talk with her on the phone every week or so – and she would bewail all of Sister’s stresses and laud her with praise at every opportunity.  She would buy us all mountains of candy and snack foods for every holiday – so much so you’d have thought we weighed 700 pounds a piece.  She worked as a secretary during those years, coming home each night to my brother – burrowed away with his books and comics.  She’d see her only grandchildren when it suited her, but never tried to connect with them or establish a relationship.  All she offered was chocolate.

Sister finally found a boyfriend who stood the test of time.  He was a tall, very thin man from the land down under.  And whether one believes in astrology or not, it was always disconcerting to note that he shared the same birth sign with my brother and Mother, and quite a few characteristics as well.  As the years went on, his already perilously thin frame became ever gaunter, while Mother’s and Sister’s became plumper.  His family faded away as all things Sister took center stage – and that included of course, Mother. His friends and interests vanished like a magic trick.  His livelihood was compromised at times.  The one thing that perhaps saved even a small portion of his identity and kept it intact, might have been because he fervently didn’t believe in marriage.  Certainly this was cause to make Sister’s blood turn to bile.  But strangely enough, in this one area, his determination never faltered.  Though he gave his entire life and being over to her and Mother, he wouldn’t marry. 

They were a strange couple.  They lived together for years and hadn’t even said, ‘I love you’ to each other.  Even after, the words were rarely exchanged, and when they were, or if they were, it was more a tithing than an emotional expression of feeling.  Boyfriend must not have realized, or didn’t care what he was in for.  He threw his lot in with them and subsumed his life in every way imaginable.  Whatever Sister wanted she got through outright demand or devious manipulation.  Sister’s work at the U.N. came to an end.  She took a very early retirement due to stress – which seemed to stem from the fact that the rest of her office didn’t agree with her on various issues, and this was unbearably stressful to her.  Sister’s throes of despair at each and every turn, were never the result of dissatisfaction with herself.  They were born of an inchoate rage and fury at what she was entitled to receive but wasn’t getting.  She went through her life like a linebacker crashing through the opposition – which was everyone else.  She did seem to love the girls – but in a desperate, almost panicky way that made everyone involved anxious.  They could never convince her of their love and affection for her.  They could never seem to love her or accept her enough.  Nor could I. 

They were all included in our lives, although there were times throughout the years when I pushed them all away for periods of weeks or months.  My brother was never the problem, despite his Asperger’s Syndrome – it was always Sister and Mother.  I would need a break, very badly, from the rigors of trying to please them.  And there was no saying, “Let’s just chill for a week, I’m really swamped around here.”  Sister didn’t do that.  It was all or nothing.  She would ask me all the time, how I lived my life, as if I had some secret that would make her happy, but I was keeping it away from her out of spite.  How did I read the newspaper – because it took her too long to do?  How did I organize my life and home – because it was efficient, clean and things were accomplished – where hers was a never-ending series of loose ends and scrambling around, mine had space for calm, reading and fun?  She’d ask how I found time for sex?  How did I shower – in what order did I shampoo and all that stuff, because, again, it took her too long – well over an hour?  She’d want to know how I exercised, what did I do and how did I do it and when?  It was like a gaping maw moving in closer and closer and trying to swallow my life…much as she’d already swallowed the flesh from Boyfriend’s bones.  Kind of like that thing in the closet in the movie Poltergeist that swallowed up the little, blonde girl.

My brother died in 1995 of cancer.  A life so partially lived, was now brutally over, and it was devastating.  And then it immediately became a contest to see who wanted to kill themselves over his death more – Sister or Mother.  Oh, neither would have done it, there was never any worry about that.  But Sister threatened to run out into traffic and get hit by a truck.  Mother looked at her dully, not wanting to be bothered.  Mother then intoned sonorously and repeatedly, that she now had nothing at all to live for.  She didn’t even react this way when my father died.  I stood on the other side of the glass window and was dumbfounded.  Crazily, I suggested that Mother move up north with Eric and me, until we could find her a place of her own nearby.  She wouldn’t have to be alone, and she could see her grandchildren grow up and be part of their lives.  I offered this scenario several times, but my words were forgotten by both Sister and Mother, practically as soon as I spoke them.  But no matter, there was a space to be filled with my brother’s absence and Boyfriend stepped right in, as if he were born for the role.  The circle remained unbroken, if slightly reconfigured.

And then the girls became teenagers and new changes arrived by the day.  One of them began going through a difficult period.  An experience that further secured and lashed to my hull the priorities I had learned years before.  And it was during this time of great fear and concern, when my daughter had wings that were exceedingly fragile and on the verge of breaking, that Mother gave her a little push.  Was it intentional?  Probably not.  But it was unforgivable.  It was her pattern of self-involvement and narcissism that I had witnessed all my life - but now its victim was my daughter.  And that’s when things ended between us. 

Eric and I lived simply – fundamentally hippies.  We were sustained by love, constant laughter and common purpose.  Our children were wildflowers – but they were tended and comforted by structure and love.  We raised them with a mind toward giving them wings to fly and minds to question.  In so many ways, these were good years – solid years, with enchanting memories.  But still, for me the unwelcome ache thrummed in the shadows.  The years were churning away faster.  My thoughts and feelings orbited, digressed and sped around corners as I tried to adjust to the loneliness and incompatibility that surrounded me outside of Eric and the girls – as well as the loss of a career which added another heavy layer of exclusion.  Sometimes, I was a tiger in a cage, forever pacing – if only internally.

I did the best I could in the town, in the house, by the tracks.  But it turned out to be an even colder and more forbidding environment than I feared when we started out, so many years ago.  The house was a symbol to me of my misfit status of long-standing.  And there was no getting away from it now.  We were financially wedded to it.  This place, this house, it had all changed and yet remained the same throughout the years.  It was its own Time Warp, but not the one we danced to at our wedding.  The girls were moving on with their lives – college and beyond.  Miraculously, they did manage to transverse the pressure-plagued, competitive and popularity-infused, hierarchal school system – academically successful, well-liked but also spiritedly independent, questioning and possessed with quite extraordinary original thinking.  They weren’t misfits, but they weren’t followers or easily classifiable.  Sara - fierce and brilliant with a shrewd and delightful sense of humor, and an intelligence that was at times nearly frightening in its capacity.  She could also throw a football like nobody’s business.  Emma was strong and gifted with her feet firmly planted on the ground, but sometimes her head lovingly planted in the clouds.  She had a wonderful ability to surprise, delight and knock any preconceived expectations out of the ballpark.  Eric and I were strong, inexorably intertwined and still laughing – always laughing.  The girls were leaving and we’d be alone again.  As the girls were here less, the rooms inside the walls were getting quieter.  There was so much that was good in our lives and so much that had changed through the years.  But the fact of my being a misfit hadn’t altered; it had grown more rooted, like our roots with this house.  I was standing there, in a windswept landscape of the heart and mind, looking ahead – trying to see what was in store for me in the next chapter of my life…