Now I didn't mean the laundry room, per se. You see ten years ago I didn't imagine a life that included things like in-laws (or their laundry rooms). I certainly didn't allow room for dreams about daughters. I had myself well trained, actually. A constant habit of reminding myself about what I would never have had taken root. I was steeled for a life alone.
And then I'll be damned if I didn't meet Rob, my opposite in just about every way. I know that his presence in my life bewildered my parents and if you want to know the truth there are some days that it's still bewildering to me. But here we are, the two of us and a crazy little miracle we call Sara, kicking around this world like we were meant to be. And I think we were.
Ten years ago I had a mother and a father. I was more or less defined by this and arranged much of my life around the script of daughter. I didn't mind, really; I didn't know anything else. Eventually Rob came along and my character changed to daughter and wife, but my relationships with Mom and Dad were always more or less the same. But then life reared it's ugly head and, without any input from me, the roles changed. I became daughter and wife and caregiver and when Mom died I also became mediator, then advocate and nurse and lady-of-the-house. I did the shopping and cooking and forged my mother's signature. I carried a warm bottle to Sara and a handful of pills to Dad every night before I went to sleep. I took away his keys and at the same time, I suspect, his dignity. God help me, I learned to take care of an ostomy and then how to change his bedsheets when Dad couldn't get out of bed. I put reason aside and begged a hospice nurse to keep her real identity from my father -- and she did. I watched as another nurse came out to turn off my father's pacemaker, only a few hours before he died. And just like Mom almost two years earlier, I watched as Dad took his last breath. I can still feel the raw cold air of that late February day as it rattled the ice-covered windows, and see my father's mother standing in his room expressionless, seemingly numb by the death of her first born child.
Those five years of sickness and death were game-changers. I am now no longer daughter and even though I forfeited that title almost four years ago I am still struggling to understand what my new role really is. Certainly I am wife and mother, despite all those promises I made to myself before. But there is more to it than that, isn't there? Friend. Colleague. Neighbor. Sister. I am all of those things to be sure, but in looking at this abbreviated list it seems that each role is defined by someone else; none of them allows for the fullness of only me. So this is where I find myself, as I run head-long into my forth decade: Pulling on the uniform of each of these roles while simultaneously peeling off the layers to find out who is really in there.
Good Lord, talk like this is making my fifteen-year-old self gag me with a spoon, and twenty-year-old me thinks I need to just get over myself already. Thirty-year-old me is slightly more sympathetic as she has finally realized that she's not twenty anymore, and thiry-five-year-old me is too tired to care because she's trying to work, manage a newborn, and take care of her dying father.
Something tells me that thirty-five-year-old me would understand, though.
What's all of this have to do with the laundry room? Not a damn thing, I guess. Except that as I walked through there tonight it occurred to me that being right here, right now, is just about as far removed from all of my roles as I have ever been. I feel almost invisible. There was a strange freedom in that moment, and I never would have imagined that I would have such and experience in the laundry room of a Philadelphia suburb.
Twenty-year-old me is bored already and has asked me to wrap this up because, come on -- how complicated can life be?
Oh, sister. You have no idea.
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