Thoughts Upon Turning Eighty

Happy birthday to me.

I was an unexpected child, in that it was quite a surprise to my parents when my mother ended up pregnant again three months after giving birth to my older brother.  Since they were running on empty financially, I’m sure I was a burden they neither expected nor wanted.

I never asked my mother if she would have aborted me if she could have—because I was too dumb to think of it.  Would I have been happier being aborted, for my soul to attach to another body, to live another life?  Well, I have no way of knowing, but it’s a thought.

Since I was born on a Thursday, I gave my mother a chance to quote quite often, “Thursday’s child has far to go.”  Thanks, Mom, I left as soon as I could.

Having examined my childhood elsewhere in my blog, I shall lightly skip  over the first twenty-four years of my life.  I never quite fit in anywhere and didn’t have the ability to enjoy my odd-man-out status.  I always thought I should belong—somewhere, but somehow a welcoming group failed to make an appearance.  In other words, as Samuel Goldwyn had put it, “Include me out.”

School was something that never suited.  Although I mastered the art of getting good grades, I had to wonder why I was learning subjects I had no interest in.  Math?  Don’t ask.  I dropped out of high school physics after one class period, when I was asked to understand levers and pulleys.  Why?  They either worked or they didn’t.

History always fascinated me.  My favorite teacher in high school was Miss Newton, who taught world history and insisted we learn to outline.  I could have worshipped at her feet, had she ever realized I existed, but I was and remain a person no one really notices. I wasn’t even a flower on the wall. I was the wall itself.

In college I had to major in English because, by the time I decided I had no special abilities to hone, English was the only course open to me, if I wanted to graduate in four years.  Only later was I able to get a Master’s in history, taking course after course while my children were little.  That was my great escape.

After college, I taught for a year because that’s what women my age did, teach, get that magic teacher’s certificate so we could always support ourselves.  May I apologize to my students.  I was a horrible, horrible teacher.

Leaving after one year, I retreated to Katherine Gibbs to become an executive secretary.  I figured that was a 9 to 5 job and would leave me time to read and dream, until a former professor suggested I apply for the State Department.  To get through that process takes a year, and they never tell you where you are in the time/space continuum. So, when they called and informed me my training would start in July, I informed them I had already accepted a job in Princeton, New Jersey.  It was agreed I would start the government course in September.

Ah, Princeton.  What a stick up the butt you have.  And yet, there he was on the graduate commons, waiting to whisk me away into a life I never expected.  We met, we can never decide.  Was it June 21 or June 27?  In any case, we were married a little bit more than two months later on September 9.  Did I ever regret not joining the State Department? I think my being there would have been a disservice to the United States. I am simply not diplomatic.

My husband became a professor.  I became a wife and mother.  The first thirteen years of our marriage we were stuck in purgatory, aka, Urbana, Illinois.  But we traveled, the joy of my life—besides my children, of course.  (I had to stick that in there in case any of them reads this.). After a year’s sabbatical in Israel, we came back to Urbana, and both of us realized we were in the land of the dead.  In Israel every hour of every day something was happening.  In Urbana nothing happened.  The corn was planted, the corn grew, the corn was harvested, the land lay fallow.  The end.

I suggested to my husband that I was leaving him because life was too short to spend one more year in desolation.  He took a job he didn’t want in the Boston area; and from then on we became academic gypsies, traveling from Lexington, to DC, to Atlanta, dragging along our kids and destabilizing them in the process.  For this I am to blame. I would ask for their forgiveness, but I doubt it would be forthcoming.

While my husband did his professorial thing, I became a writer.  Yes, published, damn you for asking.  Look at my Amazon page amazon.com/author/cahaddad and buy some books!  This woman needs validation.

In Atlanta I was finally home.  I loved it.  It was like living in Lotus Land.  I taught at Georgia Tech and had friends there, as did my husband. I joined Hadassah, the working women’s nighttime branch, and met some really lovely women.  I let the whole ambiance of Atlanta envelope me.  But there’s always a snake in the grass, isn’t there?

Northwestern University came calling.  For my husband.  Not me.  Illinois?  Again!  Could life be so cruel?

My husband had an offer, chairman of a department.  Smugly, I said to him, well, if they double your salary, I’ll agree to go.  Those fucking bastards.

So, we folded our tent and moved again.  Fortunately, only one child was still at home for the upheaval.

The difference between Georgia Tech and Northwestern became apparent right away.  Georgia Tech cocktail parties were warm white wine, cheese, crackers.  Our first cocktail party at Northwestern, full bar, fat, plump, juicy shrimp.  In other words there were some compensations, moving from Atlanta to the icy north.

And we traveled.  In style.  My husband was in this organization and that, taking one executive position after another.  He was born to be a bureaucrat, if only he had recognized it sooner.  The travel was heavenly, the places we saw, the friends we made from all over the world.  Then—

My husband needed a stent for blockage in his arteries. Who knows why. He was always on the go, never could sit still, took the stairs, never the elevator in his building, swam every morning.  They did the operation and gave him metoprolol.  Lousy doctors never adjusted his dose for his size and weight.  He fainted three times, the third time nearly fatal.

That third time I got him to the emergency room, when all of a sudden he began saying weird things.  The test showed a brain bleed.  They sent him to another hospital.  Not only did the brain bleed explode but he had a C2 fracture of his spine.

The following months were one horror after another.  First, ICU, then semi-comatose, then finally into rehab, where the doctor told me that very first day my husband would never recover.

What the fuck.

By then my husband was in charge of a Master’s program for business people who wanted a handle on engineering.  Or something like that.  He could no longer teach statistics, for which I’m sure the students were grateful. But Northwestern, bless its heart, let him work two more years, increasing his pension, and then—

I had a grandchild.  I was never one of those women who wanted to be a grandmother.  I had no feelings one way or another.  Until Ilan was born.  The floodgates of my love opened and flowed from my heart to his.  Forever.

Ilan was born eight years before my husband took his fatal fall.  I know every grandchild is perfect to a grandmother, and okay, Ilan wasn’t perfect, but nearly so.  He was bright and funny and enjoyed my strange sense of humor.  I could do silly things with him I couldn’t do with anyone else. He was the sun that made life flourish.

Then the sun died and there was no more life.

We used to take family vacations, the four of us, me, my husband, my daughter and Ilan.  But my husband kept having one medical problem after another and this year, the ninth year of Ilan’s life, I gave my daughter money and said, sorry, I can’t come.  I can’t leave your father, and he’s going nowhere.

They were in Wisconsin, stopped to make a left turn into the road that would lead them to their lodging for the night.  A semi came barreling down the highway at well over the speed limit and smashed right into them, no brakes applied because the truck driver was looking at the corn fields instead of the road.  Those days with Ilan, my brain-damaged boy, were a slow dying for all of us.  The first night I was by his bedside when they tested him for pain and he reacted.  I can’t tell you the joy I felt.  He was alive, he could feel, he would get better, we would cherish him no matter his condition.

But the next morning the neurosurgeon said it was an automatic response of the body to pain. There was no brain function.

The end.

My daughter, who was severely injured, and I dealt with all the paperwork for organ donations.

I remember being down in the hallway on another floor and hearing a group of people rejoicing because their father was going to get an organ transplant that day and I felt like rushing up to them, grabbing them and screaming at them, don’t you realize someone has died for you to have that damned transplant!!!!!

Was it any comfort that the truck driver served time in prison for homicide?  I think it was for my daughter.  But I never wanted to think of that man ever again.

So here I am at eighty, what’s left?  I have another grandchild from another of my children.  She’s a beautiful girl, but she has RETT Syndrome.  So hard to communicate and she lives a far distance away, not close to me, so that I could have her every weekend as I had Ilan.

The grief has ebbed, the keening has stopped.  But my life is no longer lived in technicolor.  My husband’s in assisted living now, while I remain in our remodeled house.  I have friends.  I go through the motions of living.  But there is such a sadness in my soul.

So I’ve come full circle. There was a time when I was happy, when all was right with my world.  I clutch at that as I move forward toward my appointed hour.