Reclaimed Ambition

By Antonia Malchik

You’d think, given Russia’s tumultuous history, the country would have a more dramatic landscape than the one it inherited. Its revolutions and massacres cry out for powerful mountains, like the Rockies that defined my childhood. Instead, its few sprawling cities trickle out into miles of taiga—boreal forests, the first obvious shift being groves of aspen trees quivering in that silvery way they have, flashing light from leaves in high summer. Watercolor paintings with a ubiquitous gray-pink winter sky and lone Russian Orthodox Church domes seem incomplete without the aspens. They are rooted in the allure of the country and its history, a culture in which poetry is pre-eminent and the past wrought hard with stoic endurance.

Aspens are communal. A grove of aspens is actually one organism, connected via an underground root system that sprouts from an individual seedling. These underground systems withstand the most devastating forest fires and regenerate with young seedlings—all genetic clones—that can grow up to three feet a year. While each tree itself might only live for a few decades, the entire root system can survive hundreds or even thousands of years—stands have been found in the American West that are tens of thousands of years old.

The analogy to Russia is hard to miss if you know something of the country’s history. Russian communities had traditionally worked as a collective, or mir, bound by a concept translated as “joint responsibility.” A community as a whole, not individuals or families, was responsible for things like tax payments and military conscription. Land was redistributed every now and then as families grew and shrank. The system had been in place for hundreds of years, long before America was formed, and functioned right up until it ran into the Bolshevik revolution. Mir wasn’t an idea formed by utopia-seeking philosophers; Russia’s “geographical vulnerability and agricultural marginality,” as one historian puts it, made joint responsibility a requirement for survival.

Like the mir, aspen trees thrive by virtue of their collective strength and resources.

•••

My Russian-born father told me (incorrectly, it turns out) that aspen wood was useless. He was visiting a few months after I had taken my first woodworking class, and I’d been getting a little obsessive about wood. More often found mixing bread dough in the kitchen or with head bent over a notebook, pen in hand, I’d recently begun using a drill and a sander and filling the back of my station wagon with abandoned stumps and branches dragged out of the woods. I’d been making three-legged tables and driftwood chairs, the sound of the orbital sander whining in my unprotected ears. I’d abandoned my usual flowing skirts in favor of jeans and tried applying a screeching, vibrating axle grinder to the innards of a cedar knot. (I had no idea making a rustic wooden bowl would be so violent.) I spent months making a table out of a solid block of maple, even now marveling at the beauty that emerged from the deep scars left by an indifferent sawmill, how its ripples and honey colors make me feel alive.

I’d lost myself sometime in the previous year. I’d grown numb, then tired, then depressed. My children’s demands crashed onto my head, crushing me into exhaustion as if I’d been sandbagged, and daily I stared out the windows, contemplating what their future would be in the face of climate change and epidemics of antibiotic-resistant superbugs and planetary chaos, wondering what the point was of trying to teach them to read, or forcing them to always say “please,” or denying them as much chocolate as they wanted.

I knew these thoughts weren’t healthy, much less helpful. I needed a distraction that would take me out of the house and require me to do something besides think too much. My head had taken over my life. Every day was split among my job as a freelance copy editor, the thousand fractured moments that came with caring for small children, and writing. Even my leisure time was taken up with books. Mothers like me often say that they’re drowning, but I wasn’t drowning; I was turning into some gaseous substance that moved through the ether, that existed but couldn’t feel. So I signed up for a rustic woodworking class hosted by the local nature museum at random because it sounded more enticing than lectures on birds. In that first class, I spent a day learning to make a chair using driftwood branches and a drill, and I got hooked. Over the next few months, woodworking started to drag me back down to the ground I’d always loved.

•••

My father and I had just dropped my son off at a part-time kindergarten surrounded by birch and aspen trees, and we were taking my daughter, Alex—or she was taking us—for a walk around the property before getting back in the car.

“It’s horrible now, looking at all this wood,” I told him. “I can’t just appreciate it anymore. I want to take it all home and make things with it.”

“Not with aspen.” He picked up one of the hundreds of limbs lying around and showed me: where it had broken off the tree, the branch’s guts were exposed. They looked like bundled fiber optic cable or a bag of spaghetti, except thicker. If you tried to cut it, it would crumble to pieces. Bound together, several branches would barely be strong enough to hold something up.

“It’s no good,” my father said. We walked up and down the driveway of the school’s property, Alex stopping to poke decaying leaves and swing her dinosaur umbrella around, narrating every step we took because she never, ever stopped talking.

“I wish we could do this more often,” I said. My father knew that I had never been a lonely sort of person. But I did get lonely for this: his company, walks and conversations, my family, my home, mountains and trees that nurtured and spoke to me and people who understood me, who laughed at my stupid, snarky jokes. He lived in Russia, back in his homeland, and I in New York, and we saw each other once a year at best, often only once every two years.

“You need more help,” he said, returning to our earlier conversation. I’d told him about feeling overwhelmed. I hadn’t mentioned that I was feeling numb and depressed and non-existent.

I’d told my older sister, though. She lived off in California with her three kids. My family was so widely scattered that it wasn’t even deserving of the word. My younger sister lived in Oregon, my mother in Montana, my in-laws in England, and, of course, my father in Russia. I had a few friends where we lived, but not a single one that I could call on for regular help in any but the most dire of emergencies.

“I know. What can I do, though?” We’d talked about my husband and me moving back to Montana. I didn’t know how much help it would give me in the mothering, the living, the feeling of non-existence, but I craved my home like drink, like the coldest, purest spring water that runs off the peaks no tourists ever venture to. I wanted to be there, closer—if not to every single family member then at least to the place we were mutually attached to.

•••

Aspen, I found out later, is actually widely used for random things you never think about—wooden matches and shredded paper packing material, for example, because it doesn’t burn as easily as other wood. It can be used in furniture but is hard to work because it’s soft and tends to shred or “fuzz” (to use a fancy woodworking term), can gum up equipment, and often refuses to take a finish or stain, although its softness makes it easy to shape. While it’s still used in areas of Russia for roofs, the wood has to be absolutely sound or it ends up rotting quickly.

The wood that my father and I picked up had been lying on the wet ground for a long time. It was decaying; we could pull it apart with our fingers. But its community would continue to thrive. Even when aspen trees are cut down, the root system keeps going, sending up multiple clones for every felled tree. Killing the roots requires girdling, a process of carving out a band of the bark, cambium, and phloem in a circle around the trunk. Girdling prevents nutrients from reaching the root system, which will eventually die.

I didn’t tell my father everything: that it wasn’t just parenthood and the lack of help. That my unmooring had a lot to do with how my writing ambitions had shipwrecked a couple of times, leaving me despairing for several months; how I then let the kids’ learning and nurturing slide into too much television and a reliance on packets of organic hot dogs. How useless I felt as a human being. I couldn’t tell him these things. Not when his parents had survived Stalin’s purges, when his father had made his way out of the Siege of Leningrad in the middle of the starvation winter, stumbling in the last stages of dysentery, when his mother had worked night shifts as a metallurgical engineer up in the Ural Mountains and then gone home to hoe potatoes and hunt for mushrooms and chop wood to keep her children alive. They’ve left so much to live up to.

I didn’t tell him how I’d started shying away from a particular shelf in our bookcases, where The Artist’s Way is kept, among other creativity/inspiration volumes of its kind. Memories of all those morning pages—three free-association pages handwritten immediately on waking, as sternly instructed in The Artist Way’s introduction—the weekly artist dates required, supposedly, to nurture my inner artist self, the facing of fears and claiming of goals, of throwing the doors of the inner self wide open to serendipity—they form a tender spot, a sore point, a wound.

My writing ambitions weren’t a secret from my father. I was one of those children who would write short story collections, in crayon on yellow legal pads, and bind them together with yarn and cardboard. In my twenties, I went off to an MFA program after two unproductive years as a journalist. And I worked really, really hard because hard work is the thing I’m best at. The harder I worked, the higher my ambitions became. I formed big dreams. Huge dreams. Dreams of many published books and attendance at notable conferences and magazine editors tapping out emails to me.

Dreams all out of proportion with what I wanted the rhythm of my life to feel like. The continued refusal of those dreams to come true infected my parenting, my friendships; they sucked the life out of all the little things I used to take pleasure in: cooking, making jam, weeding the herb garden, watching the heron fish at the pond next door, teaching my son math. I let those dreams define who I was, forgot what it meant to be a complete human being.

When I started woodworking, I hoped to find myself in the wood, or at least find a sense of groundedness in the physical labor. I started volunteering at a local hardwoods sawmill and became ravenous for information: why elm is so hard to mill and work (it twists and warps and its grain runs every which way), what black locust is used for (anything from artsy coasters to decking because it’s as hard as cement), what created that thin, black lacing—like a spare Picasso pencil drawing—in the sliced trunk of maple lying around (spalting, caused by fungus, which makes for beautiful furniture or bowls if caught early and dried thoroughly but makes the wood too weak to use if left to spread). I wanted to learn how to work with different woods, but I also wanted a metaphor for who I was. Secretly, I hankered to relate to maple, like the table I made after the scars were sanded down and the exposed beauty glossed with beeswax and almond oil.

Instead, the more I saw of the whole, beautiful hardwoods laid out under my sander or sliced open in eight-foot lengths on a Wood-Mizer mill, the more I felt crumbly inside, full of barely connected shreds. Like aspen. Prone to rot.

•••

“Leap, and the net will appear,” claims one of the paragraphs in The Artist’s Way, which has been a kind of writer’s bible for almost three decades now. “Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can,” which I realize now simply translates to “Work really hard and hope for some luck.” Because the bus driver might be a jerk and refuse to stop, or you might trip and fall on the sidewalk, or someone will suddenly block your way.

Where is the space between acceptance and giving up? Between loving who you are and turning your back on hope?

Walking with my dad, I pondered these questions but didn’t speak them aloud. I loathed my own first-world myopia because I was in fact wallowing in the pain of unattained ambition, not fleeing chlorine gas attacks in Syria, or throwing myself around my child’s body while American drones dropped bombs over my Pakistani village. I had never even suffered the self-dissolving pain of miscarriage or infertility, as many of my friends had.

I should be grateful for what I have, do something actually useful with my life, like my father’s parents had managed to do even when faced with hardships that I can barely imagine.

I want to be better, I wished I could tell him. To be less ambitious, less desirous of recognition. To know throughout myself, not just intellectually, that the potentials I once dreamed of and haven’t reached do not mean I’ve failed. I have done many hard things in my life, but this feels like the hardest: To accept that my existence might never be like a shining block of silver maple carved into a work of art, or an oak tree that will last untold generations.

Separated from my family, from the very few friends I have and treasure, from the mountains and pine forests that formed me, my art, my creativity, feels all-consuming, the one thing that defines my structure and growth. Working with wood helped bring me back to earth. I felt made of flesh again, rather than of the ether. But the depression only started to lift when I redefined my ideas of success in terms of fulfillment because when I looked back over the previous few years, the memories that brought me pleasure had nothing to do with writing accomplishments. The memories that glowed for me were nearly all related to my family, to time spent with my far-flung community, and to hiking and walking, relating in earth-bound ways to the Earth I love so deeply: walking the high cliffs plunging into the ocean on Scotland’s Isle of Islay with my husband and in-laws, taking ten days off to help my overworked younger sister with her new baby, meals and conversations lasting well past midnight with my Russian relatives, trekking through the islands of St. Petersburg with my uncle, picking Montana huckleberries with my husband, laughing for hours in our giddy way with my sisters. My daughter retrieving her rain boots and umbrella and telling me firmly that she’s going out to “play with the rain.” My son reading a Little Bear story, stumbling but persistent, to his grandparents over Skype. My mother playing the guitar and singing one of her folk songs to my kids after we spent the night at her husband’s backcountry cabin, where the sheer weight of the unfiltered Milky Way made me realize how long I’ve lived under light pollution. That I’d forgotten how arresting the unshrouded night sky is.

The thrill of a magazine’s “yes” for an essay or an agent’s interest in one of my books burns out quickly and leaves no glow like these memories do. Only the act of writing itself comes close, reflects that slow crunch of my hiking boots over dry pine needles fallen on the mountains that are part of me.

In the same way I can work with wood slowly and honor its inner structure, I want to take my writing and transmute both the excitement inherent in success and the sting that comes with every failure. I want the whole process to take a more human scale, to become as creativity should be—not majestic or overwhelming or stunning, but nurturing to everything and everyone that surrounds it, part of the earthbound root system that keeps us alive.

Relating myself and my writing to aspen’s weakness and lack of inner beauty is not accepting a lower state of being. It’s part of a whole. And, when I am gone, my existence can still be worthy as shredded pulp to shelter my community or a matchstick to light a stranger’s way.

Like the members of a mir, like aspen groves, I need community. We all do, just as we need clean water and air, as we need to work and to laugh. To feel that we belong and that we have something worthwhile to contribute is necessary to human survival, a fact I had to lose myself to figure out.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK lives in upstate New York, where she sometimes blogs about wood and writing and parenting and philosophy on Pooplosophy. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People and can be reached through her website antoniamalchik.com.

When the Floor Dropped Out

heartonastring — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com

By Erica S. Brath

The kitchen floor is sinking. It’s not a shock―it’s been failing for quite some time. I step to the sink and feel it give under me. Even worse, when I’m washing dishes and the hubby steps next to me to get something from the cabinet, I’ve suddenly lost an inch.

At first we decided we had to fix it. After all, it’s directly under the sink, meaning we have a leak.

“We have to take care of it, or we’re going to be breathing in black mold, which is unbelievably unhealthy for us and the dogs, who are stuck in here all day, and eventually the floor’s going to drop out,” my sky-is-falling husband initially barked. Back when we discovered the problem. Back when we gave a damn.

Since then, larger, more pressing problems have presented themselves, and like we did with the floor, we’ve pretty much just let them go too.

It’s not laziness; it’s survival.

Three and a half years after we moved into this ancient metal sheet-clad camper that was never, ever meant to be used for more than a few weekends a year, I’m still stepping gingerly atop the spot as I wash a pan from dinner. A chore unto itself.

The hot water heater, located at the back of the camper and yet another problem unto itself, began leaking months ago―the plastic piece that connects the water line gave way, and the new one is back ordered. So, I boil pots of water on the stove, adding a couple of electric kettles’ worth for good measure, to one side of the ceramic sink. I soak the dirty dishes in hot, soapy water, then rinse in cold. It never really gets anything fully clean.

I’ve done all the small stuff, and now I can clean the frying pan. I empty the soapy water, scrub it off, rinse it in cold and place it, gleaming, into the itty bitty drying rack, the words All Clad stamped into its sturdy handle.

The pan is one of a few holdouts from the previous iteration of my existence. Back when I could afford an entire set of All Clad. Back before the proverbial floor dropped out.

•••

“The more you make the more you spend,” a friend admonished recently when I explained that I need a better paying job. I have to admit that was the old version of me: I lived that life, making more and, consequently, spending more. I’d spend entire Saturdays shopping, not content until I came home, arms bulging from my latest retail conquest.

My friend Nora and I used to have a game in high school―we’d try to see who could score the most cool stuff for the least amount of money. It’s a game I continued to play well into adulthood. But unlike in high school, when the cheapest, gaudiest earrings or most sole crushing pleather shoes could rate high on the awesome scale, I later refined my retail love to pretty much only the best, for less.

Which is how I wound up with an apartment full of designer duds, high-end small appliances, and damn near useless bakeware. Not to mention the bright red Volkswagen in the drive. I was expected to live the part of employed professional with a master’s degree. You showed your worth by what you owned.

The problem is, you have to continue to maintain that trajectory, constantly making more. Your belongings denote your status in the hierarchy of common culture, no matter what subset of the culture you belong to. I remember, as an undergraduate working full-time while taking a full load of classes, marveling on my way to work at the black-clad punks begging on Haight Street. Their leather jackets, tattoos, piercings, and Doc Martens cost more than my tuition. They were faux po’, playing the part. They’d scurry back to the ‘burbs during the week, probably troll the mall for more black duds with their weekend beggings. Whereas I was plain ol’ po’, heading to the graveyard shift at the local diner.

I grew up fairly poor, until my father started making a decent salary as an airline pilot when I was in high school. I went from hand-me-downs to a fancy hand-built German sports car in the blink of an eye. But I still paid for my own education, working though my twenties to cover living expenses while earning my BFA. I was the proverbial starving artist, but in those days it was impossible to tell who truly was and who was the trustafarian.

Without a family fortune in my back pocket, I had no choice but to work. That included the usual twenty-something jobs ―barista, waitress, data-entry temp―along with bike messenger, tourist t-shirt designer, and phone warrior for the environment.

I never made much at any of these gigs, but they fulfilled two important aspects to my working life, in addition to paying the rent: a job where I could continue to be creative outside the daily grind and work where I wouldn’t lose my soul.

The problem came after grad school when I bought into the hype of my own superiority, my unassailable right as a member of the educated creative class to make more money than I actually needed to survive. I was told, and believed, that I deserved everything money could buy and more, by virtue of having attended school. Never mind the fact that I financed my degrees to the nines. Never mind the fact that all that learning made me no better than anyone else. I had a piece of paper, but I was still me. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

But that was then and this is now, and my current now is actually not so far from where I was back before my ego got the better of me.

The difference is that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t maintain the ruse. Probably part of the reason the soft kitchen floor doesn’t seem like the problem it really is: there are only so many fires that can be put out before you just don’t care if the motherfucker burns.

So, we just move forward, leaving all that was behind in physical and emotional form. Or at least try.

•••

My husband needed work pants, so we headed to the Goodwill. Browsing others’ cast-offs, I froze in the housewares section. An empty picture frame sat on the shelf, innocuous, seemingly nothing, except for the fact that, in my mind, I could see the photo that belonged in it.

“Oh my god, this was mine,” I gasped.

“Are you sure? Look at the back—was it messed up like this?” he said, turning over the faux stained-glass frame with flowers pressed between glass. It was very poorly constructed, with the lead messily bulging out where some shoddy worker, likely ill paid or, worse, forced labor, hadn’t given a damn.

“I… I’m not sure,” I stammered. I honestly didn’t know. I’d owned the thing for years, but couldn’t remember the back. And why would I? When I put the photo in it, I’m certain I wasn’t paying attention, and I know I wasn’t the day I took it out, shortly before nearly everything I owned in our tiny one-bedroom was left sitting in its place, like Miss Havisham finally gave up and walked away. Or, like us, was forced out for lack of cash.

I think of all the things we left behind, all the things we bought when times were flush, and wonder why. Why the hell did I need all that crap when, eventually, it would all just wind up in a Goodwill somewhere for me to find and not only not need, but not be willing to purchase again?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m against stuff. On the contrary. Sure, I lost just about everything in the financial meltdown and what I do have pretty much sucks. My car doesn’t have heat. Or a working radio. I live in a goddamned RV. I live in a hallway, really. But I have to admit that walking away from everything caused me to rethink, well, everything.

Would it have changed the situation if I hadn’t purchased any of it? In the long run, not at all, because we had a significant amount of money in savings as well, which we ran through in practically no time. I was out of work for two years―an amount of time that requires trust fund money, not the piddly bit we’d squirreled away.

Yet my fiscal downfall hasn’t turned me into the miser of my grandparents’ ways. They survived the Great Depression and never really recovered, at least in their own minds. I remember their front door. I remember my grandfather stuffing newspaper in the cracks between it and the jamb each night, placing a bean-filled snake along its base, to keep the draft out.

After they died, my aunt went through the place. She found several thousand dollars in rolled-up small bills, stuffed in corners, under towels, a fifty folded neatly under the statue of a coal miner atop the china cabinet. They could’ve bought that front door dozens of times over with the money tucked away inside that house. But they suffered in fear of losing everything yet again.

Trust me when I say I never, ever want to not be able to buy the little things. I will never willingly don a hair shirt and wander the earth a pauper. I love Sephora far too much. I’m not willing to give everything up. I’m not the Buddha. Being able to afford a cup of coffee when I want one is one of the few pleasures I will never take for granted. I remember taking the bus to work after the car quit right before the economic fall. I sat down, tried to take my bag off my shoulder, and dropped my coffee all over the floor. As I watched it roll around under peoples’ feet, spreading in opposite directions with each turn and jolt of the bus, I quietly cried, because I knew I didn’t have money to buy a new cup. And I had eight hours of non-caffeinated work ahead of me. That was hell.

I still don’t make enough to tuck even pennies away right now, but my determination is that as things get better, I will find balance. My car may be old, but it’s a sturdy Volkswagen. I won’t be trading it on something shiny, cheap and new. No matter what kinds of eye rolls I get when I pull out my old non-smart phone, I won’t give in to new gadget pressure. And I’ll be happy about the fact that the things I did purchase before the fall—the ones we managed to save that are tucked away in a tiny storage space in Philadelphia—were quality enough to last a good long time. The memory foam topped mattress we strapped to the top of the Golf because it was on sale, the Kitchen Aid mixer―the only actual item we got when we got hitched―that will probably outlast me, the espresso maker, my grandmother’s sewing machine.

I won’t live in this disgusting, falling-apart Tin Can forever, but I might get a bigger one. Or not. But no matter what, I’ll remember what matters―having a job, sure, that pays me what I’m worth. And doesn’t suck the life force out of me in return. I am not my job, and I am not my possessions. As much as I swoon over the Vitamix and the perfect smoothies it makes when I go to the grocery store, I can live without it. For now. Maybe one day I’ll find it at a great price and it will end up with the rest of the keepers.

•••

ERICA S. BRATH is a journalist and writer currently living in Ithaca, New York. She has written for publications including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Certification Magazine, and Men’s Health. She is currently working on a memoir about her experience living in a travel trailer full-time. Her website is esbrath.com.

Water from a Well

wheelchair — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Sarah Pape

Roger lived in the kind of house I coveted: a swatch of deep green manicured lawn, the clean white paint of a new development, and high ceilings. The higher the ceilings, the more desirable the home. That’s what I thought at nineteen, living in a two-bedroom apartment where, when you flipped on the light, cockroaches scattered. This was our first place as a family—Rik, me, and our seven-month-old baby, Sylvia. We’d just gotten married and everything we owned was second hand. We would go to yard sales every weekend, holding things up to each other, as if to say, “This? Is this what grown ups own?”

We bought a little tabletop ironing board and an iron so that I could press Rik’s thrift store button-ups and slacks. He was working at a dealership trying his best to sell cars to people who wandered onto the lot. He didn’t have the bloodlust for it and would come home dejected and wrinkled after sweating all day on the blacktop. We were living off of meager commissions and mercy checks from my family, waking up every morning with the dread of having to make another call—either to the bank to argue overdraft charges or to feign a casual tone as I worked up the courage to call my mom or grandparents to ask for more.

Late one night, I picked up the worn Want Ads that Rik had fallen asleep with and began looking for something I could do. I only had one year of community college under my belt, but I could type and write. I began feeding a fantasy of becoming a secret shopper or someone who “makes money from home,” going so far as to pay fifty dollars to get the catalogue for products one could assemble. It turned out to be dollhouse furniture. They would send you the pieces. I did the math and realized it would take thousands of tiny desks and bunk beds to even pay the electricity bill.

Then I saw Roger’s ad in the Personal Services section: “I’m a disabled man in need of light cleaning, grocery shopping, and assistance with physical exercise. Some experience necessary.” We had only lived on our own for a few months, but I was learning quickly how to manage the domestic. I wasn’t meticulous, but we cleaned enough to hold the roaches back. I knew how to shop on a budget. In fact, some nights I would take the baby and go wander the aisles of a store, loading up the cart and then putting everything back. I was rehearsing for the day that we would have enough money and could buy whatever we wanted. That’s what success meant to me then. That’s why I was practically salivating when I pulled up to the white tract house when I arrived for an interview the next day.

•••

People in wheelchairs don’t scare me. My grandmother, who had contracted polio at twenty-five, lived her life—and mine—on wheels. My cousin and I would fight over her chair when she would get into her recliner for an afternoon nap, using a slide board to bridge the distance between the wheelchair and her destination. Careening down the long, marble hallways, we could balance on the back wheels, spinning in circles. As we got older, Nonie needed more help getting in and out of her chair. They eventually bought a nylon sling that hooked to a manual lift. Once you hooked each corner to the mechanism, you pumped a lever that incrementally lifted her into the air. She would hang there in the cradle of the nylon sling as you wheeled her to where she wanted to go.

It was my experience with this that convinced Roger to hire me. He was impressed that I knew what a Hoyer Lift was and that I could easily identify all of its parts. That first day, he showed me around his huge three-bedroom house: the office where he had a massive computer set-up with voice recognition, his kitchen with flats of Gatorade and Mountain Dew, his bedroom with one wall covered from floor to ceiling with jerseys and t-shirts signed by rock stars and athletes. He loved heavy metal. His long red hair was tied back in a loose braid, something that would eventually become my job to maintain.

I met Roger on the decline. The first few evenings when I came to work, he had me help him into his hot tub, after which I would dress him, then hook up the lift and place him into the waterbed. It was an ordeal, but the process promised to bring him some relief from his muscles, strung tight and prone to spasms. Roger had always been afforded any technology or machinery that could help him function independently, but he had advanced cerebral palsy and his body was nearing its limits.

There were a series of exercises and stretches that he needed me to assist him with. He would lie on his back, and I would put one leg up onto my shoulder and push it toward his upper body. It was part porno, part gymnastics coaching. His already contorted face would twist into agonized knots as he slurred for me to keep pushing. Then I would take turns sitting on his thighs, straightening his stiff, bent legs. Most nights, he would fall asleep with me on his lap, some infomercial droning from the TV next to the bed, the remote out of my reach.

And he coughed through everything. After many bouts of pneumonia, he had a compromised respiratory system and he would hack to the point of vomiting. Nothing seemed to help. It would just eventually stop, and he’d lie there panting from the effort of it all.

At midnight, I could go home. I ached toward those illuminated numbers on his nightstand, littered with cough suppressant, bottles of Gatorade, and empty bottles for him to pee in during the night. My breasts would be rock-hard and full of milk by the end of my shift, and I would selfishly hope for my baby to be awake as I maneuvered through the empty streets toward our tiny apartment. Just to take the pressure away. To soften me enough that I might fall asleep, still hearing, in my sleep, Roger’s incessant cough that sounded like dying.

As we worked to get him ready in the mornings, I had to train myself to not ask if he was okay. No matter what coughing, vomiting, muscle spasm that had just occurred, Roger would nod vigorously that he was fine and wanted to move on to our next task, undeterred by physical discomfort that would undo most people. We had more important issues at hand. He relied on me to not only dress him but to make sure he looked good.

“This one?” I would ask, holding up a pressed black button-up shirt.

“Nope. K-k-ke-keep looking,” Roger urged me deeper into his walk-in closet, decades of clothing lining each side.

I held up two more, “Either of these?” Vigorous head shaking. No.

“Wh, wh, what, what would your hus-hus-husband wear?”

I thought about Rik and the pile of faded black band t-shirts he pulled from most days, and then the ironed polos on hangers from his short-lived career as car salesman.

“Probably something like this,” I assured Roger, holding one up with the tags still on, the fabric heavy and liquid over my hand.

“That’s g-g-good then,” he relented, as I bent each of his arms and slipped them through the unwilling holes, buttoning the shirt from the second one down, revealing just a hint of fine red chest hair.

Roger was a two hundred pound man, and although it may be unfair to make the comparison, there was something seamless about my days diapering and clothing my infant daughter and my nights spent cleaning up vomit and squeezing his unrelenting legs into sweatpants. Sometimes, I was there until the day’s end. Others, just to get him ready for school in the morning. He asked me if I might be able to type his papers if he spoke them to me, and I agreed. I said yes to everything he asked, whether I could or not. I needed to be indispensable to him. Every hour meant another $4.25 on my paycheck.

•••

His tract home was near the grocery warehouse. I shopped there after work sometimes when everything but the forklifts had emptied the vast aisles of mealy produce and Spanish generics. At this hour, there was no one around to see me pull out the stack of WIC vouchers I used to pay for our peanut butter, milk, and cheese. Sometimes Roger would give me a twenty to pick up a few things for the next day. Amongst his line of plastic bottled drinks and frozen dinners, I would occasionally throw in a candy bar or Chapstick. I wouldn’t tell him and he never noticed.

Was this stealing? By definition, yes. Yet, sitting in the empty parking lot at one in the morning, breaking off pieces of chocolate and letting them melt slowly between my sore-from-grinding teeth, it felt like a reward. A bonus for getting through another day of a life I had never imagined. I told myself, Roger would give this to me. He often offered me food or a beer. I never accepted his offers, but I took this as permission.

Sometimes, I stole time. I would add twenty minutes to a shift. Not much, but over the course of weeks, would equal to days. I’ve earned this, was my mantra leaving after midnight, sleeping for a few hours between breast feedings, and then getting back into the car to meander back to that big gleaming house. Tiptoeing in, he would often still be sleeping, and I would fear that he had died. Aspirated in a coughing fit in that stretch of hours that I had gone home. But then he’d shift or fart or just be lying there with the TV on, and I’d wheel the lift to his bed, roll him side to side to place the sling, hook in and begin pumping the handle as if getting water from a well. He would fold into a perfect bundle, rising above the twisted sheets and sloshing bed.

I wasn’t the only one who worked for Roger. He had other girls who would do the day or night shift, depending. None of us could work more than twelve hours a week, so I asked for more clients through the agency.

By this time, Rik had been let go from his third dealership and was collecting unemployment. Once a week, he would wake up at five a.m. to inquire about a tree cutting job one town over. Each time they would tell him to come back next week, so he’d drive home and crawl into the California King bed that had been passed down from my grandparents, to my mother, then finally to us. He’d stay there with Sylvia, sleeping, and I would rouse to get to another shift.

Most of the work was bland—helping Joyce, a high-functioning woman with Down Syndrome, to create a budget; making sure Ron got his three-wheeled bicycle to the shop for a new set of tubes; cooking a week’s worth of meals for Susan, a fifty-year-old woman blind since birth.

But then there were cases like Martin, who was so large he couldn’t wipe his own butt and had stains running down the back of his pants. Porn-addicted and developmentally disabled, he’d sit in his oily tan recliner, a gallon of milk in his grip, asking me again and again if I liked “man and woman love movies.” Because the smell was unbearable, the agency arranged for him to take public transport to the grocery store to meet me. I would follow him through the store, listening for his grunts of agreement as I pointed to various foods.

•••

As my clientele was growing, Roger began getting sick more often. He dropped out of school and spent his days at home. I would sometimes stay, off the clock, to watch a movie or listen to some music. It was hard to understand his words, slurred and truncated by gasps and hiccups, but being in each other’s company was simple. In this way, I was escaping from home and what waited for me there. There was no middle space any longer, just layers of need and necessity and care, often beyond what I knew to do or to manage. Like Susan’s face when I attempted to cook eggplant, soggy with canola oil, bitter and tough. Like the unimaginable softness of her shoulders when she would ask me to rub them for her, little hums of pleasure emitting from her at being touched.

I was running late to Roger’s one day, exhausted from being woken in the middle of the night by police. The downstairs neighbors, a reclusive Asian woman and an old man who drove his Cadillac up and down the circular driveway, called the police with a noise disturbance. “There was a report of a baby crying,” the officer informed us. We were bleary eyed, holding our rosy cheeked, feverish baby.

“They do that,” Rik offered, and they apologized, citing our neighbors as having called frequently on past tenants. I had overslept my usual alarm and I knew that one of the other girls was getting Roger up that day. It would take me a half hour to grab his groceries and head over. I dawdled at the store though, completely unmotivated to face the bottles of cold piss on the nightstand to be emptied, the chunks of dandruff I’d have to comb through to tie his hair into a ponytail, or the crusted toothpaste at the corners of his mouth, waiting to be wiped away.

I was readying my excuse for being late when I clicked the lock and heard shouting. Incoherent and muddled as his speech was, I could clearly distinguish, “Help!”

I ran through the maze of hallways and rooms to find him in the bathroom, crumpled to his knees and hanging by one arm from the metal bar next to the commode. His entire body weight was held by the torsion on his upper bicep and bone, both spare to begin with. I tried at first to work his arm out of the tight space, but I realized quickly that the gravity of his body was too great. I’d have to lift him up and slip his arm out from there.

Not thinking, I held him under his arms and grabbed him in a big bear hug, pushing up with all the strength in my legs. I wasn’t strong enough. I could get his upper body lifted incrementally, shifting the point of pressure, but he was dead weight. He said to call 911 and his mother, who lived an hour away. I tried one last time to lift him and felt a terrible wrenching in my back.

The paramedics came and, with the strength of two men, lifted him up and wrested his arm from the bar. I sat on the bed, watching and holding my lower back with two hands, willing myself to stay upright until he was taken away. He was in shock, and from what they guessed, suffering permanent nerve damage. Finally, the house empty, I put the groceries away, left a note for his mother and drove home, wincing with every turn.

Stumbling up the stairs and through the door of my apartment, I made my way to the rocking chair. Rik, surprised to find me home, held a delighted Sylvia out to me. I burst into tears and cried, every sob radiating through my torn lumbar muscles. It was excruciating, but I couldn’t stop. Nothing could stop me.

The threshold of my body was one I had not yet met. Trying to make sense of the calculations it took to make a life in close proximity to the needs of others, I had fractured into too many pieces to hold. Rocking myself that evening, ice pack against my back, I wondered how we would keep everything together despite the limits of our two young bodies, no marketable skills, and the mounting responsibilities of an adult life.

My own parents had had me young, not much older than Rik and I were. I remembered falling asleep to the rhythmic tapping of the electric typewriter as my mother wrote her term papers, working her way through college by day and pulling shifts at Montgomery Wards each night. At her graduation, I was as tall as her hip, on which my baby brother was balanced.

I kept working with clients a few hours a week, but I also signed up for classes at the local community college. Sylvia went to the child development center on the days I went to school and when I transferred to the university, she began kindergarten. This is how we built a life, with paystubs and textbooks piled on thrift store tables, each apartment slightly bigger than the last. No high ceilings, but we have a garden grown by Rik’s two strong hands and a bed bought solely for us. We worked hard. We were lucky.

•••

SARAH PAPE teaches English and works as the managing editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. Her poetry and prose has recently been published in Pilgrimage, The Rumpus, Mutha Magazine, California Northern, The Superstition Review, The Southeast Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses. Her poetry chapbook, Road Z, was published by Yarroway Mountain Press. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript of essays.

Shelving My American Dream

checkers — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Dina Strasser

“You know what I’m going to do when I grow up, Mommy?”

This is a frequent topic of driving conversation between my ten-year-old daughter and me. The acoustics kind of suck in our car, but when we talk about this particular thing, I never pretend to hear what I haven’t heard clearly. I lean my head backwards between the seats and turn my ear towards my daughter, without taking my eyes off the road.

“I’m going to start a bakery named Blue Sky Bakery. I will serve pie and gumbo. Do you need to go to college to start a bakery?” she asks.

“It depends,” I say, smiling. “A two-year college can get you some good training in food prep. But you can also go to a fancier school, like the Culinary Institute in New York City, or Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.” I’ve looked this up. I’m feeling virtuous for already supporting my daughter’s edgy entrepreneurial pie-gumbo fusion career path.

You can do whatever you want, I say.

And then I stop. My jaws click shut, belatedly, on the lie.

•••

In June of this year, I turned down the most prestigious scholarship for doctoral work that my local, nationally recognized university had to offer. It was as generous as you could hope for: full tuition, opportunities for stipends and grants. The gracious professors there, and others who helped me with my applications, spent hours of their own time walking me through the process, writing recommendations; they said, to wit, you were born to be a Ph.D. And I knew it, because I had figured that out for myself in third grade. It was the only lifelong dream I have ever had.

My husband had always, warmly and unequivocally, supported me in pursuing the doctorate. Yet we now had a fairly unusual set of circumstances to consider. He: a Presbyterian minister, where work was increasingly hard to find, poorly paid, and mostly located in the South and Midwest. My only brother: mentally disabled. My mother: widowed. And me: needing exquisite mobility to find the kind of rapidly dwindling tenure-track job required to support my family, most of which were located in places best described as not in the South or Midwest.

It wasn’t adding up. But we tried. We spent three solid weeks, after we knew the amount of the scholarship award, talking to absolutely everyone: friends and family in academia, professors, ministers, finance people, each other. We looked up stats on line, took notes.

Finally, we went to a local diner for breakfast. I brought steno pads. We spent four hours there, the waitress stoically filling our coffee cups over and over as the “Pro” list filled one side of one page of the pads, and the “Con,” six sides. The decision was obvious. I made it.

I spent the next few days befuddled. I wrote apologetic, heart-broken notes, in a fog. Someone had not died; something absolutely had died. I had not lost anything; I had lost everything. I spun like a top on the pinpoint of an invalid assumption: that culture and commerce will part like the Red Sea in the face of your training, your commitment, your talent and desire.

Had I not, like any privileged, educated, self-aware person, identified my bliss? Had I not found and assiduously practiced what I was born for? Had I not fulfilled my obligation to Henry David Thoreau and Joseph Campbell, to step firmly away from the life of quiet desperation, to find and nurture the thing that makes me come alive? Where was the world meeting me half-way? Where, goddammit, was my reward?

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” asked the third grade teacher, and I said, “I want a Ph.D. I want to be an English professor.”

“Why do you want one?”

Because I loved to read and write, and I wanted to teach other people to read and write and to keep reading and writing myself. This was my castle, under which I had thought I had built all the right foundations.

Nearly thirty-five years later, I heard Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame in a TED Talk, quoting a farmer he’d met. “Following my dreams,” the farmer said, “was the worst advice anyone could have given me.”

•••

My grip on the dream had loosened by the time my husband and I decided to have kids—but only to the degree that I felt I could not physically have children safely by the time I finished a doctorate part-time, as our financial situation then dictated. I counted myself lucky to know the statistics in that regard, thinking of my brother, and the steep, cold slope between the chances of having a kid with Down’s in your earlier versus later decades of life.

So kids came first. My priorities were asserting themselves, so nascent as to be practically dripping with afterbirth of their own.

I didn’t see the grace in this at the time, although I wanted children very much. It was only what I needed to do, somewhat grumpily, without the power to simultaneously exist in two different dimensions. I want two lives, I would think to myself. Or three, or four.

You can do anything you want, only not at the same time, said a friend to me around that time. I don’t remember who it was, but in my mind, it was one of my most talented and ambitious soul sisters, and I was blessed to have plenty of them. Magazine editors, advocacy lawyers, dancers. The foment of their lovely lives seemed to lend even more gravitas to the words.

I latched onto this phrase and put it on like water wings. I repeated it to myself with every pang of intellectual hunger. I would do this thing, the thing I was born to do. Someday.

•••

So what has been the result of my decision to say no to the Ph.D.? To stay in a related job that pays double the national average with good benefits, in a decent school district, with marriage and family healthy and happy, in a big blue colonial that houses a fridge, pantry, and medicine cabinet that, by all rights, I should just empty into a cardboard box and mail to Haiti. I should mail the whole house to Haiti. This is not Sophie’s Choice.

And yet I ended up asking around anyway about our culture’s obsession with the dream come true. I nose through books and articles because if I know one thing, I know how to find the answers to life’s deepest questions: research.

My mother is a genealogist, so I asked her what American generation she felt would be most akin to our own: where we looked toward a life for our children that would be demonstrably worse than the one we experienced. “There’s always the Great Depression. But there was also one during The Panic of 1819,” she wrote to me in an email.

The what?

It was the first peacetime financial crisis of the nation. “Your ancestor George Wells got stuck administering his father-in-law Meshack Hull’s estate in New Jersey from about 1816 on, for years,” mom writes. “In 1829, he was actually jailed for being for debt, though he’d been very prosperous before. His wife and children, instead of being able to stay on the family farm, had to leave the county and, in the case of his son, find another kind of work. George disappeared around this time, and it is assumed that he died, whether by his own hand, or naturally, being a question in my mind.”

I also asked my good friend Mary, who has her own doctorate in American history. She has routinely served in the role of perspective-giver in my life: when I was battling through post-partum depression over the deeply non-crunchy-granola C-section birth of my daughter in 2003, she was the one who gently reminded me that in 1803, the baby and I both probably would have died. (Priorities.)

She felt that our closest parallel was the 1970s. “The country was gripped in an economic recession, manufacturing jobs were starting to disappear, the country seemed to be going to hell in a hand basket—Watergate, Vietnam, Iran,” she said. “One thing that historians point to is the number of disaster movies in the seventies. American exceptionalism started to crack.”

Which was interesting. Three historical periods, all different, of wondering how to suck up hardship and hand it to your child. Maybe through disaster films. World War Z, anyone?

I assumed that the American Dream came out of generations actually achieving, to some degree, the American Dream—and no one can deny the general upward trend of the standard of living. But maybe a single life, a sixty-year span if we’re lucky, is not enough to really detect that slow crawl to civil rights and antibiotics.

Could it be that there is a reverse dynamic at work: The American Dream, as panacea for the many, many times—the majority of times?—that dreams did not come true?

Mary and I also talked, at length, about the Ph.D.

She told me that she believed that every doctoral candidate has at least one Stupid Reason for Getting a Ph.D. “Mine was to show the world that I am smart,” said my wise friend. “Why do you want one?”

And I realized that my Stupid Reason for Getting a Ph.D. ran as follows: “To not be lonely.”

And one more truth comes clear, one more layer of scale scrubbed from the eyes.

•••

Something will work out, my mother would say to me after yet another agonized Ph.D. indecision-fest on the phone.

It’s a deeply kind catchphrase. It’s better than the first two I tried. But it’s not enough. It’s only the place where your sequined tutu, your fictitious blue bakery, your unearned doctorate, is honored by people who love you, and who know better than to make you a promise.

•••

I have enough contact with the upper echelons of academia that at times I am still and suddenly wracked with envy. I’ll hear of some lecture, some conference. Discussing Hume as the sun sets seems then to be akin to paradise lost—because that is, of course, is how all doctorates spend their time. This scenario also involves French cheese.

These flashes are decreasing, though. It’s as if the decision actually worked, in one more reversal, to help me not to long for a misplaced future, or a misspent past, but simply, be in the present. I am, in the main, happy there.

Happy, but not content. For I still don’t know how to handle the bliss question with my kids, and that seems to be of paramount importance—especially now, when I’m reasonably certain that at least climate change is going to make many more big decisions for my children than it ever (never) did for me.

When my daughter lays plans for her gumbo from the backseat, or my son chatters about being selected for The Voice, what loving parental slogan do I use? What alternative vision do I weave for my children, in the face of the seductive, beautiful, barren American dream? And how do I do this without crushing their own creativity, their sense of the possible?

It’s not you can do anything you want. And it’s not you can do everything you want, just not at the same time. It’s not even something will work out. There’s a step, a saying beyond this, something at which my fledgling Buddhist practice is trying to aim, maybe. But I’m not sure which slogan fits it best.

There may be no slogan for the control of life’s outcomes. And we do love slogans, this side of the Atlantic. No wonder America has no words for it.

•••

“Why do you want one?”

The last time someone asked me why I wanted a Ph.D., I answered in that way that happens sometimes, when a truth comes out of your mouth without any premeditation. I was older than eight, and I had dropped some of the bullshit—maybe I was ready to articulate the bottom line.

“Because I want to know something that deeply,” I said.

The friend who asked, having begun his own doctoral work that year, nodded in approval, and I felt as if I had passed some kind of test.

But I sense that the real deep knowledge—the real test—is now.

I remember the moments after making the decision finally to let go, looking at that mound of steno pad pages, pushing my cold eggs around my plate.

It felt very strongly like the night when my husband asked me to marry him, twenty years ago— the start, really, of the chain of events that had led me here.

That night, I did not scream in delight, or cry in joy, although I did a lot of that later. I wasn’t even aware, at first, of really feeling anything at all. I was, instead, waiting.

I waited for fear, for resistance, for alarms to sound, doubt to flood in, for my usual inner voices to clang and chime.

Instead, everything went still: as still as a pond before you drop in a pebble, and step back to watch what happens.

•••

DINA STRASSER is a language arts educator of many stripes. She has been published in the New York Times, The London Times Online, and Orion Online, and she runs an award-winning blog on education at http://theline.edublogs.org.

Return of the Dropout

By Sara Bir

In three hours, I have a chemistry exam I might fail. I say “might” because I could cram desperately in the three hours between this moment and the time of my probable failing, and I’d rather spend those three hours doing something useful. Cramming is a deceptive word for panicking.

This feeling of looming academic doom is familiar, and I’m skilled at managing it calmly. Somehow I passed chemistry when I took it in high school, over twenty years ago. (“Somehow” was actually Betsy, my saintly lab partner, who happened to be the daughter of a chemistry teacher.) I recall very little about our curriculum—octets and ions and moles—but I remember sitting close to the window, because through it I observed the antics of a brazen woodchuck that lived in the woods bordering the school grounds. I also remember looking at the graffiti on my desk, which read, “Paige and Erin are DIKES.” They were not, as I knew firsthand, because Paige and Erin were two of my best friends. I also knew how to spell dykes properly, with a Y instead of an I, but it took me a few weeks of staring at the doubly incorrect slur on the desk before I realized I could simply erase it. If high school chemistry had tested me on groundhogs and stupid rumors and the ability to sketch various martyred saints in my notebook while listening to the Doors, I would have received an A.

And now, this exam nears. All these years later, I thought I had learned my lesson about chemistry class. Unlike the first time, I have applied myself as much as possible, because the topic is genuinely interesting to me—or at least the parts that have to do with cooking, because I am a chef. I’m teaching a charcuterie class next week, and deadlines loom: finish typing up the recipe packet, order duck legs and duck fat, drive all over town to purchase ingredients. Chemistry and charcuterie both require my full attention. My heart is with the pig.

Charcuterie is the art of preserving meat, most often through curing, smoking, or drying. Different chemical reactions make it all possible, sodium and nitrogen compounds mingling and swapping electrons in atomic versions of French kisses and extravagant, multi-player sexual positions. NaCl. NaNO₂. KNO₃.

Of course, I can’t write balanced chemical equations for what happens when you rub kosher salt, brown sugar, and sodium nitrite on a slab of fresh pork belly and let it sit for a week or so (some juniper berries, peppercorns, sage, and bay leaves are helpful, too). I just know that it happens. You put the dry cure on, flip the belly over every day to make sure it cures evenly, and, five to eight days later, it’s bacon. (You can omit the sodium nitrite, and the myoglobins in the meat won’t turn that hammy pink color, but the end result will still be delicious.) Then you rinse off the dry cure, at which point you can smoke it or cook it off in the oven. It’s not rocket science, but it is chemistry. What you wind up with is different from what you started out with.

•••

Always chemistry awaits. Chemistry awaits because I don’t have a Bachelor’s Degree. I never wanted one, ever. I didn’t even understand the difference between an Associate’s Degree and a Bachelor’s Degree when I went off to college, because I thought college was for browsing for used cassette tapes at record stores and drinking gallons of coffee at noisy cafes while reading a stack of the local alternative weekly newspapers. I dropped out of college before I failed, which is like quitting a job right before they can fire you. This didn’t comfort my parents, whose money I had been wasting with great indifference. As it turned out, the money-wasting was merely an annoyance to them; their main concern, understandably, was my future.

My first paid writing job was for an alternative weekly newspaper, where I wrote music criticism. And so my parallel, independent course of study paid off somewhat, and for many years I was smug about it: I don’t have a traditional college degree and I never needed it, nah nah nah nha boo-boo! College was for amateurs, people who like to sit and talk. Working? That’s for pros. I’m a worker. I suck at sitting. That’s why I went to cooking school.

Writers sit a lot, however. Despite my deep love for alternative weeklies, I left that job and undertook a string of high-energy, low-wage positions that managed to more or less pay the bills. Chocolate factory. Cookwares store. Library. Introducing a daughter into this equation was financially irresponsible, but we did it anyway, on purpose.

Then I realized how flawed my logic was, and how pathetic and passive my budget-driven melancholy was. My husband, a likewise melancholic fellow with a meandering career background, was not going to bring home slabs of bacon, ever. I felt our lives slipping away from us as friends moved ahead into promised lands of financial security; we languished behind, tossing scraps at the incredibly persistent credit card balance we couldn’t knock out, no matter how many extra hours I picked up at whatever job I was working at the time. In order for our family to make it, I needed to become a different person, one who could gracefully eat shit. A person who could bite the bullet and follow directions she didn’t really want to follow.

•••

We don’t discuss charcuterie in chemistry. It’s an online class, which I chose because my work schedule is unpredictable. There’s a massive, poorly organized textbook, and we’re supposed to read the textbook, log in to the web portal, and take half a dozen quizzes every week. That’s it. When I emailed my instructor and asked her to recommend some resources outside of the book, she suggested I come to her lecture. “But I’m taking the class online,” I said. “The lecture is supposed to come to me.”

We do take our tests in person, and that’s when I see our instructor, who is perhaps my age, with a petite build, an awkward manner, and a head of fabulously curly blonde hair. She seems to have a genuine concern for the academic performance of her students and a genuine difficulty connecting to them conversationally. I think she’s as confident leading the class as I am taking it.

So there it is: I will probably fail the test, because instead of attending chemistry lectures after work, I’d rather rake leaves with my daughter and watch her jump in and out of the leaf piles with unmitigated three-year-old glee. I’d rather walk the dog before dinner with my husband, and we will push our daughter in the stroller with us even though she’s way too old for the stroller and has to be coaxed into it with tiny handfuls of raisins or almonds, because if my husband and I don’t move around and talk about our days in the neutral air of the outdoors, bad things will happen. I’d rather set a real table with cloth napkins and cook a real dinner, which we will sit down together to enjoy, because that’s what we do in our family. I’d rather get my proper eight hours of sleep most nights, because if I don’t, bad things happen.

Most of the kids in my chemistry lab could realistically be my kid. All these years later and I still can’t make myself care enough to pass. Or maybe I care too much. Every week that infernal textbook throws more and more concepts at us, just when the one we were covering started to get really good. If it were up to me, I’d overhaul first-year chemistry and rename it Periodic Table Studies. I love the periodic table. It’s like a beautiful map; with each examination, it reveals more intricacies, more patterns. There’s a mysticism to it, a leap of faith, because I don’t care how many experiments chemists have done over the past dozen centuries, we can’t see and touch the atoms of those elements the way we can, say, a handful of cumin seeds or a stick of butter. Or a slab of pork belly.

I spent hours making flash cards for each element, because our instructor said we’d need to memorize most of the table. My inner child leapt for joy—craft time! I wrote the Latin or Greek roots of the names, or the interesting places they were discovered, plus short descriptions of what each element looked or smelled like, so it could be more tangible. Each element had its own story. I like narratives, and so far chemistry had not given me any good ones. On the day of our second exam, I was dismayed to find we were in fact not tested on our knowledge of the periodic table, but had to fill out a long list of electron configuration problems. And yes, those do have to do with the periodic table, but not in the way I like. By the time we hurtled to those, I was still swooning over radium and rubidium.

•••

I went back to school with the ultimate goal of becoming a registered dietician. I have a culinary degree; I care about good nutrition; I love teaching cooking classes. I threw those things into a hat with my desired salary, spent a few weekends clicking away hopefully on the Occupational Outlook Handbook database, and—poof!—created my future, reasonably profitable career. The logic went like this: by the time I have my credentials, the job market for R.D.s will be extra-sweet because of the awful diets Americans have, my years of studying late into the night would pay off, and I’d be able take our family on nice vacations and finally fulfill my dream of pledging to multiple public radio stations.

I’ll be nearing fifty by then. Is it worth it? Foremost I am a chef and a writer; I intentionally cook with bacon grease and chicken fat, I use salt liberally but strategically, and I’d rather discuss how to get a good sear on a pan of mushrooms than how to best preserve their nutrient content. That many R.D.s don’t actually work with the public but create crummy, bland menus for giant institutions was something I chose to overlook.

Maybe failing chemistry is necessary. I’m stubborn, and I don’t like to accept that I can only accomplish so much in a given time frame. Those cloth napkins are one reason we have so much laundry to fold. I have quite an array. Some I purchased for a song on clearance. Some I sewed myself in the days when I did a lot of freelance writing. I thought sewing napkins was procrastinating, but it turns out it’s one of my preferred methods of prewriting. Ages have passed since I’ve made napkins, but I really enjoy using them. They make me feel especially civilized.

Using paper napkins would save me maybe a few hours of laundry chores every year, and I could use those hours to study chemistry. Instead, my pro-napkin actions have clearly voted against chemistry and all it stands for. Sometimes you can’t just dip your toe in. You have to wade up to your ankles and hang out for a while before you realize that body of water is not where you are supposed to be.

This morning, I saw my advisor so I could discuss my strategy for next semester: lighter class load, no sciences. “I am coming up on a place in my life where I won’t have the time available to excel in a demanding class the way I’d like,” I lied, because I’ve been in that place since way before I even contemplated going back to school.

My advisor suggested I take Cultural Geography to fill a requirement.

“It won’t bore me, will it?” I asked him. “Because some of my classes here have, and if I’m not engaged, I get surly and I sort of give up.”

“By showing up and doing your work during the lecture, you will get an A,” he said, which was his disguised way of confirming yes, it will bore me.

But I’m still looking forward to next semester, and the one after that. If the sad implosion of my performance in chemistry has taught me this much, what more thorny truths about myself could I discover? Class by class, I’ll wrestle with demons more terrifying and impossible than those run-of-the-mill academic ones.

I thought that understanding the reason for your past failures made you impervious to future failures of the same sort, but here I am, wrong yet again. I’ve dreamed of going back in time, armed with the knowledge of my terminally ill bank account to come, so I could excel in high school and college instead of drifting through. But now I know that I’d make the same mistakes, only with more flair. Your problems don’t go away, even when you acknowledge and accept them. They’re still there to deal with, no matter how grown-up or deserving of success you feel you may be.

You can’t just desire the result—in my case, the employment opportunities afforded by a fancy piece of paper with computer-generated calligraphy on it. You have to desire the process. There’s no point in making bacon at home if you aren’t enthralled with handling the meat, scrutinizing its progress as its flesh firms up in the dry cure, daydreaming of the savory lardons you will cut from it and fry up to top a salad of bitter greens. Making the bacon is the point; eating it is just the reward. I like learning about chemistry, but I love my family, and I can’t click pause on this part of our lives together. Chemistry wants more of me than I can give it, now or maybe ever.

I doubt I’ll go into nutrition. I’m much better at teaching people how to make pâté than I am telling them not to eat it. Wearing the costume of a future R.D. boosted my confidence a bit, but the outfit was ill-fitting. The only way I’ll ever get any kind of degree will be slowly, leisurely, the way I prefer us to eat dinner. To earn an A in my chemistry class, I’d have to rely on frozen pizzas and skip the bedtime stories I look forward to reading to my daughter. My brain and my time and my kid are too valuable to squander on half-assing anything. Maybe I’ll take chemistry twice. Not because I have to, but because I want to.

•••

SARA BIR got 68% on her latest chemistry exam and had a blast teaching her charcuterie class. Her writing has appeared in Saveur, The North Bay Bohemian, The Oregonian, and Section M. She’s currently drying a roll of pancetta in her basement and working on a vegan baking cookbook. Read more of her work at www.sarabir.com.