All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [76]
There is a certain grief that comes with that realization, but also some relief. Perhaps if the right man came along I might still adopt, but I’m finished with the frantic search for the father of my children. I don’t regret not having kids, usually, because I never would have had other experiences that have made my life so richly textured. I also have nephews and a niece I adore and enjoy swooping in as the crazy aunt who has traveled the world, giving them a glimpse of a different kind of life. In any case, it’s the way things turned out.
È così, as they say in Italian.
But other issues up in the air still make me uneasy, such as the fact that I’m still living in the Hippie Apartment in the Haight and my retirement plan comes down to marrying a wealthy man or writing a bestseller (I’ve done both before, to little avail). For all my independence, I have never felt I had the wherewithal to try to buy a house of my own; financially and otherwise, it’s always seemed like a two-person proposition. There’s nothing wrong with renting—people in New York and Paris do it all their lives—but at my age there is a nagging sense that you ought to have a place on planet Earth to call your own. I have been in a holding pattern, waiting for a man to come along before I make a move to buy a house or change what, twenty-five years later, is essentially a postcollege lifestyle.
I’m also a little tired of San Francisco, which seems crazy, because on a sunny day—houses dressed up like Victorian ladies out for a stroll, Golden Gate Park blooming, the view from the top of Twin Peaks sweeping a circle around an urban paradise and out to sea, restaurants serving up the freshest, tastiest meals on the continent—there is no place better to be. But on one of the innumerable foggy, heavy-lidded summer days, I am itchy to move my life in a different direction, and it’s nothing that going to another country for a week is going to cure.
When one of my friends in the writers’ collective suggests we hire a personal coach for a couple of days, I agree to participate, just to get unstuck. The coach will work with us on organizing our time and deadlines and setting goals, which is a challenge for us freelance creative types, insecure procrastinators all.
Martha, the coach, shows up at the office, an imposing redhead in her sixties, full of energy and clear intention despite what would, for most people, be a devastating disability: her hands and limbs are gnarled with rheumatoid arthritis. Clearly none of us is going to get away with easy excuses about our limitations. Naturally we have to go around and talk about what we want from the experience. I’m calmer about that process these days, partly because I actually do want some help getting unstuck but also because these are friends I’ve worked with, in some cases for ten years, and so it’s not as if I’ll be revealing how neurotic I am. They already know.
Martha starts by talking about the importance of setting goals and keeping commitments in our lives, to ourselves and to others. She asks us to write down our lifelong purpose and see whether what we’re doing day to day, and year to year, helps fulfill that purpose. It sounds self-aggrandizing to talk about purpose, and many in the group have never thought in those terms. I’m one of those lucky people, though, who was never tormented about which direction to go in in life. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up back when I was in third grade and just set about doing it; it wasn’t a choice to become a writer but a necessity.
Purpose is a bit deeper than vocation, though. I’ve been too embarrassed, since my college application essay, to say out loud that I always hoped to use writing to raise consciousness, as a medium for social change; it sounds very seventies. Still, an astrologer recently took a look at my chart and articulated a similar purpose for me: I was handed