All the People I’ve Wanted to Be

There is a version of my life in which I moved to Europe and became a regular at a writers’ café in Paris, like Hemingway in the 1920s. I would have drunk absinthe.

I also wanted to raise many feral children on a hobby farm. My children would feed the chickens, gather their eggs and help pick apples and can tomatoes. We would all read classic novels voraciously. We’d argue about literature over dinner every night.

I also wanted to design an off-the-grid house out in the country. Maybe a cobb house. Maybe a straw bale house. Maybe a geodesic dome — I’ve considered every alternative house ever at some point.

I debated — start planting the fruit orchard first so the trees are bearing by the time the house is finished, or get the house done first? — even though I knew there was no chance I’d be able to afford such a place until well after my body was too old to handle all the work involved.

In high school, a friend and I intended to move to New York City after graduation and become book editors. Where I thought I’d get the money to cover the cost of reaching NYC and paying for even one month’s rent while I applied for jobs in the publishing industry was never quite worked out.

I also wanted to do two years in the Peace Corps after college.

After having children and immersing myself in the world of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, I seriously considered chucking journalism and becoming a midwife and/or lactation consultant. I started a small business selling breastpumps and nursing bras to help keep us fed until I got back to a real job and thought hard about what I wanted to do full-time when my youngest started school.

I wanted all of these lives.

I lived none of them.

I ended up in a smallish town, very much on the grid. I have two grown kids. Two dogs. One husband. I write full-time. I have a minimal garden space, no orchard or chickens.

No absinthe at all.

It’s not a bad life. It’s just that I wanted all the other lives, too.

A few years ago, I got a tattoo. I dithered about it for years because you only have so much skin. Once you get a tattoo, you are committed. Like lives, you cannot easily trade one for another.

I went with the first two lines of a poem by Rilke:

Du siehest, ich will viel.

Vielleicht will ich Alles

Translation:

You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything

And I do want everything! Why couldn’t I have the rural homestead but also the Paris writer friends and the NYC apartment but also the hut with a dirt floor in some developing nation where I’d teach English or midwifery?

But I don’t want “everything” in a materialist sense. By “everything,” the poem means wanting to do things that matter and accepting the good and the bad. And it has some judgment for people who skate through a life of ease by not thinking too deeply.

When you’re young, all you can see are open doors. They appear endless and you think you have time.

They start closing quite soon, which is why some people go to extreme lengths to get their child into the right preschool. They want to prop up certain doors that otherwise close immediately.

I look down the hallway of life at this point and see many closed doors and a lot less time to open new ones.

Some doors are closed for good. “It’s never too late!” is a comforting, damaging myth. So is “Age is just a number!” But there is still a possibility to change some of the doors.

I haven’t completely ruled out the possibility of moving abroad — particularly if Trump comes up with some reason to deport my immigrant husband. He’s totally legal, but we are under no illusion that that matters anymore.

I doubt I’d end up at a Paris café discussing writing and literature, particularly since I don’t speak French! But there are plenty of other European charms still available. They have work-life balance.

But changing doors isn’t the same thing as choosing a door when you’re young and committing to it. Ask anyone who has ever been divorced. Ask anyone who has ever had to change careers midlife or has made any other major change.

Whatever drawbacks you had behind the old door are gone, true. But so are all the good things. I miss my old career, newspapers, to what I know is an unhealthy degree. The resentment at my loss is real.

I’ll always wonder whether moving to a cheaper house in a worse neighborhood to save money in 2004 was the best choice; it’s impossible to know.

Should I have had a baby with Harrie when we got married? I was already 40 and had two teenagers. I wanted to, but I was afraid and we had no money. We debated until my age made the choice for us.

You are always going to regret that you did or did not do certain things, even when you know that in the circumstances you were in at the time, you probably couldn’t have done anything but what you did.

If only I had saved more money when I was young! But those were the years when I just barely managed to come up with enough grocery money to keep us fed if I was very, very careful and cooked absolutely everything from scratch. There wasn’t a spare dime, so what was I going to save?

There was nothing to save, and all the hindsight in the world would not have helped.

If only I had started wearing sunscreen when I was still young — but all of us teenaged girls wanted to be tan! In the 1980s, we thought we looked bad with pale skin and we didn’t care how we were going to look later. We’d be old! It wouldn’t matter!

Rilke’s poem continues:

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

and the shivering blaze of every step up.

None of us likes “the darkness that comes with every infinite fall,” but we don’t get “the shivering blaze of every step up” without it.

And yes, I want both things.

Perhaps I want everything.