I have been invited to host a panel on How to Live Child-free Without Regrets at the upcoming Fertility Planit 2014 in Los Angeles (Happily sharing the stage with my good buddy Lisa Manterfield and, the soon to meet, Lynn Newman).
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It is Monday evening and I am on a non-stop flight from Chicago to Los Angeles. I have just spent a long lovely weekend in Chicago. It is the first time I have been to Chicago in years. I could, I suppose, turn this blog post into a travelogue about my time in Chicago and tell you about what a lovely birthday I had and what lovely and generous friends I have—however that is not what this blog post is about. This blog post is about something else, something I am still in the midst of processing—something that I will discover as I write.
When I first planned the trip to visit friends for my birthday weekend I knew that there was something personally meaningful in it for me( even though that wasn’t the main reason I was going), as it would be the first time Keith would be in Chicago together. If you are new to my blog let me catch you up, many years ago( six-years, I think) I left Chicago and in doing so I left behind my dream of being a parent and the dream I had of raising a kiddo there. It was not easy to leave( understatement). I loved Lake Bluff. I wanted to spend the rest of my life there. Only it didn’t work out that way. Having a kid didn’t work out. My marriage didn’t work out either. I was, as you can imagine, not so happy that I didn’t get what I wanted most. Rather, I had a three-year hissy fit about it.
However, the last three years I have been completely hissy fit free. I am happy that it all worked out the way it did. I am extremely happy with my life and I have even come to love living in Los Angeles( proof that miracles do happen).So, even as I planned the trip and delighted with anticipation at seeing my friends in Lake Forest, I was, I think, hoping that going with him back to my old home would show me that I was completely immune to the pain of the past….and mostly it did.
As Keith had not seen my life in Lake Bluff I gave him the tour: this is where I lived; this is where I fell on ice; this is where I ate tomato soup; this is where I substitute taught; this is the lake. It’s not a tour many would endure but he loves me and knows I needed him to see the life that I’d had. During the tour I found that I felt surprisingly little. I think the best way to describe how I felt when I saw the set I had once imagined would house my happily-ever-after was nothing. We drove by the place where a picture of me had been taken when we moved away, a place that I had stood and sobbed, and seeing that site now I felt nothing. And as beautiful as Lake Forest and Lake Bluff are, and they are, they no longer looked like enchanted mythical lands that I had been forced out of. Rather, I could see the beauty without the longing. Somehow my healing, and the joy of my new life, I could see Forest and Bluff for what they are and not as an Eden I had been cruelly ejected from. It was, I can tell you, nice.
My dear friends ,who we were staying with, have two of the most beautiful, adorable, sweet, and kind children that you are likely to meet. Being with these girls was more enjoyable than our trip to the Art Institute or a dinner out in the city. And what was also lovely, lovelier than I can say, is that I could enjoy these beautiful and wonderful girls without feeling sad or envious or anything except delight and relish. I felt nothing but lucky for having these beautiful girls in my life, blessed to have wonderful friends, and spoiled to have the life that I do. This, my friends, is what healing looks like.
When I was packing to leave to come home today I was overtaken by tears. Keith saw my sadness and asked me a number of questions all with the intention of trying to make it better. When I said no to all his inquiries he finally said, “Do you want to live here?” “No”, I answered, “that’s not it. Of course I don’t want to live here, I love our home, our life, my practice. No, I don’t want the snow and the ice and the cold. I don’t want to live in a long ago Eden. I don’t want to live in this place that is meant for families.” I didn’t know what it was that I was crying about but I knew that living there wasn’t it. These tears weren’t about wanting something, of that I was sure. No, this wasn’t what this was about. Rather, this was me crying for a past me, and for all the pain I endured … and the reality that this life that I had so long dreamed of would never-ever-ever be mine, and, yes, even though I am happy about that( SUPER happy with what is) there remains a sadness for what was never to be.
As I sit in the dark of the plane typing these words, I feel my eyes burn a little and I feel some residual ennui even as I happily anticipate going home( Pasadena, that is). Simultaneously, I feel something kind of like closure…only it isn’t exactly that( I make this disclaimer as I need to leave the circle open to the possibility of me spiraling around through this once again, if even if at a different level and entering from a different place). Yes, of course I will go back to Forest and Bluff again, but never again will it be the place that it was for me. Never. It has fundamentally changed. Now when I go there I will go there to visit my friends, to play Mermaids with the girls and to see them graduate from middle school or for my friend’s birthday party, or maybe even for a conference….but I won’t ever go home again. It is now NOT what I want. It is now what I wanted, it has moved into past tense and the lovely thing about that is that it allows for a future in which I can go back…only not back home.
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of ‘the artist’ and the all-sufficiency of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love,’ back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
― Thomas Wolfe
I don’t know about the psychics in your town but in L.A. I don’t think the economy has been very kind to the Psychic set. Many a Psychic business has a big ‘for sale’ sign on their establishment. Madame Yvonne, Madame Claudia and Madame Ethel have all either gone out of business and/or have moved their Psychic trade to bigger or better environs( I have a hunch it is the former and not the later).
While I am not now and never have officially been psychic that has not stopped me from going into the prediction business in a big way. I spoke in my last post of all of my “I cant’s” which had the emphatic tones one might expect of Madame Claudia—only I imagine her predictions are more positive and more along the lines of: “You will travel, find love, meet a handsome stranger, have some adversity that you will overcome and there will be money” or she would have gone out of business much sooner, no one wants to pay good money to hear “Everything you want to do you can’t do.”
Well, the good news for me was that all of my predictions were free. I didn’t have to call a 976 number to get a prediction or make an appointment or wait for anyone to dust off a crystal ball or shuffle some tarot cards— no, I was always available to predict how things were going to go. I was an all area, all occasion and all topic prognosticator. My readings were instant and emphatic, with never a bit of ambiguity to them. Madame Tracey was bold, brazen and available 24-hours a day. She was especially active in the evenings. She tended to do a lot of midnight readings when I was suffering from insomnia and she would keep me up with her predictions of doom, failure and suffering.
Here’s how a reading with Madame Tracey would go: I would choose to do something or go somewhere or take an action of some kind and that is when Madame Tracey would pop up, replete in an archetypal ensemble of a Gypsy turban, a velvet shawl and an armful of bracelets. She would cluck her warnings and admonishments as her bangles clanked, “Ooh, that’s a bad idea,” she would warn. “That will never go well. What are you thinking? He won’t like you. You will fail at that. There is no way you should do that. You should cancel. Cancel now. You are going to humiliate yourself. Stop. Really, seriously stop that. I can tell you with 100% accuracy that this will NEVER work. Listen to me.”
For many a year I blindly took the council of Madame Tracey and I didn’t realize that under the velvet, jewels and crystal ball was a big ball of fear and that what was masquerading as intuition was in fact the inner critic. I, for far too long, took her unwise, negative and naysaying council. Only, you see, in the last three years when I could have really used some intuition to guide me through some big changes in my life, Madame Tracey continued to tell me that everything was going to hell and that I was going to fail and that there was no way I could do x,y or z.
Last March when I attended the Harvard Writing Conference I took Madame Tracey with me. I could barely hear the lectures for all of her predicting. “You don’t belong here” she warned me, “You should leave.” And when it was time to go into the room where the publishers and agents listened to would-be authors pitches that is when Madame Tracey got serious. “No, really, you need to listen to me. I am telling you this for your own good. None of them will like you. They will ALL hate you. They are going to think your idea is incredibly stupid. You are going to be humiliated if you could actually present a pitch, but you can’t.”
For some reason, I decided to take a risk and see if she was right. I pitched to the first guy, a 60-something Irishman from a prestigious Ivy-league University. I decided if I was going to fail I would fail with the man in the room who MOST looked like my father. You see, I had loads of experience with rejection and judgement from him( my father), so I thought it wise to pick his doppleganger. Only this 60-something Irishman didn’t reject, lambast, or ridicule me. Madame Tracey grew louder, “That was a fluke. Trust me, everyone else in the room will do as I predicted.” Something about having the experience of Ivy-league school publisher love my book idea and have him hand me his business card and tell me to contact him emboldened me to try again and ignore the predictions. I did, and by the time I had everyone in the room interested in my book Madame Tracey grew especially truculent. “Yeah, I know that it seemed like that went well. But they are just being nice. They don’t really like your idea. And that last agent, no way was he interested in your writing. You are definitely not good enough for him.” The joy of having over twenty publishers and agents all seemingly very interested in my topic was dampened by her paranoid predictions.
A week after arriving home from that conference I was contacted by that agent that Madame Tracey told me was really not that into me ( I think she even told me that he hated my idea). A month later this supposed hater was my agent. The same week that I signed with my agent I fired Madame Tracey. The ending was, as you can imagine, filled with dire warnings about what would happen if I let her leave. Even though she is no longer in my employ, Madame Tracey still comes around. She still likes to tell me about the future and failures that are just around the corner. I haven’t yet found a way to totally get her out of my head. I have looked into a psychic restraining order and yet I haven’t figured out how to install such a thing. What I do now is hear her predictions and I remind her how wrong she has always been and of all the times her predictions have been wrong, and that shuts her up for a little while. I also thank her for trying to protect me, only thatI don’t need her protecting anymore. She seems to appreciate that I understand her motives were not all malevolent. Hopefully someday Madame Tracey will retire all together and go wherever it is that Madame Claudia, Yvonne and Esther went to once they went out of business. Maybe the Home for the Retired Intuition Workers, that would be a good place for her as she’s worked very hard for all these years and deserves a gold watch, a good retirement and sometime on the shuffle board court.
The more time that I am away from the blog the harder it is to come back. Somehow having been away so long makes me feel more pressure to come back with something of great gravitas or to somehow come up with a really good explanation for my absence. Certainly, I do have good excuses for my extended absence from blogging: work, the book, speaking engagements, a new house, trips to Paris, London and NYC, and hired another intern. Yeah, I have excuses but they don’t feel like good ones. Maybe a doctor’s note might feel more legit. Something like, “To Whom it May Concern: Please excuse Tracey for not blogging. She’s had a lot on her plate and hasn’t been swanning around doing nothing. I can attest to the fact that she is so busy that she hasn’t yet seen an episode of this season’s Downton Abbey. However, she is getting better at managing it all and is even adding more to her plate and seems to be less overwhelmed. It is my professional opinion that Tracey can return to blogging with some limits and modifications. Best, Dr. Isayso.”
I guess what really got me thinking about coming back here is that I am coming up on my third-year anniversary of my move into being a singleton and I am, as I do, thinking a whole lot about what I have learned about myself in the last three years. If I was to put it in a nutshell in give it to you in a sentence it is a sentiment that I have shared before and it is: I was wrong about ‘I can’t’.” It is am amazing lesson to learn that your beliefs about your self and the limits you put on yourself simply aren’t true. I have over and over proved that my “I cant’s” are mostly a whole bunch of bologna. It is awesome to learn this lesson, however I wish I had learned it earlier.
Three years ago I believed:
I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. Each prediction was totally and 100% WRONG. And this is the point that I really and truly want to make is that “I can’t” is mostly a self-protective lie we tell to ourselves to protect ourselves from hurt, failure, and rejection. After three years of proving that “I can’t” is wrong I just don’t trust “I can’t” anymore. Yeah, sure, it still shows up and tells me that this time is different and this time I really can’t. But now I listen to it like I would a scared child and tell it, “Yeah, I know you are afraid but let’s try this and see what happens and see if we need some help, support or a a plan to make this happen.” And if I chose not to do something I am careful to never tell myself that I can’t….I can, but I chose not too. Yes, I still can’t ride a bike, drive a stick shift, ice skate, or ski. It’s true, I don’t have the ability. However, if I wanted to I could learn how to. It’s not something I chose to do. It feels better to say that, to own the “I don’t want to take the time or energy to make that happen” than to say “I can’t”.
I am NOT telling you all of this to toot my own horn. Rather, since I really and truly got this lesson I feel a bit like a person who found religion, I want to take your “I can’t” away from you and help you get to the other side and to help you see how when you say “I can’t” and see how you are protecting yourself with it. That said, I know there are things that we can’t do because to do so would hurt us physically, emotionally, psychologically, or financially. There are some “I cant’s” that are true and valid and that is why I am writing my book…however, I just want you to look at your “I can’t” and see if it is REALLY and TRULY true. Check and see if there is some fear hanging out in your “I can’t” as there usually is. And if there is fear, knowing that fear is normal part of any new venture helps me to expect it and welcome it. As soon as I say yes to something I know fear is going to show up, “But you can’t,” it will immediately say in dramatic and emphatic tones. “Oh, hi”, I say, “I was expecting you” and then I promptly ignore it and keep on doing the very thing that the “I can’t” told me I couldn’t do.
Remember in this post how I wrote about waiting? The waiting wasn’t actually that long— it just felt it was( wasn’t it Einstein how explained the theory of relativity by comparing five minutes spent at the dentist versus five-minutes spent with Marily Monroe?) Well, I am not waiting any more.
I am THRILLED to announce that my book is sold. Here is the announcement that appeared on Publisher’s Weekly Publisher’s Lunch:
We have sold my book, “The Other Side of Impossible: How to Let Go of the Life You Planned and Find a Happy Ending”, to Hazelden. I considered including a video here off me jumping up and down( I have actually been doing this a lot these last few weeks. My joy is great that my body can barely contain it). When your dream actually comes true it is, I can tell you, extremely energizing. This is what I haven wanted since I was nine-years-old and it has happened and I am ecstatic.
The day we found out that the deal was done we went to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In Los Angeles it is a tradition that if you sign a big deal that you go there to celebrate, so we did. And when we walked in we heard what I thought at the time was a perhaps over-cocktailed older women singing “Someone to Watch Over Me”, alas it was actually Richard Simmons ( yes, that Richard Simmons). And, I will have you know, Richard was wearing an all white suit, a sparkely sequined tie, and spats. Thanks to you, Richard( and Keith), for making my special day totally unforgettable. The ex-Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, but as he didn’t sing and/or wear such an incredible ensemble, he was a less exciting sighting. It, I can assure you, was one of the most memorable and magical days of my life. I felt like I was in a dream, and I sort of am still feeling that. However, this isn’t a dream it is a dream come true.
Here is a picture of me basking in my joy ( and, you can see Richard Simmons in the background)
The part of the post when I go on a tangent of gratitude
I just want you to know, dear reader, that I am so extraordinarily grateful to you for your encouragement, and how you helped me to make this happen. I wouldn’t have done this without you, truly, Thank you to those of you who have been with me since the beginning, you will never fully know how much you mean to me ( some of you even show up in my dreams: Linda H, Kate S., Kristen, Lynn Z, Marcela, Marjorie and Leigh)—your encouragement and long-term bloggy friendship means the world to me. Thank you for making me feel like what I have to say makes a difference. And thank you for hearing me when I needed a place to be heard.
This part you might want to skip, but I feel compelled to thank a few people who I know are here and a few who aren’t. Now, not necessarily in any order, I would like to thank a few people who have made a big difference in encouraging me in different ways: My 9th grade english teacher; Don Fehr; Jennie Nash; Keith; Wendy West; Jamie Cat Callan; Dorothea; Kirie R; Hannah Stephenson; Laura Munson; Wendy Brandes; Paul Steiger ; Lee Woodruff; All the people at the Harvard Writing Conference; Lisa Manterfield; Pamela Tsigdinos; The Huffington Post and the editors at Psychology Today.
So now I have moved from waiting to writing. I am on a bit of a strict schedule, however as daunting as that feels it is also unbelievably exciting, now that the waiting is over, and I have shared my joy and gratitude with you, I must get back to writing—this book won’t write itself.