Never Free

My photo, Greenbelt, MD, Dec 2015.
I made Meg and La each a bunny bag (Nate got one with a train engine on it) one year to collect Halloween treats.  When they got old enough, each of them would fill these bag with snacks, books to read and other things to do.  They brought them whenever I took them with me in the car:  for when mom "wasn't-lost-but-wasn't-in-the-place-she-wanted-to-be."
Megan now uses hers to store her Peter Rabbit series of DVDs.

All through high school, the message was "prepare yourself to leave home."  Going to college was to "prepare to make a living."  I turned 18 the day after I graduated from high school--and was expected to have a summer full-time job to earn money for college that Fall.  The whole of my focus was on separating myself from my family, my parents, my brothers and sisters--to leave my old life behind and set out to discover a new and independent one.

With that assumption came the idea that I was leaving my old self behind--the one that was weak and afraid and rude and selfish.  I was to "go forth" and craft a personality that embraced service and charity and confidence and selflessness.  When I set off for my first semester at college, I didn't bring any pictures of my family, any mementos of all the things I'd accomplished in my past 18 years.  Even though I played the piano and sang, I didn't even bring any music with me.  I played the flute, but left it home.  I don't know what I expected--but for some reason I assumed that I was to leave everything I was and everything that had surrounded me--because NOW I was in college.  Now I was grown up.  Now I was a new person.

I compare that with what my own children took to college with them.  They took old scrapbooks, dolls and comforters.  They took art and craft supplies and favorite books.  While all my baggage was contained in one small cardboard trunk and three small suitcases--each of my children arrived, ready to set up housekeeping with a cell phone, computer and printer, towels, kitchen utensils, pictures to hang on the walls--enough stuff to fill a small U-Haul trailer.  I wanted, more than anything, for them to feel that their rooms were places of refuge and safety.  

Brent or I went with them to set up their rooms, buy textbooks,  find class buildings, grocery stores, cafeterias--and I regularly sent packages from home:  cake mixes, new socks and sweaters, treats and things that would make their academic life easier.  They each had a credit card--and their job was to be a student, rather than working to support themselves and pay for school at the same time.  All of our children came away from college with Bachelors' degrees--free of school debt.

Looking back, that approach worked well with two of our children--not so well with another.  I tried to stay away or come to visit as often as requested.  Sometimes that meant that the only time I got a call was when money ran out--other times it meant that I talked for hours a day with someone when they worked on homework or when they felt alone.  

Money was in short supply when I was in college--I was the first of 5 children to leave for college.  I felt the burden of my university expenses, but also resented that constant imp on my shoulder, sniggering into my ear that I was wasting my father's money and that I was always spending too much . . . no matter what I saved or bought.  I felt alone, too.  I did so many things--but never learned where or how to expend the effort to learn how to develop friendships.  

I resented that my younger siblings were later sent to college with cars and credit cards and had family ski trips for Christmas.  That was weighted against my honest conviction that my parents were doing as much as they could--and as much as they though was best.

But, getting back to my first idea--that college was a time and place to begin a new identity--I never expected to keep finding bits of my old self pop out unexpectedly.  I didn't bring music--but still played piano for church and special numbers--and sang solos for Sacrament Meeting.  

In high school, I amassed hundreds of pages of hand written journal entries--details about how I felt and what I wanted to feel.  In college, I was saved by the reams of paper that I filled with my journal scribblings--where I went to hide from the world and try and sort out everything I was seeing and feeling.

In one of my journal entries, I wrote about a young man (whom I really wanted to ask me out) who loved another girl.  We were in the same college English class.   One day I, as we waited for our turn to enter the classroom, we stood near each other, next to a wall-sized window on the face of the building.  We looked down from the second story window at the sea of hat-and-coat-and-scarf-bundled people making their way to class.  I just saw people, but he saw her.  He wrote a poem about her--about how much a red beret mattered.  When he watched from above, he could see that spot of red and follow her progress as she walked among hundreds of other people.  Her mere existence made his world mean more.

Another time I wrote about a young man who sang with a band and wrote songs--and, for a few moments, thought that I was "the one."  I was overwhelmed by his musical confidence--and crushed (for the first of many times in my life)--when a single action on my part turned his regard to repugnance.

I didn't leave my awkward adolescence behind when I went away to college.  I only opened myself up to a myriad of new places where I could be revealed as the neophyte that I was.  I watched boys that I liked as they pursued other girls.  

I watched girls in the restroom flash their diamond engagement rings for everyone to admire.  

I sought for private corners of the library to read and study and research my academic efforts.  I fell short of some professors' expectations and greatly exceeded those of other educators.  

And all along, I found bits of flotsam and jetsam from my previous life surfacing in my essays, my conversations, my relationships with roommates and my ineffectual tries at becoming important to various boys who didn't know I was alive.  

Since that first semester, my life has begun and blossomed.  I survived my first year and transferred colleges.  I met people that I had gotten to know from the myriad of places where my family lived as I grew up.  I remembered what I learned from my father about standing up for myself.  I still mooned after boys I knew didn't even know I was there--but I used it as a coping mechanism.  

When I was so full of emotion I didn't know what to do, I'd look around and find someone whom I crossed paths with several times a week--and focus on him.  It was pitiful, but it worked.  I would remember that some day I would be the girl in the red beret.   

My photo, Jan 2016.

I went on my mission and brought my flute and music to play.  I memorized a simple song (One Small Child), and performed it for dozens of different audiences.  I got sick and I got better.  My Spanish improved.  I got home and I realized that there were as many reason why people needed to go on missions as there were missionaries.  

I discovered young men from my past who had cared deeply for me--but because I was too much wrapped up in my own world--I treated badly.  I had young men write poems and another compose a song for me.  I made choices that have blessed and challenged me--and others that I still regret.

I have also seen how I growing up in our family is an inexorably part of my children's adult lives.  

My photo, Jan 2016.

The way that Meg cleans the lint off the dryer lint trap is the same way I do it--a method I learned from my own mother.  

Copied from an internet site.

La sings a cheeseburger song to her young son that she learned from a video she watched Saturday afternoons when she was in elementary school.   I collected about a hundred books from the Eyewitness series and Nate devoured them.  

Copied from an internet site.

Knowledge turned out to be a dangerous thing:  he caught some flack from teachers whom he corrected as they taught high school classes.  

My photo, Palm Beach Gardens, FL.

My photo, Jupiter, FL.

My photo, mulberry bush in our yard, Palm Beach Gardens, FL.

My children love insects, lizards, snakes and frogs.  An affinity they learned from me--which I (again) learned from my mother and her fascination with creatures who lived outdoors.  

My photo, Jan 2016.

My photo, Jan 2016.
La sculpts these incredibly intricate animals, out of felt, from her imagination.  She presents them to me as gifts--each a replica of one of the animals I have learned to love.  We have had half a dozen rabbits as pets over her lifetime--and I have fallen deeply in love with the sloth--especially because of the opportunity I have to see them close up on YouTube--and at the zoo.  If you are lucky (and if the sloth is "in the mood" for company), for a few hundred dollars, the Palm Beach Zoo allows you to invest in a "Sloth Experience".  Nate and I met Wilbur the Sloth--a girl.  When sloths are born, sex is tricky to determine--so they have a 50/50 chance of getting a boy name for a boy or a girl name for a girl.  Wilbur was one of the 50% whose caregivers guessed wrong.

When Nathan was injured during his early Scouting experiences and needed stitches, he insisted on watching the doctor sew him up.  In part, I think but am not sure, because I passed on the wonder that my mom felt when she cut her hand and exposed the joint of one of her knuckles.  She called me over to her and showed me how it flexed and contracted as she moved her hand.  

When my dad got home he immediately (exasperated and upset that she had not gone earlier) took her to the emergency room to get stitches.  

Copy from internet site.
Picture of Mariel from the original cover Megan knew.

Copied from internet site.
This is a later image, from a reprinted paperback.

Megan named her first sugar glider after a character  in the Redwood series of books that I read aloud to her and her brother and sister at night as they lay in bed, just before sleep.

Mariel, pencil sketch by Megan for a class at CCAD (Columbus College of Art and Design) in Ohio.

The Gunny Bag, Calvin and Hobbs, Care Bears, the Smurfs, the 13 Articles of Faith, the Sound of Music and spoon, fork and knife family fractions--are all things that I have heard Meg, La and Nate talk about, sing about, and tell others about.

My graphic, Jan 2016.

My children know, first hand, how to care for cats, dogs, snakes, mice, ground hogs, hedgehogs, horses, hamsters and houseplants.  They know how to sew, to draw, to play the piano (a little bit), do laundry, identify an allergic rash, follow a recipe and rub a knot out of a strained muscle.  

Having left home at 18 to go to college, I took much more with me than I would have ever imagined.  The material things I brought were few.  There were other things though--talents, memories, mistakes, expectations, memories of books I'd read, and horses I'd ridden, loving to learn (some things), reluctance to admit (others)--and a unique ability to easily adsorb information in a traditional education system--that I could never be free of.

I have often dreamed a dream (or a nightmare--hard to tell sometimes) where I am suddenly in a position where I could stand before all the world.  What I always end up asking first is the forgiveness of all those I've neglected or treated rudely.  I can still--it is past 2:30 am on a Monday night in January--see the faces of so many people I would thank for their part in all that I've gathered during my 55 years on earth.  The education that I gained at the expense of others, I would try to explain, has been some of the most poignant and searing.  The love that has been given so openly, the prayers that have literally saved my life, the forgiveness that has already been silently offered--these are the things for which I would express gratitude.  

My children will never be free of all that I have, of all that I am.  Mom used to tell Susan, M, Nathan, Rob and me that we were better than she was--that we HAD to be better.  If we were not progressing, then we were falling back.  If we were not better and brighter than she was, then the eternities would be lost.  She considered our spirits to be older and wiser than hers--having had twenty or more years with the Lord before being born as her child. 

My own children bear those same burdens--to learn more, to give more, to pray more earnestly, to listen more keenly.  

We talk of binding the generations together through temple covenants of obedience to the Lord.  The promises that we make seal me to my mother and my children to me.  

Growing up, I asked my mother why I needed to practice the piano, learn to sew and grow a garden.  Why did I need to sing and to visit my neighbors?  Her answer was always the same:  "Because you are a Wagstaff; and that is what Wagstaff children do."

I'm not sure how to finish this off tonight.  I began by writing about my first semesters in college--yet I still review my Calculus text books and do the practice problems I've done two or three times already over the past five years.  I love doing it--I will never be "done" trying to solve the problems over and over.  Doing so reveals places in my mind that I'd forgotten about--and reveals new chinks where I can store extra bits of cool new stuff that I glean while reviewing the old.  I suppose that's the reason for re-reading the Scriptures over and over again--for praying repeatedly for the same sorts of things.

The image of a butterfly breaking free of its chrysalis is suppose to embody freedom--breaking free of the earth to fly above the dust and the constraints of gravity.  

I don't know.  I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be free of--and what I want to be free to do.  Stay with me--someday I hope to get a glimpse of the answers.