The other day my husband's sister-in-law forwarded a photo to us that she'd found while cleaning house. It's circa 1978, 1979, maybe even 1980. (I can't tell if that's a maternity top I'm wearing, but it might be. I seem to recall having made one like that. If it's a maternity top, then it's 1980, and I'm pregnant with Daniel.)
We sent a copy of it to our older son Stephen, shown in his blue-eyed, blond-haired cuteness. In fact, it was the hair in the photo that I couldn't get over. My own hair is thin, as usual, but it's so shiny! My Esteemed Spouse has a bouffant head of hair that is now perhaps one-fifth or one-tenth as puffy. (Of course, when he wakes up, little gray spikes of hair stick out on the sides like Dagwood's hair.) Stephen now has dark hair, darker than either of his parent's hair. I don't know where his blond curls have gone.
When we first moved to Columbia, Louisiana, to run the Burger Barn, Stephen was three years old. I'd trimmed his hair before, but not much. People kept asking me what "her" name was and how old "she" was, even when I'd specifically and clearly said "he" was "my son." I got it. It was a not-so-subtle hint that if we were going to live in a small town, with "old-fashioned" ways, then we'd better act like the rest of them. I took Stephen to get his hair cut at one of those old-fashioned barber shops with the candy-striped pole in front. Then I took him to see his daddy. My husband's face was a picture of horror: "What have you done to my son?!!!" (Remember, his own hair was pretty long at that time.)
I'm afraid I never did manage to fit into the small town of Columbia, Louisiana. The women I met were often boring, engaged in talk about their churches, their marriages, their gardens, or their presumed friends. That's when I went back to college to find people more like I was. My husband fit in better than I did, even though I'd been brought up in a small town only 30 minutes from Columbia and he'd been brought up in a much larger town, a small city, in fact. Doug just has a way of fitting in, no matter where he is. I don't. Growing up as an outsider in my hometown, I always felt that our poverty and my mother's drinking were barriers to my letting other people into my life.
Now I'm dealing with how to fit in as a new tenure-track faculty member. Once again, I feel as if I have no clue. My department chair is directing me (not very subtly) to do this, do that. In the immortal words of Bartleby the Scrivener, "I would prefer not to." I really really really dislike belonging to committees, yet I've wound up on one already, practically by accident. Other committee members are ultra-passionate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (or the English BA Committee equivalent), and I don't care at all. I'll do what I'm told, but the passions in my life have nothing to do with the trivia of administration.
The passions of my life are the two people in that photo with me, as well as the one I might have been carrying underneath that homemade shirt. Family. First and foremost, always. Family. It's why I can't commit my heart to caring whether students majoring in English take 3, 4, or 5 literature courses to fulfill their BA. With Stephen's future up in the air, with Daniel's marriage in jeopardy, with the pain I'm feeling as their mother, nothing much else matters.
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