On Saturday evening I got a visit from my favorite two year old. Somewhere amidst the golden curly locks is just about the smartest toddler I know. When she's not playing the violin and piano, speaking 3 languages, and impressing me with her advanced language and vernacular skills, she's striking a bit of fear. Fear that this time next year, she'll be smarter than me in just about every way. But today, between new big sister duties, and her second week of preschool, I get to enjoy being on just about the same level.
"Sara I'm so jealous of all the vacations you've gone on lately! Your mama sends me all sorts of pictures of you. One I saw you in your bathing suit on a beach in Hawaii near a volcano all covered in sand! Then next one you're in Chicago seeing the sights!"
"No you're not," she says.
"I'm not what?"
"Jealous, you're not jealous"
"Sara, I bet you don't even know what jealous means!"
"Fine. What does it mean?"
"Well it means you want a bit of what someone else has. A little is ok. It means you are happy for them, but maybe you'd like that thing too. When you're not sure what you want, a bit of jealousy is good to say, I want that for myself"
"Well, in my opinion," she quipped, "I say, you aren't jealous."
Mind not a 2 year old said the equivalent of agree to disagree, I'd told a 2 year old I was jealous of them.
In fact, she's right, I'm not truly jealous. Being 2 years old has to come with enough challenges with potty training and such, that I'd be just as fine being 30 if for no other reason than I'm without choice. But I'd also be a fool to imagine I'd approach 30 without a hiccup - or a loud bellow.
I didn't go to any old public school. I went to one for smart kids - or in my case kids with moms with connections to sneak the ordinary in undetected. Magnets they were called, and maggots we were called. I felt all my life was damn hard. When I'd complain my mother would say, "you have to get grades to get in to a good junior high." So I worked and I worked. I memorized the preamble to the Constitution and the solar system, presidents, and books beyond my year. I got to junior high and when I complained about a molecular biology assignment splicing a cell my mother would say, "you have to get grades to get in to a good high school." By 9th grade I had gotten in to a good high school. The most sought after one in LAUSD. Being in the magnet wasn't enough. I had to take gifted classes and AP classes, and read the entire bible in one weekend for an advanced literature class and when I complained, you got it, "you have to get grades to get in to a good college."
College wasn't an option. I learn now it could have been, but in my home, in my reality, on the small dot, on the big map it wasn't.
College was remarkably easy from the business of the magnet schools. Only 2 classes (grammar and nutrition) tested my will to live, but otherwise I did just fine working full time, holding positions in my sorority, and making the deans list twice.
I didn't complain. And because I didn't, I never heard why it was I had to work. What was next.
You hear a bell, you know you're late for 2nd period. You get a call from Mrs. Lipton to say Rebecca wasn't in class today. You are monitored by parents and teachers and institutions, and a society that dictates what is next. And then what.
I called my mom last Thursday. She was hounding me about Thanksgiving, thank goodness she is still thinking ahead, and I asked her, now what.
Without any further prodding she knew what I was asking.
"You've done everything just as you were supposed to. You've worked hard from K to 12. You put yourself through college. You took the LSAT. You worked fulltime through all your adult life thus far. And now you apply to jobs, 10-15 a day and spend the rest of your day sitting next to a phone that never rings. I wish I had more answers for you. But the nexts have stopped. I don't know what's next."
And perhaps I am indeed jealous of a 2 year old. Not of the vacations or the potty training, but of the being told what to do. Because even so, if you're resentful, and your personal will is bent against another who has the upper hand, there is still a person at the end of the day with a next to deliver to you.
So 30 has come with a hiccup. A loud bellow, and the search for a next has been an Alice in Wonderland adventure. At first lying on a leisurely bridge with my cat and a book, and next following rabbits down deep and seemingly never ending holes. But I've found that with darkness, and holes, come bottoms. And with bottoms come nexts. Nexts that will allow my mom to say:
"You can do anything now."
It was the 2 year old, and my mom, the hole and a white rabbit that visited me in a dream, that all said, here at the bottom is possibility.
My job search has covered the world, from sushi chef to batgirl, to probation officer to english teacher in korea, and while I seek each one out, it's been good for my soul to know, that what next is
Anything.
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