grace

One evening about a week ago Frances asked me over dishwasher loading whether I'd ever read a particular Shakespeare play. She's an aficionado, after performing in Camp Will over the summer and seeing countless plays my mom has directed. I told her I had, in a phenomenal class in college.

She asked more about it. The professor was great. I took it my senior year. Actually, I loved a lot of my classes that year; I really enjoyed being a student.

Why?

I stopped with a wet bowl in hand, hovering above the rack, and heard myself say that it was probably because I'd had some time to recover from my dad's death. I could turn my attention more fully to what was happening at school for the first time.

Up until then, he'd been sick. Or dying. Or I'd been struggling to stay upright while enduring relentless, knock-the-air-out-of-you waves of grief, and grappling with alienation from my peers, who had never caught a whiff of death and were obsessively focused on essays and romances and other developmentally appropriate preoccupations.

Standing in the kitchen, I felt my heart squeeze tightly in my chest. On an exhale something old and hard rattled loose. I don't think either of us expected me to say that.

Oh, said Frances. She hugged me and left the kitchen.

The next morning in a staff meeting at work, we were discussing a student who was admirably advocating for herself with a dean, asking for some academic leeway after her mother's death. I shared that I had lost a parent during college too, but that it had never occurred to me to formally ask for help in that way. I had been more independent maybe, but I'd also been more isolated in my struggles.

What ended up happening was that late in the spring semester of my sophomore year, a week or two after my dad died, I decided to drop a seminar. I felt overwhelmed often. A sense of unreality accompanied me through those first days and weeks back at school. I thought I'd still be able to graduate on time; it seemed the best course of action. My professor, though disappointed, supported me. Much much later, just before the very end of my senior year, I realized that without that class I didn't have sufficient credits for my major. A crisis ensued; I had to advocate hard with my advisor and department, and was eventually granted permission to complete the remaining work I had missed that semester, essentially completing the course, and thus graduate with my class. I remember spending days in Mike's tiny ill-lit Williamsburg apartment, reading and writing for hours on end, cramming weeks of classwork into a fevered few days.

I did the best work I could. Something about the whole awful thing, even in the thick of it, played into a narrative I had going just below the surface: see, you don't really deserve to graduate. You aren't really a good student; you couldn't even figure this problem out before the very last minute. Now your diploma will be a fake.

At my graduation, I was happy to have finished. But deep down I felt fraudulent.

Over the years that feeling quieted down, but it didn't go away. When I first began working in the counseling service at St. John's, I felt annoyed by how often my own 'stuff' came up. The students were so passionate. They threw themselves headlong into intellectual and campus life. I admired their commitment, but more often than was comfortable for me, I'd turn it back on myself. Why hadn't I been that kind of student? Why didn't I try harder, allow myself to sink deeper into difficult material, connect to more friends? What about studying? Why didn't I do that more? Why didn't I participate in the many campus traditions, and earn the right to show up at reunions feeling nostalgic and happy, running across the grass into the arms of my many successful friends? Why hadn't I graduated without that glaring fuck up marring the whole experience?

I remember sharing about this in supervision at the time. I surprised myself and cried. I don't think I mentioned that my dad had died during that time; only that I felt I had been mediocre and it bothered me terribly now. How could I counsel college students when I had been such a lame one myself?

When I began working at the F&M counseling service, Mike had just completed his first round of treatment. I wasn't plagued by the same feelings of shame about my past (which had subsided pretty quickly after that first flare up), but it did occasionally bubble up. I had so much else going on, it was easy to brush it aside.

But then that thing happened, with Frances. And at work the next day. A cold rock of fossilized shame broke loose inside me, allowing me to see something with clarity for the very first time. It took me twenty years.

I couldn't have thrown myself into college. It was impossible. I explained to my mom a few days ago, trying to make sense of the remarkable sea shift inside me: for the first three years, half my heart was always somewhere else. It was with you, and Dad, and Rachel. Where it needed to be.

My family was my strength. My dad was, in many ways, the center of us, and our love was big. I felt I needed to be home when I was at school, and vice versa. There wasn't space to endure the pain of his passing and dive into my school work. I couldn't be in two places at once.

I wasn't a mediocre student. Maybe I was, in fact - holy moly I think it might be true - a great college student. Despite watching my robust, brilliant, generous 44 year old dad become ill and die, and then having to learn to live in the world without him, I managed to do well in my classes and find my best friends and fall in love with my husband.

As I told my mom about this realization, it sounded a little crazy. Like, really. It took me so long! That shame-laced story I had been telling myself had really hurt me, and I couldn't seem to see it any other way, not for many many years.

She didn't think twenty years was so very many.

Telling her about it was healing. Then going to the hospital on Saturday, and finding Mike peaceful, comfortable, and receptive, and sitting quietly next to his bed and telling him about it - my husband, who knows my vulnerabilities so well, yet has not heard much about them recently as he's been so sick - this was another great gift to me. There was the unexpected release; then there was the telling and the being heard, which enabled something new to begin growing in my heart where that hard false story had been.

I love clinical work with college students. I could give you a laundry list of reasons why, but for the very first time, it occurred to me that maybe I was originally drawn to do this work because I needed to open up that hurting place and let it heal. Huh. Who knew?

I needed help with that. I've gotten it from all sides: coworkers, clients, supervisors, my friends, my family. Seeing my children suffer their dad's illness. Talking with my mom and sister. Walking this road with Mike.

If I was able to be in therapy myself right now, I don't think I would have brought up any of these issues. How remote! My feelings about myself as a college student? Who cares when there are much bigger, slippery, scary-looking fish to fry?

Yet the gratitude I feel, and the wonder, and the peace, make me realize how important it is.

I'm not ashamed of myself. I'm not a fake smart person. I don't have a phony degree. I'm supposed to be here, imperfect and lined, yet whole.

What makes the vulnerability and serendipity and big love possible? How did talking about Shakespeare with Frances set something that had been rumbling quietly away for years into rapid above-surface motion? I am awed.

I am calling it grace. I do believe.