I Was Going to Change the World

I sat down this week with a very old friend of mine from back in Princeton days who I’ve kept touch with off and on. She is that special kind of friend where it never feels like much time has passed and it feels like all of our deep conversations pick up again just as they were before, with new insights added. She and I have both reached that stage of life where it turns out that we are not as important as we once thought we were going to be. We both had impressive test scores from high school, did amazingly well in college, and went to grad schools at expensive universities on scholarship. And yet, here we are, very ordinary people, wondering where all that time went and what happened to all of our ambition.

One of the things that happened to our ambition was motherhood. Both of us put our dreams on hold to raise children for thirty years and watched from the sidelines as our partners followed their career paths and earned accolades (and good salaries) in their own fields. She is still married and I am not, but in many ways, we are both trying to figure out what it means to be in this place in life now. Does it mean that we failed? Would our old teachers be disappointed in us? More importantly, are we disappointed in ourselves? Would we want our daughters to follow this path?

I admitted that I didn’t want my daughters to give up careers to become stay-at-home mothers. And if given all my choices over again, I don’t know that I would pick the same path a second time. But life doesn’t allow us to do it over again. That’s not one of the choices. All we get to do now is make choices moving forward. Whether or not we wasted thirty years of our lives isn’t particularly relevant. We are both still in our fifties and all we have left is the next thirty years. Those thirty years may be better in some sense than the ones we used up in childrearing, or they may be worse. But they are all we have.

In the end, I’m not sure that the big, ambitious life I’d planned to have matters more than the smaller life I led. Yes, twenty-year-old Mette would have been certain that she would end up doing very important things and changing the world. She would not end up like her parents, doing small and necessary things for people around them who would never see them truly. Only, as it turned out, that is very much what fifty-four-year-old Mette has become.

Yes, I’ve written some books along the way. I believed those books were important at the time, but in hindsight, I am less certain. They were markers of the journey I took, but they weren’t the lighthouses I imagined at the time I wrote them, nor in my early years when I thought that being a writer was VERY IMPORTANT business. It’s not that I think that writing is more or less important than the jobs I might have had. It’s only that the idea we have of changing the world in our twenties turns out to be a little quaint at age fifty. Like, I want to pat young Mette on the head and tell her to go out there and do what she can to make the world better. But mostly changing the world is a matter of luck, not effort or brilliance or ambition.

And even if I did change the world, it doesn’t necessarily make my actual life that much different. I would still be figuring out what to make for dinner tonight, and trying to keep up good health habits, including flossing my teeth (dammit!) and eating my vegetables. I will still be adding little highlights to my life by purchasing ridiculously expensive yarn for no good reason (except that I like it) and hating buying cars (which I did this week, as well). I suspect that anyone I imagined had done a better job of changing the world than I had would tell me that it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, and that mostly living is about the same. We change more than we change the world, and it’s not such a bad thing.