Chapter Two

The list on my kitchen counter tonight, in my daughter’s sweet slanted script:

• perseverance
• resilience
• grit
• apples
• pianos
• pails of kerosene
• wheatstock
• rain

Could she be planning for the end of the world?

It seems, indeed, these are the very things that have been on my own mind as I contemplate my chapter two. And folks, suffice it to say, I feel like I get two chapters only. Chapter one was me as a beam of light, a twinkle in my parents’ eyes, the girl who tried to distract from the chaos my brother created with her own brightness and lightness and silliness and goodness. Chapter one was college and a strapping somewhat older guy, classic charming narcissist, suburbia and amazing babies and despair at being left in a 3800 square foot house on the edge of nowhere with those babies, for someone else. Was she a porn star or a stripper or did she perform surgery on the tiny figurines she collected or did she have the voice of a mermaid and a great steak recipe tattooed on her vagina? You decide. She supposedly was very good at whatever she did, so she was worth it. Or at least, that’s what I choose to believe.

Chapter one was making a life with those little girls without a guy in the house. Well. There was a hamster for a while. My daughter thought his balls were his bottom, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to correct her. There have been boyfriends. I have wanted one to stick and maybe I failed, maybe they did, maybe I was born failing so really each guy has been a version of small success. Like, I got my dishwasher fixed. I learned how expressing disappointment perpetually is really a turnoff. I decided I needed the lights on, sometimes. I figured out I’m attracted to wounded people. Then I realized, yeah, we all are. That’s called being human. I realized not flushing the toilet is a sign I’m done with the relationship. I realized I do want someone to sit next to me at the school concert. I realized I’m a little embarrassed when it’s someone different at the next concert.

Chapter one was letting the window fall out of my kitchen door and just leaving it like that, like at McDonald’s drive through, and laughing when I look at it. Chapter one is a tube TV and a boom box and a ten year old laptop and never any manis or pedis except the ones I do myself and they leave me a little deficient.

I want, want, want, Chapter Two. I can just feel it coming, bidden or not. I feel the house folding in, telling me it’s complete, I did it. Success! It has been a happy, sweet, challenging place where I fiercely fought to be a family with just one adult, and said every day we were going to be complete and happy anyway even if no one else saw my single parent nest as complete other than myself and my girls.

And now, at the age of 42, I want to launch myself out of this pretty, hot-as-asphault city to a city with a beach and a faster pulse and become a student again. Still a mother, always and of course.

The first three things on the list? Obvious. The apples are for my professors, of course. The pianos, plural, is a bit of a kerfuffle. They are there, in a conservatory of music, perhaps, where my daughter will alight. The pails of kerosene scare me. Those are metaphorical. Those are for the mean thoughts. Let them sift down with my sweat through my yoga mat and be evaporated out to a black hole. Wheat stock and rain? Well yes, of course. Nobody ever said Chapter Two would be gluten free, baby.

But. Can I do it? Is god going to give me this Chapter Two or will it be another one? Time, my tiny waiting chicken, shall tell us. Soon. But first, you must get your 8 hours of shuteye.