CHAPTER 2
All that we worried about never came to pass. It was only the unimaginable that caught us like storms in the night and crushed our spirits and dreams for years. I absorbed my mother’s concerns like any sensitive child. Health, success, normality–aren’t these universal concerns for any daughter? But I absorbed them thoroughly and each day ask myself: Am I healthy? Am I successful? Am I normal? And it seems the great challenge of growing older is to be able to calibrate and readjust our mother’s standards of health, success, and normality in order to reflect our own authentic goals more accurately. I believe the collision of the old and new standards is the basis of much depression and dissatisfaction with what the day has given us.
My mother was born in 1931 and in a very real sense I feel I am living out the anxieties of that time. It was a time of desperate poverty and want, and so my mother wished above all things that I should have wealth. She married a doctor. She urged me to marry a wealthy man. And in the aftermath of these achievements, my loneliness and divorce, she still takes pleasure that I am a woman of substantial economic means.
I think of my wealth as belonging to God, and the goal of my life is to use it in His service by nurturing worthy projects as well as my own gifts of music and writing. The way I am able to sit on a coach to London this morning as I write these words is because the settlement from my divorce bought me a home in Virginia that steadily increases in value from which I borrow the money and time to write.
Oxfordshire is beautiful on this late September morning and I remember how confident I was at age 22 when I came to make Oxford my spiritual home on this planet. It remains so today. Where has my confidence gone? I am 48 and have managed any number of challenging situations–both personally and professionally–in the quarter century since I last lived in Oxford. Yet I felt immensely attractive when I was 22. When I walked down any sidewalk in Oxford, heads turned, and eyes held admiration for my beauty. That happens still today, but I no longer believe what I am seeing. The loss of my husband’s affection after 15 years of tremendous intimacy also robbed me of a clear vision of my assets; rather like trying to read the balance of your bank account without proper eyeglasses. Is that 2,000 or 20,000 there? Likewise, my ego has gathered a need for glasses, a way to see my worth clearly and distinctly.
Is this the real reason I have returned to Oxford? To attempt to manufacture an appropriate pair of emotional lens through which I might read the dictums of my soul as effortlessly as my eyes could read fine print at age 22?