Who I might have been....
I met the love of my life in college many long years ago. After we actually admitted that we were more than a simple infatuation--all we allowed ourselves to say for the first six months or so was "I'm crazy about you" or "I adore you"---for each other, and that we probably were NOT going to go our separate ways just because we were from separate states and his parents were not willing to pay out-of-state tuition another year, and we decided that we were not only going to find some way to be in school together for another year but were also probably going to have some kind of a future together, my love said to me, "Y'know, Cynce, if you get out of here with a degree in English literature, you're going to be an educated unemployable." Sorta sounded like a social disease.
I had never really worried about that. In truth, I went to college because at my house it was a given. Dad had his PhD and Mother, although she was one of 11 children, like 7 others of the 11, had worked (and paid) her own way through the university and had a Bachelor's degree. Where I went to school was my own choice as was what I studied, but that I would go to and finish college was "writ rite thare" in an invisible contract somewhere. Oh, I had played with a number of ideas. I loved English--reading and writing, music, and drama. However, I was honest enough to admit I was probably not talented enough at any of my beloved interests to make a living as a performing artist in any of them. I also knew the true committed calling in my life was to be a wife and mother---boy, does that make me sound "Donna Reed" and "Harriet Nelson." Also, I really understood that performer's lives and even business women's (I played in my head with being an interior decorator or a fashion designer, too) were not the kind of careers that could really be put on hold just any time to have children and raise them and then picked up again at will. So teaching had always played in the back of my mind because teachers of music and acting and writing have to be able to DO in order to teach how, and there would always be a need for teachers, and you could slip out and have kids and slip back in. But I always ended these verbal meanderings with a firm and often vociferous declaration that I'd never be a teacher because there was just too much paper work! I knew I wanted to travel--travel all over the world---so becoming an airline hostess was another of the things I considered. Dental hygeniest (good thing I didn't chose that since I don't seem to be able to spell it correctly) was my back-up possibility.
But at this point, with this wonderful man in my sights and the life of my dreams beginning to gel, his suggestion that I pick up the block of classes needed to be certified to teach which would give me a double minor sounded perfectly plausable and more that a little wise. I actually enjoyed the classes I had to take; and when I went into the classroom to do my intern teaching, I KNEW I was doing what I was supposed to be doing!!
Who might I have been if things had been different? I don't have any idea because, altho my life has not been perfect--nobody's is--there are NO major aspects of it that I would want changed. He came into my psych class late, after the professor had already made the seating chart. I had kept an empty seat beside me to put my books in. He was gorgeous---divers often are; and I decided I would rather put my books on the floor and have him sitting next to me all quarter. He helped me decide to become a teacher, and that and marrying him have surely been the determining decisions in where my life has gone.
For his own reasons, he chose to enter the Army before we married. We married on a military base while he finished Special Forces training. When we'd been married only 6 months he was deployed to Vietnam. What if he hadn't come back at all? What if hadn't come home whole both physically or mentally? Those things would have changed my life completely. But they didn't. It wasn't easy when he first came back, but between diligent effort and circumstances,we got through that. What if we hadn't? I would be different, perhaps I would not be around, it was the only time in my life I even mused on that awful option. But we worked through it and are still together and in love, so many years down the road.
What I guess I am trying to say is that altho predestination is not actually a part of the religious faith I have been a part of all my life, I believe it is part of my deep individual faith, that the Lord is involved in my personal life; that I don't want to play around with who I might have been because I am who I am supposed to be. Things happened and people came into my life that I might have the life and be the person I have become. I have certainly screwed up some of the minor decisions, but in the larger "flannel board" of life, I am who I am, doing what I do, living THIS life, because it is where God has led me to be. And, I like my life.
I had never really worried about that. In truth, I went to college because at my house it was a given. Dad had his PhD and Mother, although she was one of 11 children, like 7 others of the 11, had worked (and paid) her own way through the university and had a Bachelor's degree. Where I went to school was my own choice as was what I studied, but that I would go to and finish college was "writ rite thare" in an invisible contract somewhere. Oh, I had played with a number of ideas. I loved English--reading and writing, music, and drama. However, I was honest enough to admit I was probably not talented enough at any of my beloved interests to make a living as a performing artist in any of them. I also knew the true committed calling in my life was to be a wife and mother---boy, does that make me sound "Donna Reed" and "Harriet Nelson." Also, I really understood that performer's lives and even business women's (I played in my head with being an interior decorator or a fashion designer, too) were not the kind of careers that could really be put on hold just any time to have children and raise them and then picked up again at will. So teaching had always played in the back of my mind because teachers of music and acting and writing have to be able to DO in order to teach how, and there would always be a need for teachers, and you could slip out and have kids and slip back in. But I always ended these verbal meanderings with a firm and often vociferous declaration that I'd never be a teacher because there was just too much paper work! I knew I wanted to travel--travel all over the world---so becoming an airline hostess was another of the things I considered. Dental hygeniest (good thing I didn't chose that since I don't seem to be able to spell it correctly) was my back-up possibility.
But at this point, with this wonderful man in my sights and the life of my dreams beginning to gel, his suggestion that I pick up the block of classes needed to be certified to teach which would give me a double minor sounded perfectly plausable and more that a little wise. I actually enjoyed the classes I had to take; and when I went into the classroom to do my intern teaching, I KNEW I was doing what I was supposed to be doing!!
Who might I have been if things had been different? I don't have any idea because, altho my life has not been perfect--nobody's is--there are NO major aspects of it that I would want changed. He came into my psych class late, after the professor had already made the seating chart. I had kept an empty seat beside me to put my books in. He was gorgeous---divers often are; and I decided I would rather put my books on the floor and have him sitting next to me all quarter. He helped me decide to become a teacher, and that and marrying him have surely been the determining decisions in where my life has gone.
For his own reasons, he chose to enter the Army before we married. We married on a military base while he finished Special Forces training. When we'd been married only 6 months he was deployed to Vietnam. What if he hadn't come back at all? What if hadn't come home whole both physically or mentally? Those things would have changed my life completely. But they didn't. It wasn't easy when he first came back, but between diligent effort and circumstances,we got through that. What if we hadn't? I would be different, perhaps I would not be around, it was the only time in my life I even mused on that awful option. But we worked through it and are still together and in love, so many years down the road.
What I guess I am trying to say is that altho predestination is not actually a part of the religious faith I have been a part of all my life, I believe it is part of my deep individual faith, that the Lord is involved in my personal life; that I don't want to play around with who I might have been because I am who I am supposed to be. Things happened and people came into my life that I might have the life and be the person I have become. I have certainly screwed up some of the minor decisions, but in the larger "flannel board" of life, I am who I am, doing what I do, living THIS life, because it is where God has led me to be. And, I like my life.
posted by sundaycynce at 3:18 PM
3 Comments:
It's so nice to know that fairy tales DO come true sometimes. Your story is inspiring and it gives the single girls ('chick included) hope.
Thanks for sharing your beautiful serendipitous love story and the happiness you've found being who you are!
Reading your words always gives me a tremendous feeling inside.
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