September 4, 2009

• A Special Person

  (Last year greekphysique  ran a series of guest blogs on that time of life between being a child and starting your own family. This was my entry, now slightly edited to stand alone)

  I leaned so much from Susan. She would baby sit me when I was a little girl. One of my aunts oldest girls, 10 years older than I am, she knew everything there was to know. I idolized her and for a good reason. Susan was not ordinary in any way.

   I wish I could tell you all about her, but that is not what this is all about. I wrote this to give my “sage” advice on those years between living as a child with your parents and becoming your own family. Then as you start your own family, potentially you and your mate will become parents, thus producing offspring and starting the cycle all over again.

  I mentioned Susan because she was perfection in my eyes, a major player in the way I lived life as a schoolgirl. Her life is still a major influence on the way I am today.

  As a child Susan’s IQ was repeatedly tested. It was higher than the people testing her had ever  seen before. She had lots of different tests done, due to her not fitting in very well in first grade. She kept calling her teacher “stupid” and wanted nothing to do with her classmates. She thought she knew better than the teacher, and in some areas she just might have.  Susan was my second cousin, ten years older than I was, extremely tall, with blond hair that was just shy of her being able to sit on it.  She was just simply gorgeous. That is not just my opinion–no, she was obviously what God had in mind when he created women. I loved her and she really loved me. Susan never stayed out of touch with me very long. Others lost track of her for years at a time.

  Her flaws and her strengths were related to each other.  Susan never took anyone’s advice. She did everything her own way and usually that way was better than any other. She took on conventions and made things work by breaking them. She had no faith in anyone except herself, but no one was smarter than her and it usually worked for her. Other than her social life, though–that never did work out very well. She tried reinventing the way relationships work in the same way she “improved” everything else. Relationships, she seemed unable to improve on those. But she never talked about that very much.

  I was just like her growing up minus the ultra intelligence and extreme beauty. OK, actually a much lesser version of her except for my flaws. I was reinventing the way life worked as well. Family told me not to do things a certain way and I would prove them all wrong. You can have it all. All the fun, all the play, and still get an education. And make a good living, all at the same time. Boyfriends could share the rent, play fun games when the lights went out. I could make them become serious, loyal creatures, when I decided that is what I wanted out of them. Notice I don’t mention my faith at all. I was ignoring that aspect of life then, so there is no point taking about it now. It was not part of that life. You can see that my faith (for those who don’t know, I am a Christian of the evangelical sort) would have agreed with everything I was rejecting. So no, that faith was not convenient at the time.

  Susan died of cirrhosis of the liver, at 30 years old. She died alone, dead a week before anyone missed her.

  That started me thinking. But no, it took another two years, and another kick in the butt. Finally it all came together for me. My God and my parents were all correct. Those boring social conventions were not just there to make life boring. Life can not be reinvented to be the way you want it to be. My new friends were never really friends. They were gone as soon as I needed them, not the new family I thought of them as. No, those friends were not judgmental towards me, because they did not care enough about me to be judgmental. Real family were those people willing to anger me in order to tell me the truth. They were those people willing to tell me  that I was destroying my  life one stupid decision at a time. They called me “whore”, when I was being one. They called me “irresponsible” when that is what I was.

  No, I never hit anything resembling a gutter by most standards,  but neither did Susan. We both had one talent in common. We both were very good at making money. We were very good at our chosen professions. But a profession may just be the least part of life. Funny, that is what almost everyone thinks is the key to a happy life. If that is what a happy life is all about, follow my footsteps and go straight where I turned, I suppose.

  So take that as an bad example of the way to do things. The one thing I did right was admitting I was wrong. I admitted it to my family, to my old friends, to myself, most importantly to God.

  My advice is that God and family are the most important part of your life. Don’t forget them or ignore them–they love you. Their words very well might save your life, even if you hate those words.

  The only other advice I have is just as important and maybe more so. Not every family is functional, their advice might really suck.

   Your path is not set in stone, don’t be too proud to change directions and admit when you are wrong. Pride can kill you. You can start all over and get it right the second time. The most gifted human I have ever knew, slowly killed herself rather than change her path. I am such a lesser person than she was. But I learned from her mistake.

  • 5:45 pm
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