What It Took

A good friend from college days dropped by a couple weekends ago while en route from Lesotho to Washington D.C. via Amsterdam.  I met Mark during my last year of college at Berkeley.  He and I lived in the same dorm, where he´d liked hanging out in the doorway of my room, chatting up my roommate Valerie, the Graduate Student Instructor in his history class.  After graduation, we even shared a San Francisco apartment one summer on the corner of Bush and Leavenworth.  He taught me how to hop onto moving cable cars, and he took me to my first culinary dive.  The hole in the wall on a block of the Tenderloin was minutes from our flat and served cheap, incredible heaps of Saj Paneer and Chicken Korma.

Besides having a fearless knack for finding the best places to get affordable, ethnic eats, Mark is one of those people who is very, very good at keeping in touch.  When he likes you, he will travel across the globe to be at your wedding, sleep on a mattress on your floor or re-route flights to stop over in the city you happen to be living in at the moment.  What makes him different from other friends I have known as long is this: he maintains the relationship with unconditional generosity.  He has visited every European city I have lived in since graduation, and he has even seen my parents´ home in the good old Inland Empire.  But this is all thanks to Mark, who gives without expectations.  All I have ever had to do is respond to his e-mails or answer my cell phone to say, “Yeah, come over.  We want to see you.”  When he comes, it´s like we´ve just had lattés the day before in Berkeley, Heidelberg or Amsterdam. 

After he left Zoetermeer, Mark posted a photo of the two of us on Facebook.  It had been taken exactly eight years ago to the month, in October of 2001.  I had forgotten about that visit, mostly because I had been living with the roommate from hell on the otherwise hip and beautiful Oranienburgerstraße in Berlin.  I must have repressed every memory associated with the two months in that apartment, Mark´s Berlin trip notwithstanding. 

In the photo, we are sitting on a bench waiting for the subway at Unter den Linden.  I am wearing my mother´s Polish trenchcoat, an angora sweater she sent me and a cheap scarf I´d bought at H&M.  The coat and sweater are now in attic boxes, but even if I wore them, I´d look like another girl than the one on the bench.  My hair there is chin length, I am not wearing makeup, and I am smiling at the camera in that way Europeans find typically American.  Mark is looking off to the side with half a grin.  I wonder now who he had asked to take the picture.

If I see myself in that photo, I have to cringe a little.  It´s not about the fact that my hair is puffy, or that my face is soap-scrubbed, or that I look so untouched by experience.  It´s not about the period ahead that lies in wait with scholarship searching, secluded dissertation writing, five moves in two foreign countries and, to top it all off, the cancer that would end my mother´s life.  I look at myself in the picture and I can´t believe that the year before, I had already met the love of my life, and that he, too, had committed himself to me. 

But I am just as flabbergasted when I look at the girl in my wedding picture, taken twenty months ago.  What did I have to offer anyone then – sitting at Unter den Linden or glowing in Guasti, California?  I was only a girl, the same girl that finished her Ph.D., held her mom´s hand as she died, and became a mother ten months later.  For the whole first year and a half of my own daughter´s life, I remained a girl.  Not so suddenly, then, something shifted, and one unassuming day, I looked up into the mirror and realized that I had become a woman.

Shortly after moving to Europe, I remember meeting other women my age, like my husband´s cousin Martine or her sister-in-law, Kathy.  It always struck me how much sooner they appeared to have come into maturity, looking and moving with a confidence that I assumed had been the reward of choosing work over higher education, or motherhood at eighteen.  I had grown accustomed to hearing that I looked so much younger than my years, and I would always nod in response, explaining it away as a benefit of academic life.  But I finished school four years ago, and I became a mother two years after that.  One would think that an independent decade abroad, or at least the responsibility of my mother´s convalescence, would have helped me grow into adulthood with grace.  Yet I only stopped feeling like a girl this autumn.

What did it take for me to finally grow up?  What did it take for me to stop underestimating the girth of my own versatility, to surrender self-imposed limitations and embrace resilience? 

I certainly hadn´t been lazy as a student: I worked, got three degrees, wrote a dissertation in a foreign language.  I found foreign funding for my doctoral study.  I learned what all the abbreviations stood for in German to-let advertisements so that I could live in three different apartments with central heating, pay my first utility bills and fill forty square meters of the top floor with furniture delivered from the nearest IKEA. 

It would also be wrong to say I had been indulgent during my first pregnancy.  Granted, I had just lost my mother.  Two days after defending my dissertation in Berlin, I flew from Amsterdam to Los Angeles to spend the next year and a half not throwing myself into a career start, but taking care of my mom between temporary stints in administrative assistance for Shell Headquarters.  I was fired there the same day I heard her cancer had recurred, again, after operations, radiation and chemotherapy.  So when she passed away two months after our California wedding, I flew home, emotionally exhausted and prepared to spend a few months doing nothing but that what suited me – finally, for the first time in a long time.  When this manifested itself in a pregnancy, I took it easy – scared to lose the baby, to lose my husband, to lose the chance to find my own way again.

I have made a lot of adult decisions in the last decade, and in the space of my thirtieth year, experienced enough existential changes for a lifetime.  But I moved blindfolded through the morass of the grieving process, through the birth of my daughter, through the first year of mothering.  Everything had been about feeling in the dark.  Only in hindsight did I comprehend that in kairos, I had been young at heart, succeeding by virtue of having done my best.  In chronos, I remained a slave to the passage of time and the gradual wisdom it painfully, exclusively bequeathed.

While standing in an aisle of a local convenience store last week, mulling over some craft supplies my daughter seemed keen to own, I took out my wallet to check my cash.  As my daughter chirped away, crinkling the plastic of the bag holding Styrofoam stars, rainbow-colored pipe cleaners and miniature pom-poms, I looked down at the fingers holding open the black, vinyl billfold and saw my mother´s sun-stained hands.  I saw the responsibility of all the plastic tucked into compartments of the wallet´s sleeves, and the decisions behind the receipts that lay neatly creased into some side pockets.  Without having to open the change purse, I actually knew how much cash was left, because I kept track of what I spent, because my husband and I earned it together.  We had a new mortgage to pay off, and a second child on the way.  Still, we managed to have some extra for moments like now, when the fall rain made mornings ripe for arts and crafts on the living room table. 

In prioritizing creativity, I carry on in the way my mother had encouraged my own.  We used to sit at the kitchen table, crafting homemade clay or coloring greeting cards for my aunts in Japan.  In the autumn, we´d transform wire and oases into a wreath for the door.  We´d string on leaves and twigs we´d collected on walks, a tradition that I have already begun with my own little girl. 

Meandering through the park with her following our store visit, she stopped every couple of steps to hold up a brown, broken leaf and exclaim, “Ahhh!”  After I smiled and answered, “Oh, how beautiful,” she beamed from ear to ear before stashing her treasures into the compartment under the buggy.  Strolling home, I watched the way the wheels crunched over wet foliage.  I saw my own roller skates skidding over damp sidewalks and broken branches on the long walk back from pre-school, my mother at my side, keeping my balance with her hand in mine.

© 2009 Anastasia Hacopian. All rights reserved.