Coming to Grips with My Unlived Lives
I wanted to be an actress.
When I tell people, they usually laugh. They think that I’m recalling some adorable childhood dream. They don’t know about the dozens of acting books that once lined my bookshelves. They don’t know that, during my gifted and talented drama audition in 6th grade, I got so into character that I spontaneously cried in the middle of the performance. They don’t know that I enrolled in a Chicago college at 18 as a theatre major, with a (small) theatre scholarship in hand. They don’t even know that you can find me on IMDb with the other, real actors and actresses.
They don’t know, because does any of it really matter by the time you’re 30?
My life is the polar opposite of what I thought it would be back when I was a child. I know, I know; isn’t everyone’s? I somehow always thought I’d be different. I had a 10-year plan, after all.
Go to college in Chicago. Transfer to Los Angeles. Become a movie star. Publish books. Have children.
Life had other plans for my 10-year plan.
Still, I watch movies and shows and feel a tinge of pain in my chest as I remember just how badly I wanted to be doing what those actors are doing. Whenever I think about just auditioning for community theatre, I am overwhelmed with exhaustion. I foster children. I’m in my senior year of college after a 5 year break. I work multiple jobs. I’m married. The house needs to be cleaned. The floors need to be vacuumed. My head needs to not spin off of my neck.
Even worse are the insecure thoughts: I’m too big now. I’m not as pretty. I’m too old. I’m too anxious. Can I even still do it? Do I even remember how to act?
I don’t know what to do with the fact that I don’t think I’ll ever really get over not becoming an actress. I think there’s still some part of me that thinks I still have time, even as time slips further and further away.
When I wrote my 10-year plan, I was too young to consider that, eventually, you run out of years. I was 15-years-old. 30 was ancient to me then. 30 was a lifetime away.
I’ll already be 32 in December. Time marches on despite my poor planning.
I once sat down and listed every age of my adulthood. I wanted to try to remember what I did in each year. Did I do anything besides work? I started working at 15 and I don’t have some huge savings to show for it. We live in the same town I moved to when I was 7. We live in an apartment. We drive used cars. I no longer believe that you should work so much when you’re a teenager or in your early 20s. I think that, if at all possible, you should use that time to get ready for the rest of your life.
When I was 28, I self-published a poetry book. I got two negative reviews from total strangers and those two reviews hurt my heart so much that I unlisted the book. I think it’s safe to say that, in some universe where I really did become a famous actress, I would have hated fame. Two reviews. They weren’t even that bad, but they were enough to keep me from sharing my work.
When I was 29, someone else’s child made me a mother. I walked into the hospital and was handed a tiny, beautiful little girl who made me so nervous that I was secretly afraid of holding her. She was like glass in my arms and I was afraid of breaking her. I promised her that I would be the best foster mother to her for as long as she needed me to be.
Two years later, she would be as hearty as steel, but she would leave me. She was never mine, but I was always hers. I spent the last year of my 20s raising someone else’s baby.
In two months, it will have been one year since that foster daughter left us. We’re lucky enough to still see her. We somehow live just up the road from her. We babysit. I cry every time she leaves again and again and again. What was it Carrie Fisher said, in Postcards from the Edge? “We all know exactly what to do.” This is my role. My job is to feel. Why else would I have made a good actress?
I once misunderstood a Chris Stapleton song lyric. I thought he was saying, When I’m gone, somebody else will have to feel this strong. He wasn’t, but I love that.
When I’m gone, somebody else will have to feel this strong.
Six months ago, we said yes to another foster child, Leia (not her real name). She’s still here. In the first few months, I tried so hard to care for her without letting my heart become too attached. Do you know how impossible that is? I didn’t want to get hurt again. I don’t want to get hurt again. Yesterday, when we dropped her off for a visit with her birth family, she cried just like Jessy* used to do when I would leave and it felt like I was traveling back in time. “It’s happening again,” I told my spouse. We’re doing this all over again.
When we picked her up, she wasn’t crying anymore. She waved to her mother. We stopped to chat with the social worker and I kept noticing that her mother was still there, sitting on the steps in the heat waiting for a ride. “Are you okay?” I heard myself call out. “Do you have a ride?”
A car pulled up, then, and she gestured to it. “I didn’t want her to be waiting in the heat,” I explained to my spouse.
“I know, but I don’t think we’re allowed to give them rides,” Ash noted.
“Right, that’s right.”
There’s a stereotype about foster parents, that we’re mean or judgmental or this or that. But, I feel it all. I actually do care.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be Nicole Kidman. Maybe I was just supposed to sing songs in French to my foster daughters and watch them navigate the world. I once broke out into Stephen Sondheim, happily singing my old audition song, “What More Do I Need?”, to an enraptured one-year-old. In the car, Ash and I like to sing the harmonies in Carousel by Stevie Nicks. I take the high part, and she takes the low part:
For all you broken-hearted lovers lost
Go find another one
’Cause you know time won’t wait and you’ll be late
White rabbits on the run
Sometimes I think about finally learning guitar and singing for a camera. Sometimes I think about finishing my piano lessons. Sometimes I think about narrating audio books or becoming a reader for auditions. Sometimes I think that maybe it won’t be what I thought it would be, but it doesn’t have to be too late.
I don’t know if I’ll ever come to terms with the loss of my unlived lives, the many different paths my life could have taken. I know, though, that for better or worse, even when I don’t understand it — I must be exactly where I’m supposed to be.
But when I’m gone, somebody else will have to feel this strong.
