Out of the Box

I was raised by lower middle class parents who weren’t particularly fond of children, especially the six they had. They pushed us, helter skelter, into gaps that didn’t interfere with their happiness.

Growing up, I envied other people who lived on the surface and within lines. My classmates’ parents were heavily involved with their children. They encouraged rules, and the building material of religion, town, family, and society to created strong walls: Believe in God, never veer away from town and relatives except to go to college, then marry for keeps and settle down in a five mile range of Mom and Dad. Have kids. Give them the same guidance. These were the proper standards.

In my family, it was go to church because your mother is Catholic and because this town is very religion-oriented and one needed to keep up appearances, but get yourself to mass on your own. After school, disappear when your father gets home from work except to eat dinner, then duck if you say something at the table, especially the wrong thing. Only my mother ever said the right thing. Curfew? Are you home? Be quiet if you are. Don’t ask for money. Earn your own. And move out as soon as you graduate twelfth grade

I tried to emulate classmates, but I didn’t have the right credentials to be in the popular crowd. Not the right lineage, or clothes, or vocabulary, or graces. I didn’t live in the right neighborhood or have the right surname.

I consciously broke the first standard at fifteen by rejecting faith. It was my habit not to go into mass, but sit outside by the large doors until services were over. I didn’t believe in God or Catholicism, had never bought into it since five-years-old. One Sunday, I decided I couldn’t live with myself if I continued the charade. The truly moral choice was not to pretend a moment longer. I stood up and walked home. When I announced my true feelings to my mother, ending with, “I will not attend services anymore,” she turned livid. She refused to speak to me for weeks, but I stuck to my convictions. My classmates stared at me in disbelief and horror when I told them. I’d crossed a thick line.

Most of my high school classmates took the SATs, but I didn’t. Although I was an A student, I felt no compulsion to go to college. Maybe because I had no way of paying for it, so it had never seemed a possibility. Also, I had no idea what I wanted to be. I didn’t seem to be good at anything. Without funds or a car or direction, and stuck in a home life I hated, I saw few ways out. I did, however, have a steady boyfriend who made my existence pleasant. He’s the one who taught me how to drive, who gave me a social life, who included me on his family’s vacations. I did what any trapped eighteen-year-old would. I married him. He enlisted to support us. We broke another standard: we left town.

Eighteen-year-olds change. Common sense slides in with maturity. I realized, after failing to get pregnant and finding myself happy about it, that I didn’t want a child—ever. Moreover, I no longer loved my young husband. I appreciated him for helping me navigate my teens. I enjoyed visiting other states where his career took us. However, a forever marriage to him felt like a steel shackle without a key. I divorced at twenty-one. By my hometown’s standards, I had now failed as a person, a woman, a wife, and a daughter.

That’s when I embraced living outside the box, vowing to meet all sides of myself. My credo: I’m a person shaped by instinct and desire. I don’t reject an experience until I try it. It could be right. If wrong, now I know. Like dating. I’d only had the one boyfriend and I needed to experience all kinds of people to find the right partner. I needed to get to know myself my way.

While in my late twenties, I married again. My new husband hiked, camped, and snow-shoed. He loved music, but he also drank heavily, which I discovered too late. I divorced him within a year.

In my mid-thirties, I met my third husband John. We waited almost five years before tying the knot. Once settled, I went back to school while working full time, which meant a slow pace. One inspiration was a seventy-seven-year-old woman I met in one of my first college courses. She said she could only knock out one class a semester, but she didn’t care how long it took her. She wanted an AA degree before she died. By gum, if she could keep at it, I would, too. Six years later, I finished my bachelor’s and three years after that, my master’s.

John and I shared a great love for twenty-three years. I lost him to Lewy Body Dementia three and a half years ago. In caring for him in that excruciating nightmare, I touched two of my sides: my breaking point and my incredible strength.

My walls are movable, like Herman Miller furniture. They can be reconfigured and in motion until I know what works best, what fits me. Even then, I may change my mind.

Out of the box folks are air. We’re wide-ranging, but purposeful. We’re reliable, but hard to pinpoint.

It’s our absence of borders that let us thrive.