Starting over, again and again
There was so much I wanted to do and accomplish at 22. Experience motherhood, join the Peace Corps, become a psychologist.
Instead, I became a clinical social worker; earned a master’s in social work; left my home and my religion; and moved away from New York. I was on a journey to become myself.
I wanted to organize workers into unions, act on the stage, and start a revolution. But where would I begin now that I was 32?
When social work lost its allure, I switched to a college teaching position. (I could start my revolution by enlightening students.) I married and had three wonderful children without morning sickness and labor pains (they were the product of my husband’s first marriage) and earned a Ph.D., too.
And suddenly I was 40.
When I turned 50, a line from “Fried Green Tomatoes” seemed to fit me well: “I’m too old to be young, and too young to be old.” Up until then, I had had too many moments of longing, waiting for the future. Too many days had gone by without savoring my existence.
From old desires, new goals arose tempered by a wisdom that only comes with age. I decided to start over again. Years before, after I had graduated from college, I enrolled in a graduate program in theater, but couldn’t handle work and school, so I dropped out.
At 54, I couldn’t wait anymore. I resigned from my full-time, tenure-track teaching position and enrolled in a graduate program in theater. After all, if I were to have regrets, they should come from what I had done, not what I failed to do.
Sitting under a tree on campus in the autumn, amid the colorful leaves, and listening to the marching band practice was divine. But a C- was painful. My prior academic accomplishments meant nothing to my professor of theater history, I had not adequately followed the outline format she provided. From teacher to student, like Miss Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” “the tables had turned with a vengeance.”
I also bore the embarrassment of directing a play for an assignment that absolutely bombed and all because I chose a script that would “challenge” me. It did. And oh, the disappointment when my keystone project in costume design elicited little attention and praise from faculty and my peers. As a student in my fifties, the experience was a threshing floor that humbled me.
As a result of my theater degree, I tried my hand at acting, playwriting and costuming in community theater productions. An internship in the costume department with a professional opera company was another threshing floor. I was part of a great machine that went on for ten weeks of 12-hour days. I realized that I was too old for this kind of work.
With the success of my work in two playwriting courses, I began to think that playwriting would become my next focus. After all, I had written a Christmas play for my sixth-grade class in elementary school and was commissioned to write a play for the next two years!
But I was getting older and marketing a play and going through long rehearsals to develop the script took more energy than I had. I just didn’t have the gumption to struggle and travel to make a career in theater. Maturity means facing reality. I had to plan for the financial aspects of retirement and return to full-time employment.
So, I went back to teaching and then social work.
By this time, I was 60.
But what about all those other fields I had wanted to pursue? During my last phase of college teaching, I briefly dabbled in unionizing adjunct faculty. It was very gratifying, but paid less than social work.
So back I went to the very best job I had ever had in social work. I was assigned to three elementary schools to help children with social skills and coping with family crisis, and I got to play a lot! Alas, the focus was prevention.
By my late sixties, freed up from full-time employment, I had the time to do volunteer work: community organizing, tutoring children, tutoring adults in ESL, selling in a fair trade store, walking dogs at a shelter and caregiving for my husband who had a degenerative disease.
My plate was full.
And now I am 82! A lifetime just isn’t long enough to do all that I wanted to do.
With no need for employment, and less energy for volunteering in the community, I think I will go back to writing. Maybe there’s an online publication that would like to publish what I have to say.
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Marion DiFalco is a retired clinical social worker and educator. She is also an aspiring poet and playwright. She lives in Cincinnati and is still trying to decide what to do with the rest of her life. A version of this story first appeared in the digital publication Medium.