|
 A
Necessary Journey
by
Nancy L. Snyderman, M.D.
and Peg Strep
I NEVER EXPECTED life to be so messy.
If a palm reader had studied my hand while I was
growing up and told me that, along with becoming a
doctor and a television correspondent. I'd be married
three times, go broke once, start my life over alone
with two children in a brand-new city at the age of
thirty-six, and, finally end up personally happy in my
forties as a wife and mother of three, I would have
yanked my hand back and rolled my eyes. And asked for
a refund.
But she would have been right, after all.
Of course, I didn't know any palm readers in
Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I grew up, amid miles of
rolling hills and fertile farmland, dotted every now
and then with a white farmhouse and a red barn. The
housing developments and strip malls that have since
gobbled up the farms weren't a part of life in
America's heartland then, and every street and store
had its own personality. Now, when I go back and the
commuter plane circles the airport, I find myself
pressing my face against the window, searching for the
landmarks that tell me I'm home. Each time, I'm
disappointed to see that more of them are gone. The
child in me wants "home" to be the way it always was.
Fort Wayne wasn't a place I ever remember
planning on leaving, not consciously at least.
Actually, I'm not really sure I "planned" anything all
that far into the future. I simply assumed that my
life would be just like my parents' life and the
progression of my childhood: neat and orderly. Life in
Fort Wayne was solid, and it still is. My best friends
from my childhood and my adolescence still live there,
as do my parents. All these years later, I'm still
close to Mike, my best friend in high school, and,
over the course of visits, his kids and mine have
become friends. I go back every year for the Fourth of
July and the parade is just as I remember it.
I lived in the same house from the time I was
one until I turned seventeen, in a neighborhood where
no one had fences and kids ran from yard to yard, and
everyone's mom knew you and your mom. I guess I was
relatively privileged -- my dad was a doctor and
belonged to the local country club -- but my family
lived an unpretentious life, and I grew up feeling
very much a part of the fabric of life in a small
Midwestern city.
I live in San Francisco now, a beautiful and
romantic city perched on a bay that looks just like
the postcards hundreds of thousands of tourists send
home every year. It is the city I moved to to rebuild
my life and reinvent myself just over ten years ago,
as a single mother of two. Much more than miles
separates my children's hometown from the one I grew
up in. The woman who is a mother and wife, doctor, and
television correspondent isn't the same person as the
girl who lived and dreamed about her future in Fort
Wayne. But as much as the experiences of the roads
I've traveled since leaving home have shaped me, Fort
Wayne and what growing up there taught me are also a
part of the fabric of my soul. Going back to Fort
Wayne has always grounded me, and I've made it a point
to make sure my children, who live a privileged life
in a cosmopolitan city, understand my Indiana roots.
Even though much has changed in Fort Wayne since
my girlhood, and my parents moved to a fancier, more
modern house twenty years ago, the one-story ranch
house I grew up in still stands among the same houses,
still painted the same colors, in my old neighborhood.
The fir tree I climbed both as a tomboy and, later, as
a teenager desperate for space and a view of the
world, still towers over the hill. Even so, I know
exactly how long I've been gone and how many miles
away I've traveled when I look at the tree my parents
planted in the front yard when I was six. The once
sunny lawn is now cast into shade by its leaves and
branches, and my mother's carefully tended strawberry
patch has long since been taken over by lawn.
A few years ago, I drove by the house, as I
always do when I'm in Fort Wayne, but this time it had
a "For Sale" sign out in front. For years, I
fantasized about walking through the house again, just
to relive some of my childhood memories and maybe even
get in touch with my girlhood self who'd been so happy
there. I called the real estate agent and, of course,
he was happy to let me see it. I asked my mom if she
wanted to come, but she thought it'd be too sad,
something that puzzled me at the time but that doesn't
any longer. Instead, I took my oldest daughter, Kate,
eager to show her where my stories took place. I
imagined myself giving her the tour: Here's the
trellis to the roof my sister and I climbed when we
hid from our brothers; this is the living room where
your grandmother stopped the fight between your uncles
when they were boys and broke her finger in the
process; this was my room and it was painted white.
The rooms were smaller and the ceilings lower
than I remembered, and the woods that separated the
back yard from the highway were shorter and thinner
than the childhood forest stored in my memory. But the
warmth and love of the family I grew up in seemed, to
me at least, still to be a part of the place, and
walking through those rooms with Kate, her eyes
animated, made my girlhood come alive for both of us.
For many years, I went back to Fort Wayne
precisely because my life was so full of change and
turmoil that the fantasy of being able to go back
sustained me. The still point that my hometown
represented, fixed in my stable childhood memories,
was as comforting as a mouthful of chocolate. I don't
go back as often as I used to now, simply because I no
longer need to.
The life I imagined for myself, growing up in
that house in my old neighborhood, was simpler and
neater than the one I actually ended up living. Life
was, I thought then, a straight, unobstructed road to
the destinations I would choose, with pretty vistas
and sunsets on the way. Guided by my parents' example,
I believed that marriages always lasted and that even
when parents fought, they always made up. I knew no
one whose parents were divorced, and if there was a
single lesson we were all meant to learn, it was the
value of staying the course.
I had an amazingly uneventful, happy childhood.
By the time I was in third grade, I knew I wanted to
be a doctor. I went to high school where I wasn't the
prettiest or the most popular but did just fine as the
editor of the yearbook. I sailed on to college, where
the road took one unexpected turn, and went right on
to medical school where, in my last year, I married a
young man I'd known since childhood. I was twenty-four
and, while life hadn't left me completely unscathed,
the road ahead still looked pretty straight and
relatively uncomplicated.
My husband and I shared a common background and
were each ambitious and eager; our parents had long
known each other socially. It looked, from the outside
at least, like a perfect match. He was a lawyer, I was
a doctor, and it seemed the world was pretty much ours
for the asking. I had chosen pediatrics for my
residency, and the two of us moved to Pittsburgh to
start our adult lives and begin the "happily ever
after" part. I was proud I'd managed to grow up
without ever making an important wrong turn or a major
mistake.
The next few years would change all that. First,
my marriage fell apart after just five years and then,
I decided to leave pediatrics for a specialty in ear,
nose, and throat surgery, something I saw as another
public admission that I didn't know where I was going
or what I was doing. I castigated myself for every
false step I took. But looking back, those years mark
the start of my real "growing up", the beginning of
the long haul that would bring me to where I am today.
Errors in judgment, wrong choices, and failures as
well as successes and triumphs altered my vision of
the road I was on and changed who I was.
Now, looking back, I see that the map of my life
has all manner of turns and twists, potholes and mud,
dead ends and -- now and again -- a sweep of open
road. It is not the map I expected to end up looking
at, growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but it is mine.
It is also a record of an uneven, sometimes circuitous
journey that I share with many women, if not in the
specific details, then in its broad outlines.
Take marriage, for example. In America today,
almost one in two women will find themselves living
lives and on a path very different from their girlhood
dreams. Gather a group of women together and the
statistical likelihood is that almost half of them
have been divorced at least once. They find themselves
not only trying to start their lives over but, often,
raising children with little or no emotional or
financial support. By contrast, in my mother's
generation, a gathering of women for coffee and cake
would have had nine married women for every divorcee.
In my grandmother's lifetime, a woman would have been
far more likely to be widowed than divorced.
It took me a very long time to stop apologizing
to myself, to my parents, and to anyone who mattered
about how uneven the roads I'd taken turned out to be.
I know better now.
Looking back at my life, I have taken a
necessary journey that has made me a person of a
richer fabric, if a bit ragged around the edges. I
know now, as I didn't then, that the journey itself is
every bit as important as where the road finally takes
us. I guess that's why my childhood furniture still
decorates the house I live in and why I still drive
the same old car, the 1983 BMW that was, along with my
oldest child and the clothes on my back, all I was
able to retrieve from my second marriage. It is also
the car I drove from Little Rock to San Francisco to
start my life over. The 150,000 miles on its odometer
are an important reminder of where I once found myself
-- broke, the single mother of two, starting over and
clueless about how to do it -- and where I am now.
In fact, I might not have been able to get where
I am today if I hadn't gone to those other places
first. And for that reason, I'm hanging on to that car
for as long as I can. It is my own personal, self
bestowed merit badge.
Telling our stories is important, and as I tell
mine, both who I am and where I've been become
clearer, more defined. I can look at the map in my
mind's eye and I can see the intersections where my
life took a new turn. I can point to the places where
I changed, the events and people that taught me the
meaning of joy, the junctures where I felt the full
burden of despair. What's not visible when you're on
the road is clearer in retrospect. I can now see that
the roads I managed not to take were blessings, along
with a few I probably should have taken after all. The
map, like the journey of life it details, is still a
work in progress, with plenty of intersections ahead.
When we look closely at the maps of our lives,
we realize that each intersection is different. Some
are roads we have chosen, deliberately or
unthinkingly, and some are pathways others have chosen
for us. Still others are detours or blind alleys. And
then there are the intersections we can ascribe only
to something larger than ourselves, a cosmic force we
may call by one of many names. The important point is
that each of these intersections has something to
teach us, to inform our growth. Instead of beating
ourselves up for what we did or didn't do, we need to
try to see the journey we've taken as necessary, glean
from it what value we can, and start scanning the
horizon for new opportunities.
The necessary journeys I have taken have made me
a stronger, more resilient, more confident woman than
my young girl self, lying on her bed in that cozy
house in Fort Wayne, ever dreamed of becoming. Of
course, when young girls daydream about the future,
they only dream of what they'll be, not who they'll
be. It takes the journey to teach you that who you are
is more important than anything else.
 This
article is excerpted from Necessary Journeys ©2000,
by Nancy L. Snyderman, M.D. and Peg Streep. Excerpted by permission of
Hyperion Books, New York.
www.hyperionbooks.com
Info/Order
this book.
About The
Author
Dr. Nancy L. Snyderman is a
mother of three, a wife, and a surgeon who specializes in
otolaryngology. She is a medical correspondent for ABC News, 20/20, and
Good Morning America. Peg
Streep is the mother of a daughter and the author of Spiritual
Gardening, among other books.
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