Chapter 5: The Life I Finally Chose
That was four years ago.
I'm seventy-three now, and I live part of the year in Pelican Reach, with Arthur, in the house with my willow tree over the fireplace — the painting stayed exactly where it's hung for forty years, and now I live underneath it, which Arthur and I both find quietly perfect. We are not young, and we don't have forever, and we both know it, and it makes every ordinary afternoon of jazz and coffee and painting by the sea almost unbearably precious. I did not expect, at sixty-nine, to fall in love again. I did not expect to find the girl I used to be hanging on a stranger's wall. Life is not finished with you just because your children think it should be.
I paint every day now. I've even sold a few pieces again, at the same kind of little seaside gallery where Arthur found my willow fifty years ago, and every time someone wants something I made, I feel that same thing I felt at nineteen — the particular joy of being valued for what you create rather than what you provide. It's the joy my whole adult life had no room for. I have room for it now. I made room, by selling a house and disappointing my children and flying to the far side of the world to become myself again.
My relationship with my children is what it is. Two of them have come around, somewhat, especially since grandchildren started asking to visit "Grandma who lives by the ocean and paints." Two are still a little cold, still quietly convinced I abandoned my post. I love them. I will always love them. But I no longer organize my entire existence around their comfort, and the sky did not fall when I stopped. That's the thing nobody tells the women who give everything away: the people you've trained to take will be angry when you stop, and you will survive their anger, and on the other side of it is a life that's finally yours.
Here's what I learned, finding a painting I'd forgotten I made over a stranger's fireplace.
It is never too late to go back for the self you gave away — and sometimes she's been out there the whole time, being loved by someone, waiting for you to come get her. I spent fifty years believing the girl who painted was a casualty of a well-lived life of sacrifice, gone for good, a luxury a good mother couldn't keep. And then I found her, hanging in a place of honor on the far side of the world, treasured for forty years by a kind man who saw her worth when my own family never did. My children called me selfish for selling the house and going. They were right that it was for me. They were wrong that for me is a sin. At sixty-nine, I finally learned the thing I should have known at nineteen — that a woman is allowed to keep a piece of herself, that her own joy is not a theft from anyone, and that it is never, ever too late to walk into a room half a world from home and find yourself hanging on the wall, exactly where you left her, waiting to be brought home.
I spent my whole life giving myself away.
Four children. A marriage. Fifty years
of putting everyone's needs before my own,
