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
I ever did for myself was go halfway around the world, at sixty-nine, selfishly, and get her back.
My children, when they heard — when they unblocked my number, because the trip they’d called a selfish waste had turned into a story too remarkable to ignore — didn’t quite understand. “You’re staying? For a man? For painting?” They still saw it as their mother being selfish. I’ve made my peace with that. They were raised by a woman who taught them, by her own endless sacrifice, that her needs came last — and you cannot blame children entirely for believing the thing you spent their whole childhood demonstrating. I’m done demonstrating it. They can learn the new lesson or not.
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 Book HVAC R
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.
