EVERYONE has a story, and this one is mine. I’m getting older, and I haven’t achieved the things I believed I would achieve. Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me. I’ve lived a good life, and I’ve never wanted for anything material. When I was poor, I was poor by choice, and when I wanted to stop being poor, I met and married Danny.
Danny came from money. When I met him, he was self-employed, but then he got a good job and then he got another, better one with a big financial firm in Manhattan, and we settled down in a starter house in an all-white suburb of New Jersey. We had two daughters. All my closest friends were new mothers. A few years later, the big financial firm sent us to live in London where we became members of a group of expatriates that included some of the wealthiest people in the world.
During the brief periods when I blame something for my failure to achieve what I believed I would achieve, I blame two things. First, all the grown-ups in the all-white middle-class California suburb where I grew up told me I could be anything I wanted to be, and I believed them. But it wasn’t true, and as my life played out, I’ve had to accept that in many ways, women are secondary to men in this unfair world, and it’s a genuine limitation.
The second is a corollary of the first with a wider sweep: Logic doesn’t always prevail. It should, but it doesn’t, and it wasn’t something I’d encountered much in my privileged life until after we moved from London to Portland, and I ended my eighteen-year marriage to Danny and struck out on my own again. The illogic I encountered—especially in Family Court and as a single mother—never ceased to flummox me. It didn’t make sense. It was wrong. I wanted to fix it. I fought against it, and sometimes I prevailed, which is an achievement I hadn’t anticipated and one of the reasons I’m telling my story—albeit from a certain place of acceptance.
