Choices and Freedom

We make choices in life - or do we? Are we free to choose, and how free? My mother was a reluctant participant in life and after ten years of marriage, cooking, cleaning, children, divorce was an idea she toyed with. Get more education, get a better paying job, don't talk to other women, students or colleagues, maybe I should get a divorce! My father cried that night in the teacherage bedroom we all shared, and life became less safe. I was nine and couldn't wait for the day I could get away from the tension and unhappiness surrounding me at home. Behind the door in the living room, hidden in a book, I passed away the hours, days and years until I could be free.

At 17 I left home to go to Teachers' College. Not my choice but the only one offered to me. No money to take a University course; girls just get married and raise children, we save our money to put your brothers through school. Mother made the decisions - her mother sent her to Normal School and teaching became her life - so it was to be for me. I couldn't wait to be done with the mind numbing routines of school, the regimentation, always a square peg in a round hole. I didn't want others to tell me what to do and I had no desire to do that to anyone else.
I endured Teachers' College and hated teaching.

So began the years of trying to leave the classroom permanently behind me. I was on the way, get an Arts degree and then Library School and a safe retreat to the wonderful world of books.

And then the rules, and the patterns of behavior I had been taught, failed me. It was a new world and I floundered, as I tried to get this person who had forced himself on me out of my life. "I'll kill myself. I can't live without you." he lamented when I wanted him to go and leave me alone. I had felt such suicidal despair as a child in my parents' home. I couldn't let myself be responsible for doing this to another person, could I?

It wasn't my choice to get pregnant. How many times in the year and a half that I knew him? Five or six times - I used to know exactly, when and where. Never consensual but always the French safe, until the last time when I had tried again to break it off with him again. Was it deliberate on his part? Getting even? Did he have a sociopathic personality? I only knew him a year and a half, not long enough to say definitely he did or didn't have but still, a year and a half too long.

Not to worry. We would get married, he assured me. The day the results came out he cried and said he couldn't marry me because he had a responsibility to his other girlfriends who were new to the city that year. How touching, how unbelievable, how hilarious. Later that year, I walked down the street crying and laughing at the same time as I wondered how to care for my unborn child and thought of his incredible sense of "responsibility". Periodically throughout that year he would say, "Maybe we should get married". He only came to see me after dark and then at last, it was summer and he was gone, finally and permanently.

That last night of summer school he came to my door and whispered, "Good-bye, my love, good-bye." And I stood on the other side of the screen door and thought, "You can't even be original. He was quoting from my angry good-bye letter to him.