We went the other way. The road not taken. Were we ever clear on what “the way” was that we chose “the other?” Did we regret the road we did not take? Rejoice in and boast about the one that we did? Or, did we accommodate our lives—or our life stories, in any case– to justify the one or the other?
I mean, take me. I will choose “the other way” to write about, although I have to admit that for the most part I’ve been pretty much of a conformist.
In college I found conformity, which my small Pennsylvania campus thrived on, a little stifling and silly, but I still longed to want to be a conformist. I went the “other way” there, and the results were not satisfying. By hanging around the poets, the literary types (who got too weird for me also), I lost my frat boyfriend, whom I thought I loved. That time I went the other way, thinking I’d find a safety in their numbers—their candles and black turtlenecks and readings—another kind of conformity, really, and become part of that “we” for a while, but I regretted it.
There was no “way” that one could rebel against without becoming part of another group’s “way.” And suppose one didn’t fit in one way or the other?
Because of that terrible experience, I went the other way again when I — no, I won’t go into that one.
Let’s just jump ahead a few years when I felt I was forced to go the other way again.
That way was to take my two small children and leave my husband and find us a new place to live. How I wanted to be a conformist in those days! If a conformist meant, like my friend Shelly and her husband Gene, to have a house where the husband came home, supported them well, and allowed her to just watch the kids, I wanted that way. Bonnie and Ted, too, and their cute kids and his good job and all she had to do was play house, more or less. Eileen and Joe and their kids. She wore eye makeup and stayed at home with their kids and he came home in the evenings and they were together. That was The Way that many women rebelled against at same point, acting out an attitude I couldn’t understand.
I went the other way, I mean, I was forced to take the other way, to teach all day and come home to toddlers and have to cope with the bills and house and deal with an errant husband. Until I took my own way. I mean, I took them along, those little kids who didn’t understand why they were moving. So we were the “We” who “went the other way.” Me and two children. But who wants to hear that? Let alone live it.
I yearned for predictability, conformity, The Main Way, not the Other.
Jump ahead a bunch of years to the memoir I’m working on, where I explore my deliberately going the other way, that is, leaving a good job in New Jersey, taking a chance with the man I love and moving to San Francisco with no assurances of anything. Is that the “other way?” Well, for me, I guess. Am I boasting? I guess I am. When we say “We went the other way” we are painting ourselves as independent spirits, brave ones, aren’t we?
But who knows? Who knows where that other road actually led and what it took to go there, and stay there?