Mrs. Dalloway Redux

Standing in line at the local tea shop (where the signage boasts "Tea is Now Fashionable"), I recognized behind me the voice of Dr. C., a former college professor of mine.

When I was a cloud hopping undergraduate English major, she was my number one teacher crush. I couldn't even utter a word aloud in her classroom without first rehearsing my thoughts in their earnest and hopeful entirety countless times inside my head. Any complements received for my occasional and tentative opinions would leave me blushing scarlet, and her comments in the margins of my essays were obsessed over with the same fervor I might have dedicated to a love note.

My roommates and I (black turtleneck wearing English majors all) had looked to her as a shining example of a woman who had it all, striking what seemed to us the perfect balance between sparkling academic career and enviable family life.

At the time we were her students, her children were about the same age as mine are now. She lived in a red brick house on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood that managed to be both bohemian and bourgeois. We imagined Dr. C and her handsome attorney husband drinking whiskey-laced tea and reciting T.S. Eliot to each other nightly before collapsing into passionate, intellectual embraces.

Oh, to be as smart, as witty, as lucky as Dr. C.

She was now casually conversing with a companion and completely unaware of the smitten former student standing a few inches away, prickles of nervous perspiration stinging my armpits.

I ached to turn around, to re-introduce myself, to show her, despite myself, pictures of my kids. I was curious to know if she still remembered me or my friends thirteen years and hundreds of students later.

But I paid for my overpriced tea and walked out.

I guess I'm not all cartwheels and karate chops when faced with the embodiment of my former hopes and dreams.

Striking up conversation would have begged the inevitable question, "What are you up to now?", and I knew I couldn't craft a reply that wouldn't belie a certain measure of shame at having opted out of academia and the creative life.

A certain measure of shame, let's face it, that I'm not gainfully employed in any way at all.

I would have doubtless stammered out my usual line about having done the corporate grind before quitting to raise a family, making sure to mention the part-time freelance work I haven't taken on in months, lest she make the mistaken assumption that I am only raising kids.

God help me, I might have even mentioned my blog.

And that, I think, is what's nagging me now. Knowing in my heart of hearts that mother work is worthy, I wish I didn't feel the need to be apologetic still.

My haste to explain to anyone who'll listen that this current life station is but temporary is a case in point. I'm torn between proudly owning this identity, even if it turns out to be the apex and culmination of my life's work, and dismissing it as a mere interval en route to other dreams.

Part of me believes, though many have fallen away, that some former aspirations are still within my reach. Another part feels, in the quiet moments of transcendent domesticity Dr. C. once alluded to during a discussion of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, that here and now I am my Self.

But I would never tell you that if we were talking face to face.

And it occurs to me now that, of all people, Dr. C. might be the last to expect a fumbled apology for the current tangent of my life, and not just because she had a lot less vested in me as her student than I did in her as my mentor.

I have vague memories of her rushing in late to our classroom, with just seconds to spare before the unspoken "fifteen minutes and we're out" rule was to take effect. Had she been held up by a sick child, an unscheduled daycare pick-up, the need to take a moment to cry behind closed office doors? Who knows what she went through for the sake of presenting that exalted image my friends and I greedily swallowed whole.

I wish I could say that I will begin answering the million dollar question without the slightest tinge of guilt. There may come a time when I don't need to - whether because I'm gainfully employed, or because I will have reached a point in life and personal evolution that it will no longer matter.

But even as I entertain thoughts of all that my future may still hold, I am slipping towards acceptance of the notion that my masterpieces need not be words on paper, but rather flesh and blood, and that my great opus won't be bound and published, but lived out day-to-day.