I am writing this from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, the little town where I grew up and absolutely loved. I was the only one in my family born and raised here, and my brothers nicknamed me “Little Dutchie” because, even though we weren’t actually Pennsylvania Dutch, somehow I embodied the culture more than anyone else in my family. When I got out of the car this weekend, one of the first things I noticed was the smell. It smelled like a farm, which, yes, means manure, but somehow here I mean that in the best possible way. There are cornfields, old farms, one room schoolhouses and a quaint Main Street that still feels familiar after all these years. This weekend a horse and buggy came right down Main Street in the rain. I also passed two Mennonite boys riding their bikes through it. That’s a Sunday here.
I don’t remember spending much time as a kid imagining my future. We were too busy having fun. My friends and I were committed to what we called “making memories,” although in retrospect I am not sure anyone should have trusted us with that responsibility. There was usually one particular friend by my side, my partner in crime. We would go to the laundromat, put a quarter in the dryer with one of us inside and laugh watching each other tumble around until we could barely breathe. We went to the local car wash and took turns standing in the middle while the other one power washed us to see who could last the longest. One day we skipped school, somehow ended up with what we affectionately called an “exotic chicken” from a local farm and drove around with it in the car for the day. None of this makes an especially compelling case for our intelligence, but my God, we had fun. Underneath all of it, I was simply happy.
Somewhere toward the end of high school, people around me began talking about what came next. Marriage and children held no appeal for me then. I wanted college, tennis and a bigger world, although when it was actually time to leave, I discovered that wanting a bigger world and being ready for one were two very different things. I was terribly homesick my first semester of college. Eventually, though, I wanted to know what existed beyond what I knew. Over the years I lived in Delaware, Florida, California, Connecticut and North Carolina. I experienced different places, cultures, people and ways of seeing the world.
My life also took a turn almost immediately that I could never have imagined. I had built my future around my body and tennis, and an injury changed that plan in an instant. I have written about that part of my life before, so I don’t need to tell the whole story again here. What matters for this one is that there really wasn’t a Plan B. Tennis was Plan A, B, C, D and E. Before I had much chance to decide what adulthood was going to look like, life had already begun making some of those decisions for me.
Recently, I was talking with someone about her adult children. Some were thriving in ways most of us would recognize as successful, while another was struggling to find a footing in life. As she talked, I wondered whether some part of her experienced that child’s struggle as her own failure. She said nothing to suggest that she did. The thought came entirely from me, and suddenly I wondered how many parents quietly grade themselves through the lives their children go on to lead.
Then I had the less comfortable realization that I do the reverse. When someone tells me one of my daughters is kind or wonderful to have in their home, or when they work hard in school or at a sport, I am enormously proud of them, but if I am being completely truthful, something in me also exhales. I spent 13 years at home raising my children. I chose that life and love being their mother, but I also invested an enormous part of myself in it. If I allow my children’s successes to become evidence that I did something right, am I also in danger of making their struggles evidence that I did something wrong?
Once I started asking that, I realized how many parts of our lives become grades. Marriage. Money. Career. Children. Our homes, bodies and relationships can all quietly become evidence that we either did life correctly or somehow got it wrong. I always assumed I would be successful. I still do. I believe there is a great deal ahead of me professionally. I also stepped away from my career for 13 years to raise my children, so it would be rather unreasonable to return and become annoyed that everyone else did not politely pause while I was gone. Maybe one of the problems with imagining our lives is that we create the picture before we become the person who lives it. Why should the girl I was get to define success for the woman I became?
I bring my girls to Kutztown often. When life feels chaotic or I worry they are getting a little off track, I call for Kutztown. Here they have my parents, the woods, the fields and the quiet. We can walk the fifty steps from my parents’ door to the edge of the cornfield and watch thousands of fireflies light up the night, and for a little while whatever we were worried about disappears as we get lost in the magic of it. I spent part of my young adulthood wanting distance from this town, and now I spend part of my motherhood bringing my children back to it.
Yesterday I helped my dad move cords of firewood for the winter. Later I walked my dogs through the woods on my parents’ property. My parents moved here from the Detroit area about fifty years ago and are still here. For years I tried to convince them to move closer to me. Eventually I stopped. Every time I come home, I understand a little more why they stay.
Maybe success looks different depending on where you are standing. The younger version of me thought success required movement. Go somewhere. Become something. Build something. See more. Do more. Yet leaving also taught me how powerful the pull of familiarity can be. Maybe some of the people I once thought were too scared to leave simply knew what they valued and chose to stay close to it. There is value in knowing your neighbors, walking into a restaurant and being greeted by people who remember you, living near the people you love and having enough quiet to actually notice your life while you’re living it. I have been gone for roughly three decades, other than coming back to visit, and somehow I can still walk into certain places and be welcomed home.
When I was little, I found four leaf clovers constantly, enough that I decided I was qualified to establish the rules governing their magical properties. I could make several wishes, but one had to be that I would find another four leaf clover so the luck would continue. One of my other wishes was almost always the same. I wished for continued happiness. I wasn’t wishing for happiness because I was unhappy. It was almost the opposite. I knew I was happy, and I wanted it to keep going. Somewhere inside that little girl was a definition of success that had nothing to do with a bank account, career, house, marriage or résumé. I wonder when we make it so much more complicated.
Maybe part of the answer is that somewhere along the way, we start measuring. Someone’s child gets the scholarship. Someone’s grown children all come home for the weekend. A friend is in Italy again. Someone buys the house, builds the company, loses a ton of weight, celebrates thirty years of marriage or has a birthday surrounded by people who clearly adore them. We can be legitimately happy for every one of them. We can find meaning in our own detours and put a positive spin on the twists, turns and general messiness of being alive. And still, almost without realizing it, someone else’s good news can become a tiny measurement of our own life.
Then there is the other comparison, the life we have been quietly drafting in our heads for years. The marriage we thought we would have. The money we thought we would make. The way we thought our children would turn out. The body we thought we would keep. The person we thought we would be by now. We compare our real lives to the lives we think everyone else has and to an imaginary version of our own. Little by little, we can begin to feel behind in our own lives without ever consciously deciding that we have failed. It is incredibly easy to be living a good life and still feel as though you are failing at it.
Of course, sometimes we do fail. We make bad decisions, hurt people or abandon things we should have fought for. Sometimes we screw things up. I just wonder how often something actually worked out beautifully and we failed to recognize it because it didn’t look the way we had decided success was supposed to look.
That may be what coming home keeps reminding me. The place I once needed to leave in order to discover a bigger world is now one of the places I return to when I need to remember what a good life feels like. I walk through the woods, help my dad with his firewood, go to the farm with my mom to pick what is ripe and come home to make dinner from what we carried in, drive past cornfields and old schoolhouses, smell the farms and watch a horse and buggy make its way down Main Street. For a little while, time seems to stop.
What did you think your life would look like by now? Where did that picture come from? How much of it do you still genuinely want, and how much of it have you simply been using to grade yourself?
When I was little and lucky enough to find a four leaf clover, I knew exactly what to ask for. I wanted the happiness I already had to continue, and I wanted enough luck to find another clover so I could ask for it again. Maybe that little girl understood something about a successful life that I have spent all these years trying to relearn. Maybe happiness gets harder to recognize when we start measuring it. How much of the sweetness of our own lives do we miss while looking at the life we thought we’d have and the lives we think everyone else has? Have we made it almost impossible to recognize a good life while we’re living one?