The road to hell

The latest edition of The Record, a biannual publication summarizing all of the achievements, personal and professional, of my law school’s alumni, arrived in my mailbox yesterday. In the first years following my graduation, I looked forward to its arrival and to my classmates’ news with real excitement. I wanted to stay abreast of who had married, procreated, or remained committed to doing the work for which we were all (theoretically) trained. Why? Partly it was curiosity; partly I wanted to know whose life resembled mine in its absence of spouse, offspring, or interest in pursuing our chosen profession. There is strength in numbers, after all, and knowing that I wasn’t alone in wanting to turn away from the clearest path would somehow help validate my choice—or rather, the choice I wanted to make.
It’s hard to remember now why I wanted to be a lawyer. When people—especially admissions counselors—asked me this question, I would respond with a spiel that became so hard-wired its true origins are now unknown to me. It went like this: during a mock trial exercise in my high school civics class, I became so inspired by the law while playing my assigned role of “lawyer” that I knew I had to pursue a career in the field. That story could be true. I honestly don’t remember anymore. What I do know is that what truly inspired me as I entered college and my goal of attending law school drew closer was the fat salary I could make as an associate at a large law firm. Seeking justice for the oppressed, or even seeking what I would later come to know as a “good outcome” for a corporate client, were motivations that had no place in my thought process. When my sister’s coworker, an idealistic young director of a youth center, commented upon hearing my plans that I could “do a lot of good as a lawyer-- Gandhi was a lawyer!” I responded with a smile on my face and a mental ho-hum. Doing good, I hate to admit, was not my goal.
Ironically, or maybe logically, attending law school changed all this. Many of my classmates were incredibly bright, inspired, and self-directed individuals. Everyone but me seemed to have walked in with their eyes wide open, and their anxiety over grades and inclination toward round-the-clock studying bewildered me. Wasn’t the idea just to graduate with grades good enough to secure a job at a good-enough firm? Apparently, there were hierarchies even among major firms in large cities, and those who secured jobs at the bluest of the blue-chip organizations could claim more professional success than the rest of us.
Other students strove to be lawyers of the Gandhi variety, and were committed to careers in public service. By the time I decided that a life of endless, pointless competition wasn’t for me, I was already well on my way to that path. After a summer internship at one of the good-enough firms in a large city, I walked away from my job offer. It was both frightening and completely exhilarating. Choosing a life that made sense to me and was motivated by something other than the dollar signs in my eyes was possible, and while I still didn’t know what I wanted, I did know what I didn’t want.
The latest Record tells me that one former crush (he once bought me a drink and very nearly asked me out, according to several expert girlfriend analyses) is engaged; another just returned from his honeymoon. Other friends are working at this or that firm, or have important sounding titles in government offices. What surprised me most (except for a momentary pang upon reading news of the aforementioned engagement) was how little all of it mattered to me. It all feels so foreign and distant from my present existence, almost like an alternate me was their classmate, and maybe that’s the case. We go to school to grow up as much as we go to learn from professors and textbooks. That’s the value I’m taking away from my law school experience. It was more than an expensive detour. I learned what I don’t want, which is priceless.

Three Observations on Turning 30

1. I’ve developed a bad habit of examining the temples and hairlines of my 30-something friends and acquaintances for signs of gray hair or a dye job.

Like most fifteen year-olds, I was always delighted when the clerk at Putt Putt or a long-lost relative upwardly misjudged my age by a year or two. Looking older than my years was a sign that the mistaken party had picked up on the air of sophistication and maturity that I was striving for and had apparently achieved, with the aid of Wet ‘N Wild lip gloss and Bonne Bell eyeshadow. However, these same misjudgments began to hit me like a snowball to the face soon after my twenty-first birthday. It was no longer exciting for someone to ratchet up my age once all the milestones of youth—driver’s license, voter registration (good citizen that I was), legal drinking age—had all been marked. The day that strangers stop assuming that I’m a student upon our introduction will likely inflict lasting damage on my psyche.

Hair, I’ve decided, is a telltale indicator of youth. My mom started to “go gray” when she was 18, and this bit of family history hung over me like a specter until I’d gotten well beyond that tender age myself with nary a silver thread in sight. Now that I’m in the home stretch of my twenties—in my very last twenty, actually—I can’t help my eyes from darting invasively towards the parts and hairlines of friends, and wondering who among us will be the last to maintain a virgin head of hair that is true to the color of her childhood. Men have it worse, I think. A friend told me years ago that her fiancée was self-conscious about his newly receding hairlines, despite her reassurances that this was only normal at the age of twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! She said it as though he were forty-seven. And forty-seven sounds very young to me now. I am fascinated by how ephemeral youth has proved to be—or the appearance of it, rather.

2. Previously suppressed shallow tendencies have begun to surface in the form of increased time in front of the bathroom mirror.

My mother probably won’t back me up on this, but I was never a mirror dweller. I self-righteously snickered, under my breath, when I walked past women and girls in public restrooms who lingered in front of the oversized mirrors, their hands long since clean, as they endlessly examined their appearances. The particular objects of my scorn were those who carted a toolbox of cosmetics to school or work with them to ensure that at no point during the day were they without lipstick or eyeliner. While I have not yet joined the ranks of the toolbox women, and I still tend to beat it out of public restrooms, post-hand washing, I have lately found myself, in the privacy of my own bathroom, scrutinizing my visage, looking for any little change since the week before. Recently, I lamented the appearance of symmetrical creases under each eye, sure that they were a blaring announcement to the world that my twenties are over and I will hereafter appear permanently fatigued. Then I noticed the very same lines settled comfortably beneath my 10-year old eyes in my fifth grade class photo. Perhaps if I’d spent more time in front of the mirror back then, I could have spared myself my present paranoia.

3. My formerly bulletproof protection against the world’s expectations has turned up several chinks.

Most of my friends have already turned 30, and I watched as they experienced career/marriage/baby panic with a very unsportsmanlike lack of sympathy. “Thirty,” I assured them smugly, “is an arbitrary number to use as a benchmark for any of one’s life plans.” However, as the weight of a new decade bears down upon me, I find myself alternately overtaken by my own various panics, and at peace about it all. Turns out, it is much harder than I expected it would be to ignore the social and cultural expectations, perceived or otherwise, of what one’s life should look like at 30. I’m trying to resist the temptation to see this age as more significant than any of the others that I’ve seen come and go. The lesson for me, so far, is in the resisting, and in arriving at this latest milestone without fear.

Life Lessons at the Holiday Inn

In recent years, much has been made in the media of studies purporting to show that marriage is on the decline: the average age at which we get married is older than ever (24 for women! 27 for men!), and depending on one’s tax bracket, some of us might never get married at all. Based on my own astute, though admittedly unscientific observations, however, it still seems to be the case that in most circles, regardless of one’s cultural background or socioeconomic status, getting married is pretty much a given, eventually, for those who are able. But as has been demonstrated by various romantic comedies starring Katherine Heigl—or the current girl-next-door starlet of your choice, early adulthood and marriage don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand these days. My single girlfriends and I have examined the whys of this issue ad nauseum, and the one idea that always soothes our world-weary spirits is that those early marriage types are too eager to cast off their high expectations, whereas we have refused to settle. I admit that I’ve wavered over the years, and wondered whether my self-appointment as a romantic stalwart is a virtue, or a stubborn rejection of reality.

As a college freshman, I joined a mammoth club of Christian youth, seeking kids who shared my views on drug-free partying and the banalities of the Greek system. My commitment to this club lasted all of one scholastic year, but I was an enthusiastic participant for the whole nine months, attending every meeting, prayer party (yes, prayer party), and retreat. The Winter retreat was the second of three that the club sponsored that year, and it was held at the local Holiday Inn, a few miles from campus. On the first night of the retreat, the club’s male staff headed up a Q&A in one of the hotel’s conference rooms with us girls, so we could ask all of those PG-13 questions that had been burning a hole in our brains.

As I sat cross-legged on the drab industrial-carpeted floor of the conference room, I thought of all the kind but bland young men I’d met the past semester, my brethren in the club. They were the kind of boys that every mother hopes will be her daughter’s first crush, but somehow I couldn’t picture a life with any of them fifteen years down the road. I posed the following question to the club’s senior advisor, a tiny father of seven who wore his pants approximately three sizes too large: “When do you know whether you’re settling, or just being reasonable?” A chorus of “ahs” reverberated off the beige-curtained walls.

The tiny prolific father nodded sagely, and said something to the effect of, “Nobody is perfect” and “You’ll know when you know,” before moving on to the next girl. Surprisingly, his advice has not proved particularly useful in the ensuing years.

I decided that when I met a man who would encourage me to cry on his shoulder over my parents’ divorce and the death of my father, I would know he was The One. Man enough to lean on, tender enough to care. I went out with a guy once who asked me about my parents, and I told him that my father had passed away when I was nine. I waited for the usual empathetically furrowed brow and compassionate murmur. Instead, he said, “Oh, that’s cool. Did you handle it pretty well? I feel like most people handle death pretty well.” I think he was stoned, which probably should’ve tipped me off that he wasn’t One-material.

A few years ago, I read an article in a woman’s magazine by a writer who encouraged her readers to forget about waiting for Mr. Right and to embrace Mr. Good Enough. She apparently agreed with the Tiny Father that, as a result of original sin, waiting for The One was a waste of time. Find someone who is just okay, the writer urged, and you’ll be glad you did! Ridiculous!, I thought. Or was it? After all, her philosophy wasn’t so different in application from arranged marriage, and I’d heard of successful arranged marriages (although friends from cultures where arranged marriage is practiced have pointed out that successful matches are often the exception to the rule, and when they’re bad, they are very bad). I think I allowed myself to be ruled by this philosophy for a few years, focusing on men whose marriageability was indicated not so much by their dazzling personalities or uproarious senses of humor as by their FEP (future earning potential) and perceived readiness to settle down. When this method produced disastrous results, I put the whole institution and my doubts and questions about it on my mental back burner.

One of my girlfriends recently became engaged to Mr. Good Enough. I want to be happy for her—and I would be, if only I was sure that she was happy for herself. She’s wanted to be married for years, and I’m sure she thought she would throw herself into wedding planning and other premarriage preparations. Instead, she seems a bit bored by it all. The woman’s magazine writer failed to consider the effect of her practical, if unromantic, marriage philosophy on Mr. Good Enough, who can’t take any pride in his title. If I still harbored any doubts about the wisdom of choosing a partner based on a misplaced desire for security or my fears about my perceived future, I don’t anymore. I still don’t know the difference between settling and being reasonable, but I guess the advice of the Tiny Father is as good as any: nobody’s perfect, and I’ll know when I know.