The Three Stooges of Guilt

It being Lent and all, it's inevitable that at some point the three stooges -- Woulda, Coulda, and Shoulda -- are going to pop on stage and start performing tricks for you.

Today was apparently scheduled for their big show in my part of the world, and they crashed onto my set with a bang, letting my old friend Shoulda take the major role. In case you haven't met Shoulda before (though most everyone has), she likes to begin every sentence -- no matter how farfetched -- with her eponymous phrase "Ya Shoulda," as in "ya shoulda been tougher on your kids" or "ya shoulda ignored the whiny boyfriend and gone to Cambridge your junior year."

Shoulda is a hard act to forget; it feels like she's always dancing around backstage in my brain, and she loves to do those little impromptu appearances that make you want to get out the hook. But today someone had obviously given her permission to take out all the stops and let her rip, and she sang an aria so impressive that the encores are still echoing.

The problem is that, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, for my Lenten discipline, I signed up for a Joan Chittister course called "The Cry of the Prophet" through the Spirituality and Practice website. In this morning's readings for that course we were given a set of quotations from women prophets, and this one, from noted suffragette Jane Adams, really struck me:

"Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world."

You would think I might have learned this lesson from my first marriage: In that case I was extremely careful NOT to leave until I felt I had done ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to make it work -- which meant that, once gone, I never revisited that decision. Unfortunately, subsequent events convinced that I had perhaps been a bit too assiduous about staying til the bitter end, and so I became a little gun-shy, leaving bad situations, if not at the first sign of trouble, at least before my self-esteem got worn down to the nub. As a friend said recently at breakfast, discussing things he had learned from HIS first marriage, "I may have let the pendulum swing too far."

So, reading this, I found myself wondering yet again if I had made a mistake in leaving my last job: surely, if I had stayed in place, I would have had additional opportunities to make a significant difference in the world (there's Woulda, stepping onto the stage). I try to be an appreciative audience when these ladies take the stage, to stay in my seat and pay attention rather than walking out in a huff. But then, having put down the prophecy text, sitting there wondering why I had even bothered to sign up for that course, I picked up my daughter's Farid Ud-Din Attar poem and up cropped Shoulda, blazing forth like Ethel Merman in an even louder version of the same message.

"Weak woman in your faith... you should be there...
Is this devoted love? Shame on you all,
fair-weather friends who run when great men fall...
This was no friendship, to forsake your friend
To promise your support and at the end
Abandon him...
However hard the fight,
You should have fought for what was clearly right."

Ouch!

So I slammed that book shut as well and went to meditation wondering if I should consider going back to the old job now that I have more of the spiritual grounding it would take to do it right. And sitting there, thinking about what life might have been like had I stayed on the hard path, had I not stepped off into motherhood and island time, had I not discovered the joys of the contemplative life, I found myself thinking about Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken.

I soon realized, having chosen the road MORE traveled by, that it would be intriguing to go back and revisit the poem in reverse, from that perspective. And what I learned (as you can see from the resulting poem, which I published on my poetry site,) is that both roads still end in the same place, and together they inscribe the heart of the challenge so many women face, the duality of outside the home and inside the home that makes us wonder why it is so hard to serve both the world and our families.

I am grateful now to have been able to travel both those roads, and grateful for the choices I made, because going out there and wrestling with the demons is not the only way to make the world a better place. At some point, standing in the darkness that had begun to dominate my life in that job, I chose to take that long walk down the ramp to the ferry; chose instead of work to move into Island Time; to devote my life to kids and contemplation. And whether it was a more or less traveled road, it has certainly made a difference.