Happy 53rd to Me!

Gannet Girl at 3: Idyllic life in the country, next door to grandparents who think she is Miss Perfect. Probably not entirely idyllic, as six-month old baby brother is on the scene and Gannet is probably exhibiting less than perfect behavior.

At 13: Miserable and away at summer camp in Minnesota. Gannet’s readers know that she views camp in North Carolina as having saved her life, extricating her as it did from Wicked Stepmother for months at a time. But Gannet’s father never grasps the importance of building on friendships summer after summer and keeps sending her to DIFFERENT camps. Gannet would run away but she can’t figure out which direction down the road would lead to Minneapolis-St. Paul. She will return to Ohio at the end of the summer and go straight back to Catholic boarding school. Her days at home are long gone.

At 23: Married, working as a waitress, and about to start law school. Days are full of onion rings and low tips.

At 33: Mom with twin almost-two-year-olds, practicing law part-time. The boys are charming tow-heads who charge around Chautauqua talking to fire hydrants. The work, in an era when mom-lawyers/lawyer-moms are still surprising aliens in their field, is draining. Most people at the firm have no idea that Gannet does so much of her work at home between 5:00 and 8:00 a.m.

At 43: Kids are just about 12, 12, and 9. The boys are in camp in North Carolina. The daughter is in day camp at home. The mom has her own law practice and is immersed in other people’s divorce and custody battles. There has been one medical crisis, but at the moment all is well and is good, especially since trips to North Carolina always involve sliding waterfalls, where Gannet plays with as much abandon as her children do.

And today: The kids are approaching 22, 22, and 19. They are working in an office job in Chicago, studying (somewhat) in Barcelona, and camp counseling in North Carolina. Life has apparently stabilized after another difficult period, Gannet has switched careers and been teaching for several years, and is about to acknowledge the call toward another direction. Everything depends upon the continued health and employment of the adults in the family and the continued health of their parents and children. Making new choices is so much more complicated when there are pipes with leaking issues, college loans, adult children almost in need of steady employment, parents steadily approaching (or already in) their eighties, and a history of repeated unanticipated disasters that have had a way of sucking up every ounce of energy in range. But there are people singing in the Chautauqua Ampitheatre and in the Iona Abbey and in Chartres Cathedral and in the North Carolina camp lodge and Gannet has made it to all of those places this summer. Life is good again.