Identity Crisis

Yesterday I read an article in the Sunday New York Times about Philip Roth as an English teacher.  The writer, Lisa Scottoline, whose books I really enjoy, said the following.  “In those days, I dreamed of marrying what I wanted in my life.  Not of becoming what I wanted.”  I cringed, because I had felt the same way in the fifties, though, thankfully, I don’t think either of my grown daughters does.  In thinking about her quote, the question arose:  “Who Am I, and How Did I Become This Person?”  I realized immediately that I didn’t become the person I then was or am now, through either of my two husbands, although in a strangely negative way my marriages did have something to do with the process.  Though I initially thought I wanted to ‘be like him’, especially in my first marriage, I soon realized that I wasn’t ‘like him’, and really didn’t want to be.  I liked my personality traits, my moral values, my sense of how to be in the world, and I liked all those things about myself more than I liked them in relation to him.  It didn’t work to ‘marry what I wanted’, because I eventually learned that I couldn’t find that through another person. I had to struggle to learn who and what that was through thought, conversation, and reading, as well as trial and error.  I guess one of my ‘errors’ was thinking I could find ‘me’ through another human being.  By my second marriage I wasn’t looking to  my husband to help me discover who I was or what I wanted in life. Neither did I think that my friends would be able to tell me, though talking about such things with them certainly helped me make sense of my  journey. I have a partner whom I have been with for over eight years.  I certainly don’t think he can tell me what I want, or who I am, but he is a man who values such discussions, which, in my mind, certainly makes him  special.  We both have a pretty clear idea of who we are, though what we want in life, from year to year, has sometimes altered as we have gotten older, or goals have shifted.  I have learned that what leads me in one direction or another, from one fork in the road to another, is who I now am and who I have become over the years.  My ‘self’ certainly has nothing to do with who another person  thinks I am, or what anyone else thinks I should want. For this I am very grateful.  I like being my own person, a full human being that can be shared with others, but not defined by them.  Still, the sentence I read yesterday gives me the willies.  What a horrible thing to have been taught and to have believed all those years ago: as a woman, marriage would give me definition. Thank God I learned better and didn’t teach my daughters that life-killing prescription either.