When Hope and Disappointment Collide

Which is, perhaps, all the time?

Last night I received word that my thesis for my MFA in Creative Writing passed final approval. Here is proof:

“ETD” is an acronym someone made up to confuse people

Here are the reasons, beyond the normal ones, that this is remarkable:

1. I’m a single mom with full physical custody and a “co-parent” in another state.

2. I work full-time. And work another job part-time.

3. I’m short and it’s hard to find pants that fit right.

4. I started an MFA over twenty years ago and wasn’t able to finish because of stuff.

5. I thought that my dream of being a writer was over and out-of-reach and impossible and impractical.

6. I’m 46. And, word on the street is, this year I will be 47.

So I am proud of myself. And if you asked me how do it all, my only answer is, I’m not sure. But also, maybe ADHD.

I’ve got my hat!

There is a couplet from a particular poem that I’ve had tucked in my mind all these years. The poem is titled “The Ghost in the Picture Room”¹ by Adelaide Anne Proctor and here’s the bit that I carry with me:

No star is ever lost we once have seen,

We always may be what we might have been.

I believe that: We always may be what we might have been. It gives me hope.

At this same moment that some of my long-ago dreams are coming true, I’m also facing the reality of chronic health issues that are really bumming me out and some really difficult stuff with one of my kids. I spent most of yesterday in random, hiccuping sobs.

For some reason, there’s a part of my brain that believes someday I’ll reach a point in life where I am simply happy. Where I’m not always carrying hope and disappointment, grief and joy, success and failure.

But if life has taught me anything, it’s that emotions don’t ever come in the singular. There isn’t a magic moment where we can feel only our grief, process it, and then move on to joy. It’s always a mumble and mess of everything at the same time. I would prefer something tidier, but it just isn’t tidy, is it?

So here I am: happy and sad, thrilled and disappointed, fulfilled and confused, content and nervous.

Even with these heavy binaries, I’m ready to keep looking for hope wherever I can find it.

If I can always be what I might have been, then so can my kids.

And so can you.

May that hope easily find you, wherever you are.

1. Note: You can easily find this couplet all over the internet attributed to random famous writers. I haven’t seen it tied to Abraham Lincoln yet, but there’s still time.

In the interest of faithful provenance you should know:

Proctor’s poem is part of “The Haunted House,” a portmanteau story written by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sarah Smith, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Proctor, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It was published as a Christmas special in Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round. This particular story was written in verse by the poet, Adelaide Proctor. It relates the legend of a young nun, once the pride of her convent, who falls from grace and later receives forgiveness through a miracle.

From the Victorian Short Fiction Project