“There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”
~ Carl Jung
If you’re someone who can never answer the kinds of special-snowflake questions like “what would you be doing if money were no object?,” “what are you passionate about?,” “what have you always dreamed about doing but disqualified yourself before you ever tried?,” have I got an essay for you.
This whole time I’ve been alive, I’ve been waiting. I thought I was building, preparing, stocking up for real life—I knew I wasn’t actually living, but I’ve been busier than heaven on earth’s last day getting ready…more for every contingency that I could possibly think of than an actual life, but surely vision, clarity, purpose, passion, direction, all the marrow that makes life matter would come if I just kept up the HIIT on life’s rodent wheel. Good things come to those who work hard and wait…or something. Right?
The one eventuality I made no plans for was hitting the skids. You know how, when you were a kid, all the adults around were incessantly all lo, where does the time go? and hark, it is already the Christmastime again and how it sounded coo coo? I didn’t understand and I never thought I would. But that’s what happens when it ambushes you that you’ve actually been waiting, torching all the time you’ve been given, which actually has been fast acting all along, with nothing to show for it. Not even a candle to hold to your life’s purpose, passion, or plan.
That’s why the hundreds of webinars and trainings and courses about leadership, business creation, using your gifts to help others, smashing this whole living life to the fullest and reaching your potential thing haven’t worked: they’ve started in the wrong place. They all assume you know what your passion is, that you have a message, that you know what you have to give to the world, and the trouble is with articulation and dissemination. I need the step before that: How To Know What Your Passion Is Without Conjuring Up Some Contrived Answer That Sounds Good Like Your Mama Trained You To Do 101.
I thought I was getting there. With my signature naïve sincerity, I believed the workshops and career coaching and YouTube videos about purpose that all started to sound the same after a while, would finally reveal what I was supposed to do with my life, what I loved, what I was good at, and how I was to change the world. But as I rapidly round the corner to my 40th birthday, what I’m seeing isn’t the promised utopia of a fulfilling, purpose-driven life that impacts others. It’s tar and emptiness and scrounging all the way to the horizon, like I’m just not someone built with a plan or for a purpose. At least that’s a much, much shorter distance than I thought I had until basically yesterday.
But how could this be? How is it possible I’ve been stuck on wait for approximately 14 times longer than I had conscious awareness of waiting? How could I have gone through nearly four decades having done so much work to still be an admin assistant (and not even a very good one) with two unfinished Master’s degrees and so much anxiety, I can’t even answer the phone when it’s someone I love and have been wanting to talk to, let alone actually help people? How could it be that I’ve done so much self-discovery work, spent my time and treasure on identifying my strengths, drivers, passions, and how I could put them to use in the service of others only to just now realize that all I’ve been doing instead of living has been holding my breath, waiting to live? And how did I not know any of this?
It didn’t start out this way. It didn’t start out this way at all.
I hurtled through my mother in less than nine months into this pageant of wear and tear—I had “places to go, people to see,” Grandma Jane said. So far, so good.
Three months later, during my grandparents’ late-spring BBQ, my dad’s dad died suddenly while he was alone with me for probably less than five minutes: Grandma Jane went to answer the door, my mom went to check the grill to see if the burgers were done, and my dad cannot remember where in God’s name he wandered off to that was so important that Grandpa George was left alone. Could my deal with simultaneously waiting for real life to start and to end any moment while scrounging around in every nook and cranny for some kind of meaning be coming from this moment that I don’t remember at all?
In the almost four decades years since my rushed launch into the world and subsequent full-speed-ahead drive to get my life all set up, I’ve definitely gone places. Not the important places one needs to get to in order to feel “arrived” on the planet, valid as an adult person, and belonged in their life. Just geographical places—the deep sea, a tall French tower, a hurricane-mottled island slum, the poverty of Appalachia, turbo-charged tourism, an ineffective peace wall—almost all in Q1 of my life. I’ve seen people, too. Not my people yet, I’m told over and over. By people who are not my people. I’m speeding toward Birthday Number 40 in a car I’ve just discovered has no brakes on a clover-leaf entrance to yet another highway I never wanted to be on. I clench my jaw against the centrifugal force that is the unbearably empty future—“time is an allusion” my ass—so hard the place I broke in my neck when I was five throbs.
Wait.
I’m searching for brakes? I thought I’d been straining on all the reins. I’m older than my dad was when his dad’s heart blew up in his own living room seconds after my mom, my dad, and Grandma Jane BRB-ed without knowing they needed to say goodbye and I’m still waiting to start my life?
Yes. Watch my stop forward momentum even as I cannot stop time: I hypervigilate with the same intensity over choosing a side dish as I do over what house I should put an offer on. I spreadsheet out every pro and every con except my own preferences about everything because that is what my trauma-frozen mother modeled for me. Your feelings are irrelevant she said without saying by leaving the room the moment I started crying. You shouldn’t need help. Your purpose in life is to perform and behave so others are comfortable (and you should know what it is that makes others comfortable) she said in her silence in response to my questions about life, then about history, then about homework, then about nothing.
My mother has all her hatches so battened down that I didn’t know she was a gifted visual artist until she told me she was taking colored pencil classes at the Denver Botanical Gardens. I said how long instead of why’d you wait so long. She said since June. I said I don’t remember this from childhood even though I used to have a steel trap for a memory and she said I waited until you kids were grown to start.
So, is it my fault she waited to follow her real dreams?
When we gathered our towels and pool noodles and dive rings and fins, drove to NanaPop’s house with the forever-long driveway, made it safely past the great cloud of bees patrolling the lilac bushes in the back to let NanaPop know we were here so they could walk us back down the forever-long-driveway across the street, down the gravel path that always provided the pebbles needed to make “fireworks” in Tule Lake if the cattails weren’t too thick to weasel through (I wasn’t taller than them until high school) on our way to Nana’s Pool, praying the whole way it wouldn’t be “adult swim” when we got there, rub a bottle each of sunscreen into our skin and swim for what still feels like it just might be forever until it was time for Nana to go make popcorn chili or dented brisket or walnut doodle salad and us to dry off swinging on the tire swing or racing across the monkey bars while the adults packed up the towels and pool noodles and dive rings and fins, my mom never once got beyond her ankles in the pool. We went to Nana’s Pool all day every day and twice on Sundays when the summers were still halcyon instead of sepia, curling our lengthening bodies around the edges of the kiddie pool with the pokey bottom during the 15 minutes of adult swim AKA lifeguard break to keep warm except when all their whistles blew for thunder and lightning. My mom was the only one who stayed warm in those storms. It was because she never got into the pool for real. (And yes, she knows how to swim: she spent her childhood splashing around the Potomac.) I vowed to never be like that.
But is it actually my fault she was always holding back?
When she and my dad took us to church because they thought it would make us good people and maybe to make NanaPop happy even though neither of my parents were (are?) believers and even though my siblings cried to go home—I was Little Miss Followtherules, once of which is get over your feelings as quickly and privately as possible AKA don’t cause a scene, and, doxology still echoing throughout the sanctuary, my dad talking to every last parishioner until well after I and the other youth changed out of their acolyte robes and hung them up in the musty closet we were never convinced we had permission to enter even briefly, my mom remained a stone in her pew, waiting for my dad, who was making all the friendship. My mom says she just doesn’t think fast enough to follow most conversations. Maybe she’s also truly an introvert. I vowed never to be like that.
But is her failure to engage really my fault?
When we’re at the bank and she makes a passive-aggressive comment to the teller in a way only I can tell is a criticism how busy things are, how long we had to wait even though she let the single mom go ahead and the old man with the walker go ahead and the harried college student go ahead and the biker who had to tie up his dog on the bike rack outside to enter the bank go ahead, is it my fault that we have to wait? I vow never to be like that.
Wait.
Is this what I’ve been modeling my life after even though I promised myself I wouldn’t?
I don’t know who needs to tell me the obvious right answer. The wrong one is lodged so deeply in the pit of my heart that I still believe you can get what you want—love, purpose, hope—by not causing a scene. Except that I got so tired of not being seen or cared about for who I was at all that I up and moved 1300 miles from everything I’ve ever known like I don’t know nobody because the very first person I want to unknow all stat-like is myself. But wherever you go, there you are.
I had it wrong for almost 40 years—all the soul searching and therapy and walkabout I did to the hilt would nauseate a herd of therapists. I’ve had no idea what the hell to do with my life that would bring everything back from the brink of meaninglessness it’s been teetering on since three months after I was born. But I have known exactly who I am for quite some time: a fearful fire ant who so often gets caught up in the kingdom of anxiety and accommodation that she comes up short of any power to cast a vision compelling enough to chase and make meaningful sacrifices for.
Instead, I’m living life following all the rules, taking self-help webinar after peppy, rah-rah self-help webinar that always starts one step ahead of where I am and avoiding anything that sounds too good—and getting nothing I have longed my whole life for. Oh, and waiting and waiting and waiting. It’s all I’ve seen my mother do even as I didn’t know that’s what she was doing.
But can I really blame it on my mother? If it’s not my fault she chose to wait until well after I grew up to start living her own life, then how could it be hers that I in many ways don’t feel like I have? I was the one who chose to follow all the rules, which sounds a lot like living someone else’s plans for my life, but I did it so that no one else would die and send my dad running and leaving me an emotional orphan since my mom probably got frozen in her own childhood. And I haven’t felt like I’ve been living someone else’s plans for my life. I don’t feel like anyone has plans for my life, including myself. I feel like I am chained by the waist to a bucket chair in a dank waiting room in a condemned hospital on the other side of the apocalypse with the only source of light some half-used candles, gnarled with the measure of their selves already given over to their beautiful purpose and I don’t believe in myself enough to even check my pockets, ever stuffed with paper and pen and ChapStick and paracord and extra socks and emergency blanket and magnifying glass and nail clipper and other shit I might someday need to survive for days if I’m trapped under rubble, for a match.
Wait. Even if I had one, I’d be too scared to strike it.
And how the hell is a magnifying glass going to save me in a grid-down scenario anyway?
Then again, I’ve been following the steady, unmoving, dimmed light of my mom’s life this whole time, I just didn’t know it.
Maybe it’s about time, given how much of it I’ve vaporized into nothing already, that I get on that vow never to be like my mother and hand her light back to her.
It’s the only way I’ll be able to see how much of that little light is mine.
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Megan Wildhood is a writer who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at meganwildhood.com.
© 2025, Megan Wildhood
Halfway Down the Stairs 