Life changes and choices - Part One

One of my all-time favorite sci-fi novels is Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, published in 1980. (This wonderful book parodies the pulp fiction novels of the 30s, as well as paying homage to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.) In this story however, the biblical “number of the beast” turns out to be, not 666, but 6 to the power of 6 to the power of 6 or 10314424798490535546171949056, which equals the number of parallel universes that Zeb, Deety, Jake and Hilda could have visited if they’d had the time…

Parallel universes fascinate me… all those what-if worlds of the past, present and future – I’ve often wished I had a way of finding out what might-have-been in my life, if only I’d chosen a different path to the one I did…

When I was 17, way back in the Dark Ages, there was no such thing as career guidance. I was the oldest child, first of four, and I hadn’t a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I liked literature, writing, film, drama, English – but somehow, choosing a career that started with a university education just never came up for discussion. Maybe my parents couldn’t afford it? Maybe we thought I didn’t have the brains for it? I can’t remember. What I do remember is that in the middle of my matric year, my grandmother got sick. I visited her in the state hospital and I remember light, bright airy wards, where the sun shone in through big windows and the gardens outside were dominated by oak trees, squirrels, lilies and agapanthus. The nurses were sweet-smiling, calm, moving round the wards in their starched white uniforms with starched white caps and shiny laced-up shoes. It felt magical to me.

I applied, got accepted and six months later, started my training at that same hospital. My ‘A’ for English, my love for literature and words, my interest in drama—ended up submerged in the nursing world for the next twenty years. The closest I got to literature was reading books like The Magus (John Fowles), The World according to Garp (John Irving) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the fabulous and late-lamented Douglas Adams). The closest I got to writing was documenting the bowel actions, aches, pains and pills of my patient’s in the nursing Kardex. The closest I got to drama was seeing Saturday Night Fever and Grease at the flicks!

I’ve worked in nursing almost non-stop since then. Sometimes fulltime, sometimes part time, sometimes day, sometimes night, through singleness and marriage, though my ex-husband’s three years at bible college, through two pregnancies when we subsisted on my income and the good graces of his parents, through the drawn-out months of the divorce, through the two and a half years of my post-divorce health breakdown, through croup and bronchitis, through temper tantrums, childhood depressions and tonsillectomies, through the good and the bad times … I worked.

I have to say, though, that there were times when I really, really liked being a nurse. I like caring for people, relieving pain, advising, helping, counseling, supporting … I liked my years in psychiatry, I liked understanding what makes people tick, I liked learning … but I didn’t like the boring, repetitive nature of most days on the wards. I didn’t like getting up at 5.30 to be at work by 6:45am, I didn’t like leaving my babies with the nanny or the day mother or the crèche.

And during that time, I forgot that I used to like to write. I forgot that I had a vivid imagination. I forgot the joy of the printed word. Movies were for the weekends when the kids went to their dad, books were limited to Danielle Steele . I was in survival mode. Creativity showed up now and then in dreams about starting a business that would earn millions, in dreams of winning the Lotto, in dreams of meeting the real Mr. Right-for-me …

But in 2000, God put me through a bit of spiritual surgery, removing from my heart a dream that I’d clung to for several years. And in the aftermath, as I contemplated the aridity of my life-minus-the-fantasy, I started fiddling around with writing again. Puerile, imperfect scribblings littered my hard drive, words filled my mind, dreams fired up my imagination. I started a writers group, went to a couple of Christian writing conferences in the States (huge, unlooked-for blessings, both!) and moved out of the clinical field into working as a case manager / report writer and editor for a managed healthcare company. Retrenchment followed in early 2004 and I lived on UIF and a small redundancy package for six months before deciding to pursue a freelance writing / editing career.

Two and a half years later, we’re still living from hand to mouth, as I mix freelance work with occasional nursing shifts. Most of the work comes via a friend who runs a very successful graphic design studio, so I write and edit ads, brochures, folder inserts, directories and so on. When the work is there, the pay is great. When there’s no work, I do transcription (long hours, low pay but it’s at home) or nursing (long hours, mediocre pay, away from home). With some serious marketing, (not my strongest point), I reckon I could make a go of this, and still keep on writing fiction on my own time.

BUT … isn’t there always a ‘but’? BUT, there’s another dream in the pipeline. A good dream, a wonderful dream, a life-changing dream. A dream that will upset my current career applecart completely.

More tomorrow …

Anna Quindlen said ...

“… I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

This quote intrigues me. As a Christian, I learned that I need to let go, abandon my life to God, to leave all my hopes and dreams and desires in his hands. I also learned that no man could ever be that ‘wonderful person’ for me, because men are just as human and needy and imperfect as women—as I am--and no one man can ever meet my every need. So all I can do is leave my needs in God's hands, look to him for fulfilment, contentment, and love.

Reading Anna Q gives me pause for thought, though… and it's not a comfortable pause, either.