Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

begin again

124 begin again Catherine Kasper To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave…. ––virginia woolf, A Room of One’s Own When I was in my senior year in college, I told my father I intended to continue for a master’s degree, and he said, “What does a woman need a graduate degree for?” He refused to fill out financial aid applications, and when my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he asked me to help care for her. That’s what I did. I like to think that somewhere in the back of my head I was planning to save up for graduate school, but instead, I was sidetracked by supporting myself and by wanting to help my parents, both of whom would become seriously ill. It was a sidetrack that lasted nearly fifteen years. I had grown up in a Midwestern working class neighborhood, where I now realize we were taught how to be vital members of the service sector. We could take orders well, polish floors, and serve food proficiently, but had no training on how to work toward opportunities our parents didn’t have. I worked in bookstores and restaurants, night-shift at a perfume factory. I babysat, sold newspapers, answered phones. My high school was clear about the careers open to women: nun, mother, primary school teacher, or beautician, in that order. None of those felt right for me. Fortunately, my mother liked to tell us that we could do whatever we wanted as long as we could read. She taught us that answers to our questions could be found in books, in the lines and inbetween the lines. I was sustained through stressful times by books like All of a Kind Family and Harriet the Spy, and later, biographies of Amelia Earhart and novels by Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. When I had time to myself, I would read or write furiously in my journals. I came to learn how lucky I was that my mother convinced my father of the “new world” necessity of an undergraduate degree for young women. At the university, life seemed nearly miraculous to me. Endless reading the courage of choice 125 material in massive libraries, encouraging professors, and real physical and intellectual freedom was my utopia. There was nothing I wanted more than to spend my life in this setting, teaching and learning for the rest of my life. One of my teachers told me I should apply to Yale, a school I had never heard of and whose location I didn’t even know. I only knew that when I brought the application materials home, my father refused to sign them. Then, my mother’s seizures began. After my mother recovered, I joined the nine-to-five work force. I taught myself several computer programs, basic design, and accounting. I moved from various secretarial positions to being a marketing director for an architectural firm. Nothing seemed quite challenging enough. I was trying to renovate a house by myself, but I wasn’t ever home to enjoy it. I sometimes worked sixty hours a week, and while I learned much about architecture, my brain withered. During this time, my father became ill. I spun in place, consumed by the emotional stress and the doctor’s visits and care. My father needed to be taken to dialysis regularly and soon two days a week increased to three days, then four. He had a detailed diet that consisted of boiling vegetables two and three times, and severe leg cramps that my younger sister tried to massage out. After he retired, he began to run out of the house to work in the middle of the night, or wander away from the house and forget where he was. My mother couldn’t sleep at night, and so her health deteriorated as well. There was no time to think about other choices, and no one to offer them. My father died after seven long, painful years of deterioration accompanied by dementia. After his burial, I decided to put my life in order: I wrote a will and purchased a cemetery plot for myself. I could work at a meaningless job until I died, like my father. Or I could learn how to live. Although I’m not sure I knew it then, I chose the latter. And I knew what that was, no doubt, because I...