I am always lamenting the fact that I wish I had more mentors, more women a decade or two ahead of me who made similar choices as myself who could keep me looking at the right guideposts. I was voicing this to a professional friend, and she looked at me in disbelief.

“What am I, a void or something?’

I looked at her. Hmm. She’s sixty, mother of two healthy young adults, successful at a job she loves, balanced, sane, apparently happy . . ..

“Oh.” I really felt like a jerk. “Sorry. I guess I never think of you in that way.”

She smiled in a naughty sort of way. “And what way is that?”

“Well, like me, struggling, trying to keep up. You always seems so, I don’t know, in the zone or something.”

She grabbed my arm and stopped me short. “Wait a minute, you want your mentors to be struggling?”

My face flushed with the implication of her question. “Ah . . . no, you’re right.”

She laughed. “By the way, this is me now. You should have seen me back then.”

We kept walking down the hall. “Look, Andi, if there’s one thing I would have done differntly it is this: change the have to’s to get to’s.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to pick up the kids from school today, you get to do it.” And she turned into the stairwell and disappeared down the stairs.

So, I had my bi-annual freak out this weekend. If you don’t get them — and bless you if you don’t — take all the people who depend on you, add all the responsibility you have, some guilt (internal, of course, and if you are really lucky, you’ll get some external, i.e. “You’re never going to come to those early Sunday games, huh?”). Mix that all up with feeling ineffective at work and at home simultaneously, and several ball-drops (i.e. forgetting to show up at the science fair, forgetting I was on refreshments for the hockey game, being two hours late to pick up my mom from the HOSPITAL . . . and, well, you get the picture. I dramatically swear off my entire life and spend a few days determined to quit everything and just to stay home and stop the circus.

I’m over it now.

I think my life moves in waves of optimism and depletion. When I am feeling good and on top of things, over the course of a few days, I sign up for a yoga class, or make plans to have friends over, take on an extra project, forgetting within seconds all that optimism gets stripped away. When I am energized, I forget that kids get sick and parents get sick and cars break down and someone always needs a ride, a poster board, an obscure book from the library 3 towns away. And how else could I be, really? If I played defense all the time, I’d never do anything. My world would get smaller and smaller as I sat at home waiting for the shoe to drop. So I choose to play offense–I miss a ton of shots, but at least I am taking them. As my coach used to say, you can’t score if you don’t shoot. 

And, I’d add to that, you can’t live your life in a neutral zone, either. For every broken date, lost uniform and missed opportunity, there is one that came through –watching a movie without getting called, finally getting together with those friends, doing what I was asked to do, or finishing a task. 

As my wise friend said to me yesterday, “Hey, you chose the roller coaster, right? Can you imagine it being any other way?”