I parked my car and walked with my laptop, handbag and rolling suitcase to the registration dorm, map in hand. Looking around, I saw a beautiful campus, anchored by rusted red brick buildings (the color of chunks that used to hang on the belly of my dad’s 15-year-old diesel truck) with apricot-colored trim, and freshly mowed green lawns. A clock tower stood proudly in the center of campus, and a fountain trickled as I walked past. Locating the registration dorm, I entered, stood at the back of the line and glanced at the other students around me. There was an older woman who was tall, pale and wearing what looked like a Banana Republic outfit from the days when the catalog was on soft, yellowed pages and bore scientificlooking illustrations. There was a clean-cut looking jockish guy who got in the line marked “Interns.” And then there was me, in my favorite pair of jeans, the first pair of designer jeans I’d ever bought, with money that should have gone toward groceries or the electric bill. A young woman behind the desk handed me my keys and I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d made it.
It had been nearly ten years since I was out on my own. I realized this as I stood in the middle of the colorless, stripped down dorm room that would be my home for the next week. Surrounded by a thick quiet, I took a deep breath and started to unpack my clothes. I made my bed with the new twin bedsheets I’d bought at T.J. Maxx, put away my shoes, plugged in the refrigerator and computer, stacked my books by my bedside and arranged my bathroom things on top of the dresser. I stood back and looked around; it was better, less bleak and felt a little more like me. I peeled off the sweaty shirt I’d spent all morning in (driving along the highway, feeling like I was pushing myself off the high dive) and changed into my favorite new sleeveless dress with stripes of warm brown, turquoise and pearl white. I pulled the door shut behind me and walked across campus to orientation.
I’d been accepted to the low residency MFA program at Queens University just three weeks before. True to my intuitive, idealistic, dreamy INFP personality, I’d pleaded with the director to review my application two months after the deadline. For days I obsessively checked my email, and was thrilled when I received my acceptance letter. Over the next two weeks, I ordered the required reading material, organized babysitters, filled out financial aid forms, requested an official transcript, asked for a letter of reference and made copies of my writing for the workshops. I had no time to think about actually leaving home.
I’d been dreaming about getting an MFA for years. I called the director of the Queens program six years earlier, shortly after my oldest son was born. I was a stay-at-home mom and not employed for the first time in years. Any free time I had was spent writing (naptime), so it seemed logical that my next step should be actual writing classes. But over the course of our phone conversation, I realized that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t published and didn’t really know what I wanted to write, just that I had to do it. So I enrolled in the MAT program at The Citadel instead, a rational, logical degree, a degree with a job at the end. I put my dreams of an MFA back on the shelf and dutifully went to classes on the Methods of Teaching, World Literature and Educational Psychology. But my heart wasn’t in it. I had a history of getting excited about big ideas and failing to see them through to completion. Like my horrible sense of direction, I didn’t like this part of my personality. But giving up felt like losing credibility, so I plugged away at my degree. Until this summer, when it was time to enroll in Modern Grammar and I just couldn’t do it. Six years had passed since that first phone call to Queens, and I had to believe that it wasn’t too late to try again. I told myself that life was a process of moving forward, and I dialed Queens University one more time.
Sitting in the wooden Adirondack chair beneath the clock tower later that first night, I called home to confirm with my husband that it had in fact been almost a decade since I was on my own. I wanted him to acknowledge the significance of this insight. He disagreed, and reminded me of the trip I took to New York City shortly after we were married. Okay, eight or nine years then, I said. I wanted him to know how strange it felt to be alone. I wanted him to know that it felt like I had been sucked back in time. That it felt as if I were not three hours away from home, but oceans, countries and entire continents away.
As I climbed into my twin bed with the lumpy mattress, I was both in awe of being alone and unsettled by the sudden realization of my dreams. I wondered how I had let so much time elapse and if I would be able to bring myself back home.
As the week progressed, I began to feel more and more at home. It was less painful to listen to my children’s voices on the phone and they, too, seemed as if they were okay without me. I began to fall into a routine. I woke up, drove to Starbucks for a cup of coffee and ate a bowl of cereal at my computer while I checked email. I went for a run through the neighboring park and waved to the other runners on the trail as if I belonged, as if I were a local. I learned the names of my classmates and sat next to someone different at every morning seminar. I learned to do my reading after dinner in my room or outside in my favorite chair beneath the tower. I learned to write up my critiques in the morning and that I needed to run to the computer lab before our afternoon workshop. I even got used to the silence in my room every evening after the readings were over. I got used to there being no distractions, no one asking to be fed, bathed and dressed, no one demanding my attention, my help or my time. I got used to there being no TV or radio, no paper on the lawn, no mail in the box, no teeth to be brushed, no nails to be trimmed, no hand to be held except my own.
By the end of the week I was ready to go back home. I missed my family. I wanted to put my face into the crook of my boys’ necks and breathe. I was ready to be needed. I understood that growth wasn’t measured in straight lines or by time. It didn’t matter how long it had taken me to go out on my own, but that I’d gone at all, and that what I’d found was coming home with me. Before I climbed into the car for the drive back home, I changed into my same designer jeans and returned to my family, unchanged only on the outside.
Amy Stockwell Mercer is a freelance writer living in Charleston, SC with her husband and two sons. She is already looking forward to her next residency in January, and hopes it gets here quickly.