Maze Craze

Photo by Tiff Ng on Pexels.com

This past weekend, I was cleaning out the car in my driveway and caught sight of the young woman next door. All smiles, she exited her car with a white gown slung over her shoulders and walked into her house. I deduced that the gown was for her high school graduation. For a moment I was transported back to being a naive 17-year-old when I saw the world as a linear, simple place where scheduled events like graduations were made up of happiness, love, sunshine and uplifting greeting card sentiments.

Her smiling face also kicked off a grown-up memory in my maze of life full of twists and turns that happened 10 years ago when my son graduated from high school. About a month beforehand, my son wrote his father, who had relocated some 600 miles away, a request: please do not come. Although I kept my opinions to myself, the last person I wanted to see was the man I was in divorce proceedings with. Secretly, I sensed the act of barring him from my son’s graduation as punishment for the fallout our family experienced for his bad decisions and, at that time, I felt the punishment was valid.

On the day of my son’s graduation ceremony, as far as I remember, I was there with my daughter, Brother Paul, godmother Pat and my friend Lisa. We were all on guard in case my son’s father showed up. Malaise hid behind our smiles as we entered the auditorium. I was like a hawk searching the room with telescopic eyes, worried that my son’s father, whom his children had not seen for over five months at that point, would make a surprise appearance. Inside I was troubled, totally unable to fathom the outcome of such an encounter.

Concurrently, it was also a solemn occasion. Although a chair was reserved for one of the classmates, Robert, my son’s best friend, it was empty. Eighteen-year-old Robert had been killed five months earlier in a freak off-road vehicle accident during a blizzard.

During the ceremony, the family faced the audience as they sat in a special spot reserved for them at the head of the auditorium. The spotlight of unfairness of it all did not occur to me until this past year when I had a deeper understanding what it meant when the future milestones on the calendar are unwillingly torn off along with your heart. Now, looking back, I am stunned to think about how Robert’s family sat in the unfairness of it all and managed to be present and smile for the sake of the other participants. I equate it as purely a heroic act of self-sacrifice. Caught up in my own selfishness, it took a pair of grieving mom’s eyes to understand that after the crowd dispersed and continued the good celebratory vibe, the grieving family left in the same manner they had arrived: carrying their “griefcases.”

In addition, as it turned out, my children’s father never showed — at least, we never saw him. Years later, he revealed that he accomplished the 11-hour drive to the ceremony, but sans admittance ticket, he stood unnoticed outside behind the crowd. I can’t remember if I told my son that bit of information years later, but it’s doubtful if it would have kept him alive in his later years.

Anyway, after the ceremony, my son, despite the sadness of his best friend’s death and anger and angst of his father’s decision to abandon the family, was all smiles like my neighbor this past weekend. He rarely smiled during his middle and high school years. I remember I was on top of the world because of the picture he presented of rare normality, and it was one of the few times that I saw my son in sync with the world.

At the end of the graduation ceremony, the knowledge deep inside pumped my faith muscles and I knew that everything, as my now ex-husband had assured me in the early days of our break up, “would work out.” Obviously, I was tricked. The maze I was given with an entrance and goal was a scam, the layout, to this day, is too convoluted and ambiguous to ever figure out. There is no start and finish. No solution.

The kiss of promise on my son’s face is only a memory. During his 10-year high school reunion this year, there will be two empty seats for sure. Thinking of my young neighbor’s face, it is some sort of consolation, and I hope and keep the faith that things will work out in her life.

I recall seeing her in the window at midnight studying, working, and she reminded me of me at her age. I deserved a happy future just like she does. In the maze of life that’s not straight thinking, because we all get our own very custom-made mazes. Some are crazier than others. We all, though, at one point or another, get lost. Inch our way through. But then again, maybe finding the way out isn’t the key, maybe it’s how we stay steadfast to our values, keep the faith and remain in the game despite a burning desire to take a shortcut and erase the dizzying lines.

Faith Muscle