Substitute:
(noun) A person or thing acting or serving in place of another.
(synonyms) surrogate, deputy, replacement, proxy
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the kind of person I am. There are certain truths about me that have always been there, and on which I rely:
1) I have an impeccable memory. For lyrics, names, overheard details … for life, my mental Rosetta Stone etches easily. This is also means if we had a conversation, I remember it.
2) This is a blessing and a curse. My memory is my single greatest asset, and the weapon with which I masochistically destroy myself.
3) During the last few years especially, I’ve become honest to an extreme degree.
4) I have an almost pathological aversion to wastefulness.
5) I have the ability, through concerted effort, to improve specific habits pointed out to me as personal flaws.
And that last one is the feature that allows me to create new truths about myself. For example, someone once told me I had a tendency to cut off the ends of people’s sentences in my eagerness. I actively squashed that over a period of months, and people noticed. I suffered greatly in a relationship once because I made a promise that I, admittedly not completely my fault, I could not fulfill. Ever since, I have never made a promise that I did not know I could keep.
During the last couple months, I’ve done a massive, concerted personal overhaul. I’ve been calorie counting, for both personal and political reasons. A month ago, I stopped biting my nails for the first time in eight years. I’ve endeavored to be nicer, more constructive in my delivery of criticism, more appreciative of everything. And I’ve been trying to let the world make me happy with what is immediate to me.
I admit that the impetus for this attempt to truly accept that which I cannot change came from a kind of giving up. Nothing in my life I’d hoped for or built had turned out as I wanted, and entire sections of infrastructure were collapsing from the framework I relied on. My misery over this and my helplessness to change it had become a frustration to friends and family, who at best ignored me and at worst yelled at me or plotted escape routes.
So, I thought to myself: What if I get nothing I originally wanted, and what if wanting those things (a particular love, a particular job, a particular living situation, a particular world) is just impossible? What do I HAVE? I have my body. My will. I have small satisfactions. I could accept people the way they are, try to love people for what makes them good. I could give up the dreams that hurt me, and find peace in acceptance: I’m never going to go live in some downtown city studio or some old house I’m rehabbing, but my life is such that I will always have a place to live. I’m never going to have a bio-diesel school bus roving apartment, or a 68 Mustang. I am too practical for that. I’m not going to pay off my little credit debt in a year, as I’d hoped and planned, but if I’m not saving up to leave and go anywhere, who cares if it takes me years to pay off while I live not counting every penny? I’ll never be a reckless spender. And love won’t be like I thought it would, and the world may go to hell in my lifetime … but I would like to live it. I’d like a partner in it. And I would like to sustain, for the first time in the last third of my life, a sense of inner peace, outer world be damned.
I’ve had the butterflies beaten out of me. I’ve had belief anything happens for a reason beaten out of me. And I’ve had the belief that people are inherently good buried in the backyard like a childhood pet for quite some time. What I have left is logic, a good heart going to waste, a good memory hurting me with the past. I have honesty to protect others from my flaws, and I have the will to change those flaws. And something new I have recently learned about myself:
5. I am a professional substitute.
I have always wanted to be useful. I am a professional musician, which is a very self-indulgent choice for a college-educated journalist. But it seems I am only comfortable with the amount of responsibility that comes from filling in for someone else. It started innocently enough: substitute teaching. Even in long-term jobs of six weeks, the job is never really mine. I do a great job at it because there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I take it more seriously than a lot of people would for a “fill-in” role.
My band, though few now would know this, is another example. I was a replacement for the girl who originally played with/inspired rob, Audrey. At the time, it was the only situation that could have prompted me back into my first love of music: an established act in which I would not be the central focus. It already had a charismatic front man. It needed harmonies, another writer, and a willing adventurer. I needed someone I could lean on, who could teach me. In the early days, people wondered if rob was purposefully limiting my role. Not at all. I was playing catch up to the huge cache of songs he’d written, and I had exactly what I wanted. Even now, when I’ve made such a place for myself here that it would be impossible to disassociate the band with me, I am not comfortable with anything beyond an even split. It’s honestly why we have not released a disc since Cecilia: I am not willing to have more of my songs on the disc than rob has. He is the bearer of the band name, the brander of it, the one responsible for its image. And that was what I wanted then. And, for the most part, it’s what I feel comfortable with now.
I guess it should not be surprising then that I’ve never wanted to be a mother, the definition of unique creation and responsibility. I don’t dislike children, a misconception (ha!) often ascribed to people like myself who have no maternal drive. I liken it to being gay: From childhood, I have never felt the urge. Never babied dolls. Never picked out my future children’s names. And, like being gay, nor can it be traced to some clear fault in my upbringing. I had a lovely childhood complete with parents who’s goal in life was to lovingly raise children. I feel guilty sometimes that they must feel they made a mistake with me somehow … made parenting seem unappealing. If anything, they gave me the healthy respect for it that gave me pause. To do it well requires commitment. “Oh, you just haven’t met the right man.” In my twenties, people would add that I was “still young and would change my mind.” At nearly 32, that has quieted. I will not be having children.
Recently, I’ve been helping out a friend with his three young children, and I’ve found it gratifying. There has been no pang, when I hold his youngest, that she is very well what I could have right now if life had gone a little differently. They are just small, curious, miraculous, foreign to me. And I fall into a kind of maternal thing with them easily because I am not cold-hearted, and because they are loving children, and because the real ache I feel when I look at them is over this world they are being so briefly sheltered from. They are innocent and they deserve every kindness. And it is very possible that I could wind up a “substitute” with these children, too.
My school kids are always excited to see a substitute, because it’s different. Because it offers a change of pace and new possibilities. I always tell my students that warn me their class is “bad,” that therein lies the beauty of our relationship: They might very well be bad … I might very well be mean, but maybe today while neither of us knows that for sure, we might be great together. And then we can all go back to being lousy later on with the people who think they have us figured out.
