Hitting a little too close to home.

I just finished reading Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary. I had read the piece before; I think I read it, or at least in parts, in high school English class, and then I read it in one of my French classes in college (in French). Neither time did the book leave much of an impression on me. (I remember watching the film more than reading the book; I have images of Isabelle Huppert, as Emma, languishing on her deathbed, coughing up black bile. That doesn't happen in the book, as least in this latest translation.) Yet this time, with this reading, I am scarred by the book, or at least wounded. No, shamed. Shamed may be a better descriptor. Because I see a bit of me in Emma Bovary, and I'm distressed by this.

Maybe my link to Emma Bovary is tenuous, but, like her, I formed my vision of the world through books, not actual life experiences. She read the works of Sir Walter Scott and the tales of Arthur and his knights, and I read Sweet Valley High and Anne of Green Gables, but I think the effect was the same. We created these fabled and almost mythical images of what our futures - our grown-up worlds - would be like, and when they didn't turn out that way we became disappointed. Emma Bovary reacts quite forcefully and indulges in materialism and passions, and I have created a numbing, defensive barrier that protects myself and these childhood notions from the outer world. Emma is not successful in her coping, and I wonder how successful I am. When I sit with furrowed brow, silently fuming at yet again having to be the one to cook dinner even though I'm just as engaged in my activities as Doug, I think I'm not very successful at all.

Oh, good lord. This post risks becoming one of those introspective melodramas that I at times unleash on the poor, unsuspecting Internet. I guess all that I'm trying to say is that I realize that there is a difference between what I thought my adult life would be like when I was young and what it is actually like. My life is not terrible; on the contrary, there are many good things about my life. But there is a contrast in what I had envisioned and what is reality, and it would seem that I still have a difficult time coming to grips with this contrast.

Lest anyone think that as young Rosie I was wishing that a knight in shining armor would come to sweep me away, that my Prince would give me that fateful kiss or that glass slipper and I would be whisked away to a castle, horse-drawn carriages, dresses of silk and muslin with hoop skirts and poofed sleeves, let me set you straight. My one wish, my most pronounced and memorable wish, was to be old (old to me was somewhere between 35 and 40, by the way; I guess that was old to a 10 year-old). I wanted to be instantly old so that I could bypass adolescence, pimples, dating, college, finding a career, applying for jobs, finding a husband... all of those things that come along with what I thought of as "growing up." I wanted to bypass all of it, all of its decisions and uncertainty, and I wanted to simply be "grown up" - have a job, have a husband, have a house, have a car, and live that very suburban vision of happily ever after. My castle was one of the large colonial homes on Main Street in South Windsor, with maybe a sheep or a horse or two out back (not for my carriage, though), and my prince was nameless and faceless but someone who was stable and steady and always around. What's ironic is that I suppose I am in that place now, that place of my 10 year-old fantasy, and yet I still find myself wishing to be "grown up." To bypass my thirties and forties and to suddenly find myself retired, selling my house here to buy a condo somewhere near the water, downsizing and getting rid of all the worries and decisions that come with being where I am right now (mentally and geographically where I am). But because I am a "grown up," I know that I cannot bypass the next thirty-plus years of my life, I cannot be instantly retired, I cannot shed the anxieties and concerns of my life, not now and not really ever. So in a way I feel stuck. I shouldn't feel stuck but I do feel stuck. I've grown to think that being stuck is what being an adult is all about, and I am beginning to wish that I didn't spend my time as a kind wanting to be old. I wish I had enjoyed being a kid, when I wasn't stuck. At the time, though, I didn't know that I wasn't stuck, and I didn't know what being a kid really meant. That kind of carefree childhood wasn't in the cards for me.

So what's in the cards for me now? I hope acceptance. Understanding. And, if I'm lucky, at some point contentment. Because my grown-up life isn't so bad - isn't bad at all, actually - and before I know it I'll be 62, looking retirement and, if they haven't yet hit me, major health problems in the eye, and I'll be wishing that I hadn't spent my thirties wishing I were sixty and that I instead enjoyed the great things that I had before me. And I'm trying. Most days I do a good job of trying. But some days I don't, and the winter certainly doesn't help. If only I could see the grass... if only I could see a daffodil push up from the dirt. Maybe that's my new wish. Instead of wishing for the passing of life, I wish for the start of it. I wish for spring.