Glinda the Good Witch

I have very mixed feelings about this photograph. On the one hand, it’s a lovely record of a family holiday, and the first Halloween we were able to spend with all four of our children. On the other hand, it is a vivid reminder of an evening I spent feeling intensely embarrassed, humiliated, and out of place. Like I said, mixed. I’m smiling in the photo, but only because it was taken before everything turned horrible.

As many of you may know, ours is a blended family. When Doug and I married, I brought to the family my six-year-old daughter, Katherine, and Doug brought Sam, 4 and Kate, 2. Together we had baby Sarah. While Katherine lived mostly with us, Sam and Kate spent the school year with their mom who lived at that time in Arizona. Although they spent summers and vacations with us, there were a number of events that were not a regular part of our family experience. Things like Halloween.

In 1996, we decided to fly down and spend the holiday in Arizona, take the kids trick-or-treating, and attend the Halloween carnival being held at their elementary school. Perhaps I was overcompensating just a little bit, but I decided to make costumes for all of us, strange given the fact that I don’t really sew. I even decided on a theme for all of our costumes. At that time, Kate, who was in kindergarten, was  entranced with Toto, the little dog from Wizard of Oz. She’d often crawl around the house on all fours, barking. She refused to answer unless I  called her Toto. She of course wanted to be Toto for Halloween. Fine, I thought. I can pick out characters for each of us and pull together the appropriate costumes. I found a pattern for a dog costume to fashion Kate’s makeover into Toto. I modified the pattern to make a Cowardly Lion suit for Sam. Katherine wanted to be Dorothy, so I sewed a blue gingham dress for her, using her red, high-top Converse shoes for ruby slippers. Doug made a perfect Scarecrow when I stuffed a sweatshirt and jeans with straw. Sarah didn’t get much say and became the Tin Man in a grey sweatshirt and a tinfoil-covered funnel that fit her round little head. I wasn’t sure which part to pick for myself. There weren’t many female roles left. I was already heading to Arizona as “The Stepmother” so I certainly didn’t want to be the Wicked Witch of the West. That pretty much left me with Glinda the Good Witch. I somehow created a dress out of white and gold tulle, accented by a  magic wand and a tiara from the kids’ dress-up box. There I am in the photo, tiara and all, blissfully unaware of the embarrassment to come.

We showed up in Arizona the day before Halloween, swimming in the hotel swimming pool, and hand-crafting  Halloween candy bags. Okay, maybe I was overcompensating a lot.

We went trick-or-treating in Sam and Kate’s neighborhood. The weather was lovely, and the kids hauled in lots of great candy for Halloween, even agreeing to share some of their Snickers Bars with me.

Then came the school carnival. It was a big event, widely advertised in posters around the school. Everyone was supposed to come in costume, including parents. There would be games and music and food and prizes. We all dressed up in our Wizard of Oz finery and walked into the school as a group. The kids dashed off, eager to play the games. I, meanwhile, looked around with an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach. In a huge gymnasium filled with people, Doug and I were the only adults dressed in costume. I looked at all the other parents, members of a fairly well-to-do suburb of Phoenix. There were the all other moms, all of whom seemed to have expensive haircuts, size 2 designer jeans and excellent manicures. They were all beautiful and tanned and relaxed. And there I was, with my fish-belly white Oregon skin, craft glue under my fingernails, holding a wand, of all things. I was sure everyone was looking at me, judging me, incredulous that I could be so eager, so earnest, so . . . so stupid. Doug at least was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. I, on the other hand, was wearing a tiara.

I  wanted to drop through the floor and disappear. I wanted to ditch Glinda the Good Witch and revert to Barbara the awkward stepmother visiting from out of town. When that didn’t appear to be an option, I wanted to gather all the kids together and leave immediately. The problem was, they were all having a great time throwing bean bags and fishing for little plastic prizes and eating hot dogs and cake. They were in their element. I was the one completely out of place. I felt like I didn’t belong—in the gym, in Arizona, or in the world of happy, intact families. I felt, in short, like a failure.

I stuffed the tiara and wand in one of the kids’ bags and mostly hid behind Doug. I tried to chat with some of the other adults, parents of Sam and Kate’s friends, but I’m sure I didn’t make much of an impression, or at least not a good one. Would you want to talk to a silent, cringing woman in a white fairy dress? It was one of the longest nights of my life, and one of the hardest in my career as a parent. That was over fifteen years ago, and although I’ve shared the story a few times with friends, I’ve never written about it.

Until now.

Why now?

My daughter reminded me of the story earlier in the week, and I began to ask myself this question. Why, when I am willing to write about most things—my childhood, my relationships, my mistakes or my lessons—do I stop at recording memories like this one. It’s not that I resist talking about times when I’ve made a fool of myself, because I’m actually fine with that (see my story “Denver“). What stops me is that it is part of my history of raising a blended family, which carries the distinction of being both the thing I am most proud of, and also the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Twenty years into the process, I am humbled by all that we learned, and so grateful for the relationships I now have with everyone involved. It is perhaps one of the most significant experiences of my life.

So why wait so long to write about it? Because it probably took the distance of all those years to figure out what it means. What did I gain from that night standing in a crowded gymnasium, feeling out of place and humiliated? Here’s a beginning:

That I can’t control my experiences. I can do my best to plan, make beautiful, thematically-correct costumes, cover all the bases, and still have it fall apart.

That I survived the evening. It wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t happy. But my kids had a great time. They loved their costumes. In the end, it was just one night in a series of thousands.

That I belonged in that gymnasium, whether or not I felt like it at the time.

Ultimately, I decided to write it in hopes that perhaps I will be able to connect to someone else who has felt foolish or out of place—you, maybe—and be able to say that even in the middle of sinking humiliation, you have company. With time and distance, it will make more sense. You will survive. You already belong.

Legacy

When my husband, Doug, and I married 18 years ago, we created a blended family with small children living in two different states. While wonderful, our family required a lot of time and flexibility, so I left my counseling position at the community college and went to work part-time at my husband’s company, IBR. At the time, IBR was a small research and development company for the baking industry which employed less than ten people, including Doug, his partner, Pat Shannon, and Pat’s wife, Sara, who worked as a graphic designer.  The company didn’t really have a legal department, and since I had worked my way through college and grad school working for law firms, I at least knew the terminology and could talk to lawyers.  Which is how I came to spend seven years of my professional career working as a Legal Liaison, a title we created to describe this cobbled-together job.

Over the seven years I was there, the company grew dramatically, moving three times to bigger offices, doubling the staff, then doubling it again. Still, it retained its family feel.  Our kids practically grew up in the place and were always,always welcomed. We celebrated birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and, later on, a few funerals. When I finally decided it was time to leave the company to start what would become I Am Story Studios, the hardest part was to leave this group of people who had become extended family to me.

The legal work, while important, was never really the highlight for me.  I did it because I could, and it was necessary, but it always felt like I was improvising. I wasn’t an attorney; I only hired the attorneys. There was a lot of paper to keep track of, and I wasn’t always sure if it made a difference to anyone. When it came time to leave, however, I wanted someone to care about the work. I handed the job over to the only other person I thought could make sense of it: a woman named Angie Daley, an already busy woman and indispensable part of the IBR team. She wasn’t an attorney either, but she was smart, a quick learner, and a great communicator. If anyone could do it, she could.

In the years since I left IBR, I missed the people most of all. We’d get together for the occasional dinner, and kept in touch on Facebook. I’d see people at company picnics and the annual Christmas party. Eventually, the company sold and Doug left as well, and we looked forward to less frequent times we’d get together with these friends, this family we’d helped build.

Last week, we attended the retirement party for Pat, Doug’s long-time partner, who has decided to move on to other adventures. It felt like a graduation of sorts, and it was wonderful to see all the faces, both veterans who’d been there from the beginning, and more recent additions. I was talking with my good friend Angie about our experiences at IBR, and the word “legacy” kept coming up.  Certainly, Pat and Doug created a wonderful, tangible legacy in their work at IBR.  People used words like integrity, passion, innovation, and game-changer when describing what these men had created. Their’s was an obvious, tangible accomplishment that made a difference in the lives of so many people.

But I soon realized that legacy can happen in small and unintentional ways. I mentioned to Angie that it was the people of IBR that kept me coming in every day, because I’d never really felt that the legal work made much of a difference.

“Oh, but Barbara,” Angie said, “You don’t understand. The legal work was one of my favorite parts of my job, and what I was most proud of. Working as legal liaison work made a difference to me. And to the company.  I was your legacy.”

I was stunned.  And surprisingly comforted. I’d never thought of it that way. I appreciate Angie for helping me re-story that part of my life. It was a good reminder that we won’t always know the impact of our efforts, and that the outcome can be different from we expect. You drop a stone in the water, and don’t always see how far the ripples extend. Sometimes we see the legacy and know it–the things we celebrate at retirement parties and graduations and funerals–and sometimes we find out almost accidentally, and can celebrate with one good friend.