My costuming days are over. Well, there are still a clutch of weeks steering a room full of students toward increased sewing skills, but the projects will be their own. There are no more theatrical extravaganzas for us to outfit, because the heavy curtain has thumped to the stage.
It has been an adventure to concoct the hundreds of illusions involved in turning teenagers into mermaids, or the inhabitants of Narnia, or Alice's queens. There is some pulsing desire within many of us to pretend. Try on another persona for awhile. But when the music stops we all settle back in to our own skins.
Letting go of some of the roles of the past leaves me in a quiet space. Parenting nine children is largely over. Fifteen years spent crafting a menu of marriage support, including these missives, is winding down. Five years of spinning students into characters has stopped.
Yet endings are part of the rhythm of life. Facing my own expendability casts me in a part I never understood when my toddlers outnumbered me. For decades I believed the fantasy that the world revolved around me. At least the one whose stage was my living room. But in the afterparty of being mom, and the marriage lady, and the costumer, it occurs to me to finally read the credits.
And the only name that really matters is not mine.
