Acceptance
By: Nineteen Peregrinations
Tags: Venting, Inertia, Resignation, Acceptance, Life

How does that prayer go? Please God, give me the strength to accept the things that I cannot change and change the things I cannot accept. Or does it? Let me do a quick google search…. Ok, that’s not it.

It’s the Serenity prayer — God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I like my somewhat contradictory version better.

There are things in my life that I have had to accept and things that I couldn’t accept, I have tried to change. Sometimes I have been successful. I have a Ph.D in English literature from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. A thesis that was hard fought, laborious, not so much a labor of love, and written long-distance because the man I married couldn’t wait for two years till I finished writing my thesis. Could I have changed his mind?

Probably. But the person I was, at that moment in time, decided to accept the demands of the situation. I got married, moved to the west coast and used the Berkeley library as my resource for Canadian native literature. As you can imagine, it was an uphill battle. Trying to locate Canadian critical pieces on Native Canadian literature in the United States. They were hard enough to come by in Canada! I would take a bus and then the BART to Berkeley, three days a week, spend my day at the library, and then make the return journey to come home to my wifely tasks of cooking and cleaning. I finished my thesis in the allotted two years. And I am awfully proud of doing it.

Finding a job at a reputable university with a Canadian degree in the US is a f#&king joke. Of course, I was geographically limited by the constraints of my husband’s job in San Francisco. In all fairness, he did offer to move to wherever I got a job. I have little doubt that he would not have appreciated being dragged to North Carolina from his current employment. In short, both of us could not have been successful in the same place. Again, the practical person I was at that point in time, chose to stay in SF. I love SF, and being a Delhi girl, I need to feel the electric hum of city life.

I did try to make the best of my lemons, and applied to community colleges in the bay area. I was doubly stumped for four years because I was on a spouse visa (H-4) that didn’t allow me to work in the US, and prioritizing milestones of married life required moves that never coincided with my objectives . And try as hard as I did, I was never successful in getting an interview, let alone a job. I didn’t have enough information or any mentors who could have guided my job search. I saw no reason to teach middle schoolers when I was trained to teach undergrads. It was, frankly, an upsetting idea. Should I have changed my perspective and accepted my situation? Sure. I didn’t, though; I went down fighting against the dying light of my non-existent career.

I grew frustrated, depressed, and eventually accepted my fate. Then, I had my son and the next 10 years of my life were spent raising him, which I did single-handedly. Neither I nor my husband have family in the States, and any help from them would come with chagrin and a “but, you don’t work”. I accepted my sole responsibility of raising my son, because my husband was busy building a career, and I gave him my complete and unequivocal support because one of us needed to succeed. And succeed he did. Magnificently.

I have this credo that I have followed for a better part of my life with positive results. Whatever I decide to do, I do to the best of my ability. Whether it is cooking dinner, washing clothes, sweeping the deck, giving advice, picking apples from the heap in Safeway, or supporting my husband in every way possible.

It’s been 16 years since I successfully defended my thesis; it might as well have been another person and another life. I don’t even know where I kept my university degree. I have a vague memory of a parchment colored paper in a cardboard roll.

Did I reinvent myself and become a CEO of a literacy-oriented company? No. I became a serial volunteer, a wife, a mother, and resigned. Mostly, when I look back, I find that I have mostly accepted my situations and tried to make the best of the hand I was dealt. I have not tried much to change the situations that I could not accept. That, perhaps, is my fatal flaw.