A discharged, frustrated twenty-five-year-old, I joined a conservative,
top-down managed oil company, where I was again on the bottom rank. Although constrained
by corporate convention at work, my income supported wild away from work. When transferred from Houston to Chicago in
the early seventies, with women's liberation in full swing, I rented an
apartment designed for sexual freedom: “singles-only.” Doing whatever I wanted on weekends lasted
almost three years, while my mind remained focused on succeeding at work.
Dad had taught me work was a man’s identity, best done with
suppressed emotions. Engineering and military trainers agreed with him, but a four-day
encounter in my twenty-ninth year trumped them all. Chicago social directors
organized a week in Hawaii, where I wandered onto Waikiki Beach and met a Montreal
beauty in a blue and white bikini. Before I returned to Chicago, I was
hopelessly in love.
Mance LeGuerrier and I found ways to stay together,
married when I was thirty and had two children, Tristan and Katherine. My roles
as husband and father began transforming how I defined freedom. But at work my competitive
corporate drive versus other men to provide for my family remained for over
fifteen years. Into midlife, still primarily work-oriented, I encountered an identity
crisis, however, events conspired to correct my imbalance: an early retirement
offer secured our financial future. In
the following years, I turned to nourishing my relationship with my family,
then began exploring my spiritual and emotional life—efforts that taught me I
was more than my work and dissolved my ultra-competitive stance against men.
During these transformative, sometimes messy years, freedom
as doing whatever I wanted shifted to
doing what would move me closer to God and Mance, my children and others. That
brought my freedom into a new role of choosing, or not, to act from love rather
than my rational self-interests.
I still struggle
trying not to express my anger in the moment I feel it. But redefining freedom has
changed my life. Rather than feeling frustrated not getting what I want, my new
freedom now fills my everyday life with joy and love, going amiss if I act from
a feeling of superiority to other people, or, imagine myself totally self-sufficient.
Before I began finding meaning in my second half of
life, an anthem to my once stand-alone rational mind could have been "So
Much To Say," by the Dave Matthews Band, wherein Matthews sings the closet that he is stuck inside is his hell, that there is no light there, and he begs someone to open his head and release him.
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