One of the tasks of growing up is deciding who we want to be. The image we adopt consists of several personas and may change as time passes. I’m a female, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a writer. Traces remain of that young, tomboy who wore overalls and preferred batting a softball with the boys in grade school instead of playing jacks with the girls.
Not everything I do becomes part of my image. I was the Durand Township clerk for 46 years, but I considered that just a convenient, part-time job.
I show various sides of myself in different circumstances and dress appropriately. When I was a young mother with two daughters who were Girl Scouts, I wore a dignified pants suit to help chaperone the troop visiting the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department. My husband was a deputy and I had arranged the trip on a Tuesday after school. A uniformed officer gave us the tour including the jail. He commented to me quietly, “You don’t look the same as the last time I saw you.”
I replied, “Neither do you.” The previous Saturday evening, he had met me as a colleague’s wife at a cop party. At that time, we were adults wearing leisure clothes, drinking beer and relaxing together.
I can no longer be a daughter except in my memories.
When I fix a holiday dinner for my family, I’m a grandmother wearing jeans and a top that’s easily washed in case I slop something.
Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless blouse are the order of the day while I attend a writers’ workshop during the summer. For a week, I’m a woman and a writer.
What identities make up your image?
I have had many images over the years including those you mentioned (except grandmother) as I have maneuvered through four marriages. But even before the marriages, I added college student, and later single mother while I got my Master’s Degree. I was an Army Signal Corp officer’s wife for 17 years, a college professor’s wife for 9 years, a retired VA employee’s girlfriend/companion & wife for 22 1/2 years, and now a retired Oscar Meyer’s employee’s wife for four years. I have had to reinvent myself many times over the years, but I seem to have the kind of personality that has not only survived, but thrived, and I enjoy looking back on what I have done – the friends I have made, things I have done, and the places that I have been. I never would have planned this life, but I am proud of it.
And still the Joyce I met years ago.