Plans For My Future?

I met an old teacher of mine. She was one of the teachers that really liked me and considered me a star pupil. So we meet at a wedding, and she inquires where I am up to in life:

"So Dry Eyes, which corporation are you running?"

And then it hits me. This is the reason for my unrest, for my feelings of stagnation. I can talk until I am blue in the face about how I will manage financially, even with a husband in kollel, and no degree. But it goes further and deeper than that. I want to go to college.

You see, this is what they hoped for me. As the brilliant girl, Dry Eyes was expected to chose some lucrative field, and rise to the top of it. This is what I was supposed to become. The CEO of a large company, or maybe a top specialist in some complicated branch of medicine. Maybe a researcher, an inventor. Maybe I was expected to be a famous lawyer.

So I can try hard to convince myself that I don't want anything more. That as the future wife of a future Rosh Yeshivah or future Rav I don't belong doing this kind of thing. That my place will be at the stove or the sewing machine, where good yiddishe mama's have positioned themselves for generations.

I might fool the people I tell this to, but I can't ever fool myself. B"H, He gave me brains, and I want to use them. I want to find myself stimulated, to find myself exhausting my brain power. I am not happy working as a lowly secretary. I don't enjoy the odd-jobs I do to pick up an extra few dollars. I don't want to spend the rest of my life allowing my brain to rot under a pile of papers that need to be filed.

And now I am fighting back tears as I write this, because I know that right now, as I sit in the dead of the night at my computer typing spontaneously, without planning what I want to write, I have stumbled over a truth that has lain dormant within me for so long. That little bubble of sadness I feel when my friends talk about their classes and professors and finals...it's not sadness. It is jealousy. I was supposed to be sitting next to her in class! I was supposed to be experiencing those finals, the ones they complain about so much, from the inside.

I don't want to be amazing anymore. I want to be a regular girl like everyone else. I want to move forward in life, not sit around waiting for...for nothing. For everything. For what?

My sisters and sisters-in-law all went to college. They all have degrees. They all moved on and up in life. They have well-paying jobs where they use their brains, they think a little. But Dry Eyes made the decision to help her family out financially, rather than use this money for her schooling or to save up for her wedding. How noble of her, no? But does tzedakah even count if you resent every penny? Do I still get a mitzvah if every dollar is a stab inside my heart? Is there schar for someone who gives money but feels like running to hide so she shouldn't have to?
Is it a mitzvah to give if I do it simply because I see no other way?

Looking back at the past year, at all the money I made, I am impressed with myself. Combine my lowly secretarial job, all the overtime hours I am allowed to put in, and a whole bunch of odd-jobs on the side, and I made a considerable amount of money in the past year.

But where has it gotten me? I could have paid for a lot more than a year's tuition. Probably a master's tuition. I could have bought myself a lexus. I could have saved up a bunch of money to make up for not getting financial support after I get married. I could have a closet full of clothes to rival the fanciest girls in town. I could have.....done a lot of things.

But I did nothing. A year has gone by, and I am at the exact same place as I was last year. (Minus a couple thousand dollars.) I have gone nowhere. I have saved nothing. And it's not as if my money has made such a difference to my family. We are falling apart either way. The house is in foreclosure, the collectors call daily, the IRS is on our case, what help have I even been?

And so, I feel this sense of restlessness, of wanting to go somewhere. And it is getting me down. The "me" of yesterday doesn't even recognize the "me" of today. The "me of yesterday was so carefree, so hopeful. And the "me" of today has nothing. Not a degree, a car, a husband....not even a plan. And the "me" of today has hope, only the "me" of today's hope is represented by the intangible straws of bitachon that she is grasping at.

I can't indulge myself often. I didn't buy the shoes, even though they were cute and I need new shoes because I didn't want to spend the money. I don't indulge myself in a new wedding outfit, even though my close friend is getting in a week and I really need it, because I don't want to spend the money. I didn't even indulge myself on the two dollar ice cream the other night, because I choke over wasted money like that. But tonight I will indulge myself. I will allow myself to wallow in self pity for a bit. At least that is free.