The Choice

strong body. To work hard. To be a team.” I told them what my ballet
teacher had told me a lifetime ago: “All your ecstasy in life is going to
come from the inside.” I said good night and started to walk out the
door, but before I le the room, I did a high kick. Audrey’s eyes
glittered with pride. Her friends clapped and cheered. I wasn’t the
quiet mom with the strange accent. I was the performer, the athlete,
the mom whose daughter admired her. Inside, I equated that feeling
of self-worth and elation with Béla’s absence. If I wanted to feel that
glow more often, perhaps I needed to be with him less often.
at hunger for self fueled me in my undergraduate studies too. I
was voracious, always in search of more knowledge, and also the
respect and approval that might signal to me that I was of value. I
stayed up all night working on papers that were already good, for fear
that they wouldn’t—or would only—be good enough. When a
psychology professor announced to our class at the beginning of the
semester that he only gave C’s, I marched to his office, told him I only
earned As, and asked what I could do to continue my exceptional
academic performance. He invited me to work with him as an
assistant, augmenting my classroom learning with ĕeld experience
usually granted only to graduate students.
One aernoon, some of my classmates invited me to join them for a
beer aer class. I sat with them in the darkened bar near campus, my
chilled glass on the table, enthralled by their youthful energy, their
political passion. I admired them, social justice advocates, paciĕsts. I
was happy to be included. And sad too. is stage of my life had been
cut short. Individuation and independence from my family. Dating
and romance. Participation in social movements that were bringing
about real change. I had lost my childhood to the war, my adolescence
to the death camps, and my young adulthood to the compulsion to
never look back. I had become a mother before I had grieved my own
mother’s death. I had tried too fast and too soon to be whole. It wasn’t