You Won't Find This Route on Map Quest

I've been thinking more about my post from Tuesday, specifically the part about the "daddy issues" and the Tori Amos lyrics. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it's really okay, that those things are just part of my history but do not in any way sum me up.

When you get where you want to be, it doesn't matter how many dead-ends you bumped into along the way, or that if you hadn't hit that dead-end, you might have ended up somewhere else just as nice. This is where you are, and there is no going back to undo a wrong turn or a roadblock. The mistakes and rough parts in the journey are as much a part of the journey as the parts in which you were on the right road.

You know, back when I was teaching, I attended a workshop one summer in which the director, a good man overall but a guy who didn't always think before he spoke, heard me stutter severely as I read aloud a passage I had written, and he burst out laughing, saying, "You teach the deaf, right? So it doesn't matter that you stutter . . . because your students can't hear you!" And he laughed until he had tears in his eyes. I handled it with grace, partly out of pity for the fellow teachers who sat around the table looking horrified at the director's reaction, and partly because I am too stubborn to let someone so insensitive see how deeply I am hurt.

Part of what hurt me is that it's true, at least a little (although my job included a lot of speaking, including voice interpreting for deaf students). My stuttering surely had something to do with my major in deaf education. I didn't sit down and say, "Okay, I stutter. There's not much else I can do, so I guess I'll teach deaf kids." But the fact that I fell in love with American Sign Language at the age of twelve did have a lot to do with my stutter. I remember learning the manual alphabet and a few signs so that when I stuttered so badly in class that I could not speak, I could fingerspell the answers below my desk as a sort of rebellion, a way to prove to myself that I knew the answers. That led to more reading about ASL and Deaf Culture, and eventually I knew that was what I was supposed to do with my life. And as awesome as it is to know a second language in which I am completely fluent (um, as far as stuttering goes -- I'd say proficient is more accurate as far as my linguistic competency in ASL is concerned -- I still have that "hearing accent."), that has nothing to do with what I truly love about the Deaf Community and my (former) job. Does it really matter how I got here, a teacher of deaf students, as long as I'm staying for the right reasons? Does the fact that an imperfection led me to my vocation make me any less of a teacher? Of course not.

When you get where you want to be, it doesn't matter how many dead-ends you bumped into along the way, or that if you hadn't made that wrong turn, you might have ended up somewhere else just as nice. This is where you are, and there is no going back to undo a wrong turn or a roadblock. The mistakes and rough parts in the journey are as much a part of the journey as the parts in which you were on the right road.

So I could hide from the fact that I spent a lot of years being angry with my father, or that I had some issues with dating Christian guys, or that I had(have?) problems with male authority. But it was all just part of my journey. Why be ashamed of it, really? It's just part of how I came to be here, standing where I am, with a choice in front of me.