Firefly Lane
For nothing was simply one thing.
~Virginia Wolf, To the Lighthouse
By Kristin Hannah
Firefly Lane is a story of how all of the seemingly insignificant moments of our lives add up to life itself. And because it is impossible to pay attention to each of those moments, we sometimes feel cheated and lured into the possibility that if we’d only made that other choice. Maybe it would have turned out better. Or maybe it will turn out better.
In this early novel by Kristin Hannah I found characters I could identify with, characters I could love, and characters who confounded me. I wanted to, as we tend to do, keep them all separate. Neatly compartmentalized in their character “selves.”
And I loved the characters. Though I didn’t consider the book to be a high form of literature, I did find a story to engage with. But unfortunately, I found the character archetypes to be a bit to neatly categorized.
Kate and Tully, the protagonist pair, met in childhood and through the story played alter-ego to one another’s roles. Kate the quiet book worm, Tully the adventurous risk-taker. Kate from the stable middle class family, Tully from a tragically broken home. And they played out their roles in this story through adulthood and eventually into loss, grief and sorrow.
But the quality of the story which I struggled with was the caricature of their life choices. Either career professional or maternal domestic. The choice so many women feel compelled to make. While both Kate and Tully entered university with a career intention, they chose separate paths, Kate choosing motherhood and Tully choosing her brilliant career.
That choice, as it plays out for us in contemporary culture, is a lie on it’s face. And we do not have to buy in to the lie, or settle with a single choice. That choice reduces the nature of women to either mother OR well, anything else. That lie tells us that if we are leaning into our nurturing side, we must sacrifice every other part of ourselves to it.
That’s nonsense.
The truth is that existing in all of us (men and women alike) is the potential to reach for either and to reach for both. Because nothing is simply one thing, and no person is simply one person. I have made all of these choices. I have chosen to be a full time mother, I have chosen to be a full time student, I have chosen to invest in business and career, I have chosen to support my husband’s career. Now I know some will respond to this by scoffing at my unacknowledged privilege that I even had those choices. So I will acknowledge that privilege. But I want to move into a deeper space than that. The space where different types of choice exist. Not global this or that choice. But the choice of how we acknowledge the moments which affect our experience and how we respond to those moments.
Because I have to say that in not a single one of those choices did I find complete fulfillment. That part, I think, Hannah got right. The fulfillment isn’t in choosing a path and trudging along through it regardless of outcome.
For me, the fulfillment was and always has been in the way I chose to spend the seemingly insignificant moments embedded in any choice, which added up to the sum total of my life.