Charming Adjacent

I've been thinking about this plus-one role I've played, on and off, for the last three decades, and it made me wonder: had I been primed for this from the very beginning? Was I always meant to be the one observing, adjusting, making space for someone else's spotlight?

My mother was only 21 when she pushed me out into the world and already a successful actress. There is a wonderful photo of her that ran in a magazine, two years before she became a mother. She is standing in the entrance of a double-decker bus in stilettos and a beehive. It describes her as a starlet, and she looks the part.

A publicity photo of my beautiful mum at 19

She loves to tell the story of the day I was born. "When they handed you to me," she says, "it was frightening. I was sure you didn't like me at all."

From my first moments, I was cast not as the star but as the audience. My mother - so young and beautiful -looking down at her newborn daughter and finding not an adoring fan but a critic. Maybe she was too young. Maybe she hadn't had enough love and attention herself. Maybe she just wasn't ready.

And I wonder - who might I have become if she'd had me a little later, when she was better able to put me at the center? When she'd lived a little more, steadied herself, learned how to give what she hadn't yet received? Would I have turned out different, bolder, less prone to observing and more inclined to take up space? Or was I always meant to be on the edge of the action, watching, waiting, absorbing?

My childhood prepared me perfectly for a life of celebrity adjacency. When my then boyfriend but now husband’s career took off soon after we left college, I had been cast in a role I knew by heart: the appreciative audience, the affirming mirror, the professional plus-one.

And yet, this clashed with everything I thought I was supposed to be. I was an avid reader as a kid, which should have been my first warning sign. Like any girl child raised during the second wave of feminism, in my imagination I was Jo, not Amy; Elizabeth, not Kitty; Ramona, not Beezus. The difficult ones, the ones with opinions, the ones who stomped and refused to be charming.

And yet, here I was, charmingly adjacent, always standing slightly off-stage, politely waiting. I had to wonder: was I just the boring one? Too timid, not funny enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough, just one of the crowd. Maybe that was the problem all along. Maybe I lacked the genetic mutation that makes certain people magnetic - the ability to command a room, to draw people in, to make them want to watch.

My mother gave me many gifts, intentionally and otherwise. She gave me resilience, the ability to adapt, and most importantly, she gave me material. Every writer needs a complicated relationship with their mother, after all. It's practically required.

Daughter, observer, plus-one, friend, colleague, wife, mother. So many supporting roles. Along the way I lost track of who my story was actually about. But lately something is shifting. I've decided it might be time to accept the role of the leading lady in my own life. Stepping out of the shadows is scary. I get nervous when I pitch my voice to a louder setting. I’m so used to listening that talking sometimes feels like interrupting. Even now, writing this, I've deleted and retyped this paragraph three times.

Am I changing? Or am I rediscovering someone who got lost along the way? I don’t know and I’m not sure it matters. Life is full, it's big, shit happens. The most important thing is to live it.  So that's what I'm doing. Trying to make sense of it all, one story at a time.