The Main Page of My Life[edit]
At dawn, the kitchen is quiet. Just the kettle’s sigh and the slow turn of the world outside my window. I wonder sometimes what the main page of my life truly cost. Not the grand, dramatic choices, but the quiet ones that reshaped everything.
When I left the convent at fifty, I traded the deep, still waters of the cloister for the lively, sometimes chaotic main page of marriage. I gained a husband’s hand in mine on a Tuesday morning, the sound of children laughing at breakfast, the weight of a small child asleep on my lap. I gained life, vibrant and messy. I gained the taste of shared silence over coffee, the comfort of a home built together.
But the main page hides the cost. I gave up the morning prayer that came before the sun, the hours of contemplation that felt like breathing. I gave up the certainty of the sacred in the quiet rhythm of the convent. There was a kind of grace in that silence, a deep knowing that settled in my bones. Now, the silence is different. It’s the quiet after the children have flown, the space where the echo of laughter still lingers.
I wonder sometimes if the silence I traded for laughter was worth it. Did the warmth of a shared life outweigh the depth of the stillness I left behind? I think of my husband’s hand, so sure and steady, and the way he’d hum softly while making tea. I think of the children’s faces at their first school play, bright with joy. There’s a kind of grace in that, too—the grace of having loved and been loved, of having built a life that mattered, even if it meant the quiet corners of my soul grew a little dimmer.
The main page of my life is not the one I planned. It’s not the one I thought I’d choose. But it is the one I lived. And though I miss the deep, slow waters sometimes, I wouldn’t trade the laughter for the silence. Not for a single moment. The cost was real, the sacrifice deep. But the life that bloomed on that main page? It was worth every single thing.
— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering