The Woman on the Park Bench

Preface to my upcoming collection of short stories ~ "A Storyboard Life"

In my memory, I can still see her – a young girl, just thirty years old. She sits alone on a park bench in the middle of Washington DC, weeping. Her blonde hair partially obscures her tear-stained face as she wraps her arms protectively around her large belly. She shivers from the cold. It is the week before Christmas, she is seven months pregnant, and she has just lost her job in a career she loved.

That young woman crying on the park bench in the middle of the city was, of course, me. After seven wonderful post-college years working for a creative genius in the world of international Scandinavian furniture and fabrics, I found myself laid off without warning.

Prior to losing my job, knowing there would soon be three of us, my husband I had moved from the cute little flat I’d had when single, to a townhouse. I’d also just taken on car payments for the cheapest and safest car I could find, a Volvo 240DL.

And then everything came crashing down. Without a job, how would we afford these new financial commitments? My baby was born seven weeks premature. She was a wee little thing weighing not much more than 5 pounds. We named her Zoë, meaning ‘life’ in Greek – her good luck omen.

Three years later, I once again found myself crying in the days leading up to Christmas. During a brief economic uptick, we had optimistically decided to have another baby.

Pregnant with our second child, I’d just had a sonogram. The doctors had seen something that concerned them. It was possible, they said, our baby would need to be induced prematurely for immediate brain surgery in the event a second sonogram confirmed he was indeed hydrocephalic – a neurological disorder caused by too much fluid in the brain. That Christmas Eve, the story of Mary and her baby unleashed the floodgates and I sat silently through most of the church service with tears again streaming down my face.

Fortunately, the baby was just fine when he was born. We named him Leif, meaning beloved descendant in Norwegian. These days, Zoë and Leif are now in their thirties, healthy and with lives of their own.

If I could go back in time to that park bench, the one with the weeping young woman sitting on it, I would lean down and whisper into her ear, “Dry your tears, everything will be okay. You won’t believe the adventures and plot twists that await you. They will astonish you.”

What to read next: What is a Storyboard?