The Huge Life of an Ordinary Wonder Woman: A Memoir of Learning to Love It All

By Kathy Egan

Kathy Egan is pursuing her dream of being the best mom, wife, businesswoman, and friend she can be. She and her husband have two sons, and she half-reluctantly climbs the corporate ladder, worried about not giving her children enough of her time. It's even harder than she imagined. She plows forward with a steadfast heart, believing in the beauty of tiny, ordinary moments of connection.
Through years of experiencing both joys and struggles, she dons her Wonder Woman cape and hides her insecurities, until one day she breaks her "no crying in baseball" rule. The terrifying tumbling out of her inner self causes her to accept an invitation to an intriguing workshop about simplifying one's life to what really matters. What follows are some unexpected life events—namely being diagnosed with and treated for both breast and skin cancer—that offer Kathy a sort of inner transformation. With the help of a gentle guide on her self-discovery path, she learns how to fully experience all aspects of her life, even the bad stuff. She learns to let go and allow her soul to fully shine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350944648

Kathy Egan

Kathy Egan graduated from Boston College and earned her MBA at the University of New Haven. From the beginning of her career as a software developer to her recent retirement from executive leadership, she often found herself the only woman at the table. She currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband Bill, an architect. She is the proud mother of two sons and a daughter-in-law. Kathy is a playoff-stretch sports fan who also enjoys reading, walking, and yoga. Kathy began writing alongside a group of spiritual seekers shortly before being diagnosed with breast cancer and several impactful skin cancers. Feeling compelled to examine her life choices—to inquire into what she might have lost and gained through all her years of struggling to juggle it all—Kathy got serious about writing her first book, "The Huge Life of an Ordinary Wonder Woman."

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The Huge Life of an Ordinary Wonder Woman

A Memoir of Learning to Love It All

Copyright © 2024 by Kathy Egan

Independently Published

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35094-463-1

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35094-464-8

Cover design by DesignCrowd / images from Adobe Stock

Book design by BookBaby

For Bill, David, and Charlie

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part 1: Starting Out

1. I Wanna Be Like Mary

2. Safety Not Guaranteed

3. Brave and Perfect

4. Parent Love

5. Side Pony

6. Longing

Part 2: Striving

7. Fulfillment

8. Super Senses

9. Baptism

10. Starting Over

11. The Wonder Years

12. The Wonder (Woman) Years

13. Snap

14. Shine

Part 3: Seeing through a New Lens

15. Vulnerability

16. Dangling Woman

17. Help

18. Cancer Island

19. Sadness

20. Child’s Pose

Part 4: Discovering More

21. Holy Water

22. Communion

23. Into the Mystic

24. Finest Hour

25. Living All of It

26. Roar

27. Going Back

28. Dance Me to the End of Love

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Author’s Note

Inever imagined myself as an author, but once I got going, it was as if the writing put a spell on me. I initially wrote for myself, pulled by a need to self-examine the mystery of this heart. Later, my desire to leave a little piece of my heart in tangible form for my children and future grandchildren is what kept me going, and open to what wanted to be expressed through my writing. My purpose is to share with my loved ones, and all readers, what I’ve learned about the true gift of being human—the capacity to feel all the feelings.

To write this book, I relied primarily upon my memory. I referenced personal medical records, job records, and journals from my cancer treatments and spiritual seeker workshops. I changed the names of some locations and most, but not all, individuals to preserve anonymity. I chose not to write much about my sons’ personalities or individual lives, as they each have their own huge life in front of them.

Being new to writing in the later stages of my life, I am humbled by how hard and lonely a job it is. I have gained an even deeper respect for authors, musicians, and artists of all types who put themselves out there, vulnerably hoping for human connection. Therein lies the essence of the magical spell—the sheer possibility of becoming more connected and more human through writing.

Introduction

When I was in my 30s, my big, huge life was spilling over the edge of my plate. In the middle of raising two children while simultaneously trying to be a top performer in my job in information technology, as well as a loving wife, daughter, sister, and friend, I had so much going on, but no time to ponder my life choices. There was rarely a moment to pause for reflective activities like journaling or creating a nice photo album of a family trip. Okay, I did manage to put together three or four mini photo albums—the kind where you simply slide your favorites into sleeves—when my kids were really young. But after that, I gave up and stashed all the often-unmarked boxes and envelopes of 4x6 printed photos in a built-in cabinet in my bedroom. I came to look upon that cabinet as my trustworthy door to a land of hidden treasures, believing that someday I would be able to properly catalog and cherish those photos and the memories they held.

I had other stashes, like my Short, Simple Prayers stash, which I drew upon to help me juggle all the balls in my busy life: Thank you, God, for helping me squash my nervous voice in that meeting. Or, Please God, help me get by on another night of five hours of sleep, or please God, don’t let me be the last parent to pick up their kids today. And then there was my Special Moments stash, which I added to liberally when I was with my kids and my husband, Bill, by closing my eyes and freezing the moments into my brain, and then sealing them for good measure with, Please God, don’t let me ever forget this.

Joking with Bill or a girlfriend, I made fun of myself as The Mad Stasher, yet I could also feel a kind of longing for something underneath—I didn’t know what—and a periodic questioning if I was living it right. Those quiet inquiries in my head felt a bit dangerous. I easily hid them with my glass-half-full disposition. I had built my life around striving to be successful—to be an A student, to be special at my workplace, to be a giver with my family and friends—and I had no earthly idea how I could break my stride in all my striving. I held onto the hope that all my stashes would carry me forward safely to a less stressful time in my life, when I might slow down and more fully relive all the treasures and reflect upon the joys.

Shortly after I turned 60, when my life had downshifted a gear to a pleasantly full pace as an empty nester with a wonderfully challenging career, I was meeting with my gynecologist before my annual check-up, and she asked me what I’d been up to lately. I told her I was planning to evolve soon, by which I meant I was going to retire from my IT job (crediting tennis great Serena Williams for the new terminology), and I was going to focus on completing the memoir I’d been writing on the weekends, as a labor of love. My gynecologist was curious.

I gave her the basic details, though still feeling shy to talk about my book, explaining that it was about my early years of motherhood and career, when I was striving to live the very full life I thought I wanted (the huge life) by doing more and more, stretching myself thinner and thinner, to the borderline breaking point. And, I continued, it was also about how, through some unexpected life events, and with the help of a guide on my spiritual journey, I learned the meaning of the real huge life through slowing down a little, fully experiencing all parts of my life (even the bad stuff), and by, well, being more fully human.

My gynecologist seemed sincerely interested. She is only a few years younger than me, and had held the same high bar for herself, in her work as a female physician, as she imagined I must have held for myself in my career in the male-dominated information technology field. She said that in her work, she’s encountered many women like us who were raised in the 1970s and early 1980s, who had embraced the opportunities and expectations of the second wave of feminism—trying to do everything their mothers did as well as striving to be better than the men at the traditionally male roles. And at this stage in life, she observed, many of those women are asking themselves a tough question: What might I have lost of myself in the race to do it all?

I added that discussion with my gynecologist to my Special Moments stash, as I felt a tingly connection with her, and through her, to so many other women like us. Her words and that question felt close to what I’d been trying to explore when I first got serious about writing this book. For as long as I could remember, I’d believed in female empowerment. Whenever I needed a boost, I would envision myself as the iconic Wonder Woman, power posing with her hands on her hips. And although I hadn’t initially framed my book as an inquiry into what I had lost of myself, writing it did force me to pull back the covers on all my standing up for myself and being strong, despite the fear of what I might learn about myself, or what regrets I might uncover. It gave me a great sense of acceptance and relief, and possibly even normalcy, hearing that there were other ordinary Wonder Women struggling with this question at this point in their lives, when they finally had some time to think about it.

Even still, I had a sense that the framing of the question was incomplete. In writing about my perspectives as an outsider at work in my IT roles, and as an outsider with my mom friends (almost all of whom seemed to put more hours into their work parenting or managing the household than I ever could), and about the overall feeling that I wasn’t doing any of my multiple jobs well, I had also written about how I loved my work—the intellectual challenges and the mind-melding relationships—and how along the way of trying to manage my huge life, I had uncovered many unexpected gems, and grown in ways I never could have imagined. This made me realize that there are so many dichotomies in how we experience life. So, it seemed to me that the question would be more appropriately stated as, What might I have lost of myself, but ultimately gained, through all my crazy juggling years?

In my 30s and 40s, when the pressures of my full and wonderful life were at the maximum, I secretly yearned for someone, or a squad of superheroes, to jet in and tell me how I might engage life differently to ease my constant stress. Part of me worried I might snap. Part of me worried I wasn’t giving my sons enough of me. Part of me worried it was impossible for me to stay abreast of the fast-changing technology field I had chosen. I just couldn’t shake the sense that I was missing something or that I was on a precarious path, despite the fact that my life was all I had imagined it would be, and more.

I didn’t really know where to turn to have open discussions about this, as my closest friends at work were men, and my sense was that—based on how they talked about hobbies and leisure on their weekends, and knowing from my own experience, and that of my girlfriends, that women tended to pick up more of the family duties—they weren’t doing the juggling act between work and family to the same extent I was. And my closest friends outside of work were women, some of whom had made the decision to step away from a full-time career for the responsibilities of parenthood, and others who had more flexible or part-time roles that seemed better suited to raising children than my job was. Some days I envied them. Other days, I felt a sense of pride, as I was somehow managing, at least outwardly, to juggle it all.

While Bill and I were partners, and we’d talk about the ongoing struggle of integrating life, I still wished for guidance from some sort of coach, mentor, or teacher. I turned to books as my best resource for squeezing in help. I loved to read, and I could zip into the bookstore, or try online bookstores, as a relatively inexpensive way to seek out multiple teachers. Also, I was obsessed with efficiency, and I liked my perceived time-saving trick of reading a book while enjoying time with my family, either in the same room watching TV, or in the bleachers at my sons’ sports practices. I hoped to find a book that would reassure me that loving my work did not make me a bad mom. I wished for a book that felt like a lifeline to other women who might be feeling what I was feeling but not talking much about it. And I wanted a book that would teach me more about my spirituality, or whatever it was in there that I felt was missing in my life.

I never found that book. I read various business books, such as Enlightened Leadership by Oakley and Krug. I read some inner self-exploration books, such as Dinty Moore’s The Accidental Buddhist. Although these types of books were thought-provoking and provided practical advice, they were all missing something that was essential to me. What I really wanted to read in my precious and thin reading time were books that touched my heart, and none of the nonfiction books I was reading did that. I had always loved the fictional stories of quirky characters and families, where the writer reveals the beauty in their sweet and sad, ordinary lives. Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge are two of my favorites. There’s something about their writing and characters that makes me feel so humanly connected and alive, and at the same time, centered, with a sense of self-acceptance.

I read these kinds of books whenever I could sneak them in, with a simple rule that they had to spark my heart. Yet, I was still missing a book that spoke directly to the questions I was having about my own life. I suppose my quest was for the secrets to having it all, although I wasn’t totally sure what that meant. During my intense juggling years, I assumed it referred to women having kids and a career, and knowing how to manage all that and still maintain some sanity. I didn’t want to be super-human at doing, doing, doing, but that was the path I seemed to be on.

After many years, when I was close to having made it through the activity-stuffed and emotionally trying years of parenting high schoolers and balancing it with career, a work friend introduced me to a leadership framework that seemed to give a structure to how to live the best life. It involved thinking about your life in four buckets: Health, Family & Friends, Work, and Legacy. The idea was to be self-aware of what’s happening in all parts of your life, and to be intentional about which bucket you’re focusing on at different points, because, likely, it changes. A salient point was, if you don’t take good care of the first bucket, your own health, then how can you do anything well in any of the other three buckets?

Not too long after I heard about the four buckets, I came across another version of the same type of framework in a 2009 essay in The New Yorker titled, Laugh, Kookaburra, by David Sedaris. I remember the essay as mostly a father-son love story, with a sub-plot about making choices, using what Sedaris called The Four Burners Theory as an analogy. The theory has you imagine life as a stovetop with four burners—Health, Family, Work, and Friends. If you want to be successful, you have to turn off one of your burners. To be very successful, you have to turn off two burners. (Sedaris is credited with originating The Four Burners Theory.)

I preferred The Four Burners Theory over the four buckets leadership framework, with Friends deserving its own burner, bumping out Legacy, because friends have always been such a soul-nourishing part of my life, and I’d often felt bad that I wasn’t giving enough of myself to my friendships. Also, at that time, I didn’t see myself as a leader impactful enough to leave a legacy. I assumed that was for the big dogs, and I didn’t see myself as a big dog. But the point of the four buckets and burners frameworks was that you have to make choices and sacrifices to go after what you really want. And yet I realized that, in my quest to live my dream, I’d had unrealistic expectations for myself to keep my more-than-four burners always on. All those years, I could barely allow myself a break. I couldn’t fathom turning off any of my burners because how could I give up on any part of my big, blended dream of being a good parent and worker and wife and daughter and sister and friend, and being kind and happy, too?

As I said before, I never did find the book with all the answers, nor did any superheroes arrive to save me. I had to live it, and in living it, I came to understand some things about this universal dream of having it all, and about what I might have lost, yet also gained, along the way.

I am aware that the phrase having it all sounds cliché and evokes emotional discussions about what it means for women, and men too. The challenges in today’s society of raising children with both parents working, inside or outside the home, or of single parents juggling family and work, prompt important discussions about everything from equal pay to flexible work schedules, to access to reliable transportation and affordable, quality childcare and eldercare. I am not minimizing these challenges, nor am I attempting to offer answers to any of them in this book.

Instead, I’m offering the book I desperately wanted to read all those years ago but couldn’t find on any bookshelf. This is what sparks my heart. It is my story of striving to balance motherhood, career, and all the gloriously rich experiences life may bring. And it is the story of how I am still discovering how to fully live all of it. Although it is my story, it is also a gift to those who are experiencing doubts and struggles like the ones I have experienced. My hope is that this book may help someone realize it’s perfectly okay to ask for help—lots of help—and to gravitate toward people and places that offer flexibility and support. It might help them define what living their best life means to them and realize that in fully experiencing the perceived losses—the guilt, the sadness, the unworthiness, the broken-heartedness, the sense of being an outsider—there can be unexpected gains, opening us up to a broader and deeper spectrum of life, which one might playfully call the real huge life.

I believe we all have layers upon layers of love inside, some of them discovered and some yet to be birthed. If you’re seeking the secrets like me, find a shaded seat in the bleachers and I’ll share what I’ve learned so far in the true love stories of my huge, ordinary life.

Part One

Starting Out

Chapter 1

I Wanna Be Like Mary

It’s ironic that I’ve spent my entire career in information technology and yet I’ve consistently been a laggard at adopting the latest technology products for myself and my family. My kids like to tease me about how deprived of technology they were while growing up. They’d be among the last of their friends to get a mobile phone or a computer (and not even a personal computer, but rather a shared computer in the family room). They were stuck with the Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) game console and a couple of Madden and PS1 Crash Bash games for about ten years, until they left home for college, and by then they’d given up on any earlier desires for honing their computer gaming skills. Now, our PS2 is considered by some to be old-school cool, and my older son asked if he could have it, for the sentimental value and an occasional game of Crash Bash with childhood friends.

As I reflect on my life’s work in technology, I feel proud about sticking with it as a career all these years, yet I’m aware that I have made the choice to not delve into purchasing or fiddling with it for personal use. It’s one of many things that simply didn’t make the cut on the list of priorities (the four burners of my life) that I was incessantly running in my head. I was constantly assessing how best to prioritize my time to be the best person I could be, and being a good mother was always at the top of the list. And yet, succeeding at my career in information technology was a close second or third.

My life as a computer geek began at Boston College. It was the early 1980s, and I, like most of my fellow students at BC, did not have a personal computer (called microcomputers at the time). We did have access to Apple IIe computers, located in the basement of the library on campus. It was dark and a little spooky down there, especially late nights and weekends, when I and a few other overzealous students like me would be there to complete our computer science homework assignments.

Upon graduating from high school, I had thought I wanted to major in art or communications. However, I grew up in the 1970s watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show—about an independent thirty-something woman who loved her job and her work family—and my desire to be like Mary Richards, to be the brave one who could make it on her own, with my own apartment, tossing my hat in the air, trumped everything else.

Like many undergraduates, I really didn’t have a good sense of what I wanted to do until I was in my junior year. Aside from my calculus and computer programming classes, my other favorite classes at BC were liberal arts type classes in philosophy, faith, Spanish, and major American writers. However, I had chosen the school of management to be readily employable. I slogged through finance and marketing and statistics. I was determined to graduate with a job that enabled me to live on my own, and not have to move back in with my parents. It’s not that we didn’t get along, it’s just that I wanted so badly to begin the next phase of my life independently.

It was my LISP programming language class, during my junior year, that hooked me (the name LISP is derived from LISt Processor). Solving puzzles in a very organized manner with source code, data lists, and recursive functions (sections of code that can, with delightful efficiency, loop back and call or invoke themselves to solve the next layer of a problem) struck me as some sort of science-fiction-like superpower. Since hanging out with the cool kids in middle school and high school had eluded me, I was excited that I could actually grasp these superpower concepts and, therefore, possibly be accepted by the trailblazing, cool-in-their-own-way computer geeks. I loved it.

The LISP class was like a glass-clinking toast, meeting all my desires for a career path: I loved the work, I felt confident that it was clicking in my brain, and it provided a safety net of employability. As soon as I learned there was a strong job market with good salaries for computer science graduates, I locked in on that as my major, hopped on the geek train, and never looked back.

The missing glass-clink in my toast of dreams was a partner, a soulmate on the life journey to be with me as I pursued my career dreams. I figured that would happen in time. While I admired Mary as sort of a feminist with a huge heart, and loved that she didn’t settle for any of the men she dated on the series who weren’t quite a match for her, deep inside I had always rooted for her to find her soulmate.

I first discovered Bill the summer of 1983, while looking through the Pig Book, the informal name of the paperback freshman directory (a sort of early version of Facebook before the Internet) from the college where my friend Amy had recently graduated. I was a rising senior at Boston College, and had picked up the Pig Book while over at Amy’s apartment one evening.

I had met Amy at my summer job, where she and I were two of a number of college students hired by an insurance company to do research on the effects of asbestos exposure on long latency diseases. We wore t-shirts and shorts to work because we spent our days in a dusty, hot old warehouse on the Boston Long Wharf, climbing up step ladders, pulling down boxes, and searching through folders the old-fashioned way. Surprisingly, I had a feeling of excitement about this job. I couldn’t believe my parents had agreed to my plan of staying in Boston, renting an apartment with my college roommate, Catherine, and taking whatever summer job I could find that paid the rent and would look reasonably good on a resume. I was ready for a summer of fun, and I loved my new work friends, especially Amy. We listened to music and danced in the aisles while we worked, planning our after-work Boston adventures.

What first drew me to Bill in the Pig Book was his succinct self-description that he liked country music. Me too. I had grown up in Maryland listening to the country music radio station, and in college, I listened to Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline, over and over again. I remember buying Willie’s Red Headed Stranger and Stardust albums at the record store at the edge of the Boston College campus, at a time when buying an artist’s album felt like making a commitment. There was something about Bill’s black-and-white photo in the Pig Book that struck me as outlaw-ish, with his strong jawline and eyes that seemed both kind and rascally. I was sure he listened to Willie’s outlaw country music too.

It was a crazy coincidence that this guy I pointed to in the book just happened to be close friends with Amy’s boyfriend, Trace. Amy told me that Bill and Trace had been the only two architecture majors in their graduating class, and that they had spent their junior year studying design and living together in New York City. What? I had wanted to study art myself, and I had received encouraging feedback from my art teachers, but I had pushed those heart strings aside and pursued business and computer science instead, seeking to have a safer financial pathway toward my goal of becoming a self-sufficient career woman. When I learned Bill was pursuing architecture and moving to Boston to find work, and that Trace was going to help him get settled, it felt like this was more than pure chance. I had to meet this guy.

In the fall of my senior year of college, Amy and Trace arranged a