She Bets Her Life by Mary Sojourner

Author:Mary Sojourner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

I’m sitting at my old rolltop desk on a gorgeous Mojave day. I read what I’ve written and feel nothing but nostalgia. That’s the nature of this dysfunction. The memories of hot wires under my skin and in my gut, the racing thoughts and the crash that always followed, pale against the recollection of the fun—and the way the obsession reduced life to simplicity.

I loved how uncomplicated my choices were in a casino. Eat. Don’t eat. Drink coffee. Don’t drink coffee. Go the ladies’ room. Stay in my seat. Get off Cleopatra. Go to Sun and Moon. Switch to Aztec Gold. Try fives. Try tens. Try twenties. Up my bet. Drop my bet.

I spent twenty years of my life as a working mother and the full support of three kids. My decisions had more often than not seemed a hopelessly tangled skein of threads. Single motherhood, especially on a low income, is like a game of chess for which the stakes are survival or disaster.

I rarely occupied the moment in which I was living. My mind was always five steps behind the game plan. If the check comes, I’ll buy groceries first, then pay the rent, then electricity ... if the check doesn’t come, I’ll have to figure out where to get money for tonight’s and tomorrow’s food ... if my daughter’s sore throat gets worse, I’ll have to take her to the clinic and cancel my afternoon appointments ... if she’s better, I need to get her to soccer practice between my last appointment and buying food for dinner, if the check comes....

What’s more, I was a woman gratefully immersed in early second-wave feminism, learning assertiveness, challenging old gender conditioning, pushing through terror to make changes in my perceptions and behaviors. I was a therapist and mental health trainer. Change was my mantra. I was coming to crossroads all the time, questioning my every reaction and impulse, thinking about which way to go. My generation of powerful women invented multitasking—in both our external and our internal lives.

I can’t remember more than a few moments of feeling relaxed in two decades of being a working mom. My brain was on overdrive from the second I woke till the second my body fell asleep. So I have an immediate response when people have asked me why, if I loved gambling so much, I didn’t just learn to count cards and play blackjack. I have (ask any of my lovers) a piranha memory. My brain gobbles up everything and retains it. I knew card players who earned their livings from careful observation, impeccable information storage, and judicious play. I couldn’t imagine anything more tedious.

“You’re kidding,” I’d reply to my financial advisers, “that would be a job. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to communicate. I just want to be surprised. And I want to be left alone!”

I knew full well even then that the casino marketing departments had captured my brain, a brain that was susceptible to external control, a brain that once triggered was almost completely out of control.

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