Twenty years
Gabe has this peculiar little habit that we adore. Upon being discovered in any particular place or circumstance (on the couch in the living room at 5:55 a.m. when I come down quietly, so as not to wake him, and am always too late, he’s already up; when he answers the phone; upon arriving home from school and throwing open the front door) he will announce: “Here I am.”
HERE I AM. A proclamation, and now, a habit. An actually helpful statement for an individual who doesn’t ever stop moving.
So confident. So self-assured.
On a recent weeknight, I was experiencing the opposite. I realized with a start, when Nora (who’d forgotten too) said, biting her lip, a sudden frown, “oooooooooohhhh, tonight was back-to-school night.”
“Oh NO,” I replied, because by then it was too late. I’d missed the annual invitation to meet her high school teachers, to sit in the classroom with other parents, laughing at the desks and then onto the next, saying rushed hellos to neighbors in the long hallways of that old building.
First things first: it’s fine. J and I, and all of us, have a lot to keep track of lately, and I’ve come a long way since I first started to fail at the game of “trying to remember everything.” I’m like, in a post-get-it-together stage of parenting. I’m in the stage where success looks like going over the schedule regularly so we aren’t constantly surprised, and when we are surprised, remaining calm.
But I love back-to-school night at the high school, and not only had I failed to put it on the calendar; I’d failed to know it was happening at all. I spiraled harder than I should have. Because it wasn’t just about feeling disorganized, or missing something I’d wanted to do. It was about the kind of schedule I’m keeping. The schedule that causes me to miss things like this.
A question came to mind: am I spending my days doing the most important things?
And it’s contrary: am I spending them doing what’s least important?
The next morning I woke up and stared at the ceiling as full minutes ticked by while I drank my coffee. Half-reclined, no reading or Worldle to start the day. Just thinking, yikes. I put my arm on J’s shoulder and I asked him a question.
“Is this what life is for?”
To his credit (perhaps because he is used to living with someone who gets suddenly philosophical in the morning, when he’s trying to read a few pages of his book before a busy day) he didn’t ask me what I was talking about, or if I was ok. He just waited.
“Is this what it’s for?” I repeated. “Is it for an endless loop of emails, and always feeling behind on tasks that don’t really matter? And never being able to find the soccer uniform in the laundry?”
Yet again to his credit, because he’s the best when it comes to calming my inappropriately sudden questions about, well, our existence on Earth, he said, calmly, “No. This is not what it’s for.”
I replied, “I KNOW IT ISN’T!”
We didn’t solve the problem just then - how could you? We simply opened the topic for discussion. I hesitate to write about exchanges like these because I worry it will sound like I am not constantly delighted, ever grateful, for my full and awesome life. Or, I don’t know, that it will sound kind of depressive? But it’s not, and I’m not. This was more like: reassessing. Like when you rearrange a room, but the canvas is your actual days.
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I came downstairs later that morning morning and Nora had absolutely butchered a tomato by cutting it with a butter knife. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told her that this isn’t a good methodology, and yet, she persists. I find the remains of massacred apples, so much flesh left on the core, the “slices” (I guess! More like odd little chunks!) placed carefully in her lunchbox. She’s so incredibly good at so incredibly much, and fails so incredibly regularly at this simple, simple task. That tomato, so sad and defeated, lying on the cutting board, she didn’t even put the leftovers away in the fridge. And yet, I was taken by it, so caught up in its very being, and in the echoes of her departure with a friend on their daily walk to school. Giggles, a shouted goodbye. This tomato, forgotten. I was beguiled, charmed even. More so than annoyed but a little of that, too.
These, lately, are the moments I want to sink into, to document. I want to pen a novella about this minor inaptitude. Is this how certain midlife crises begin?
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Is this what life is for, I’d asked J. Our mornings, coffee, quiet, before the day explodes. The only time for asking questions like these.
A week or so later I was walking with two friends I’ve known since Nora was a baby. The kind of friends where our conversations have followed and aided every stage of life since then.
That day, as our walk ended, we’re talking about our children and the way they see their own worlds. How some are satisfied after completing their to-do list of necessary tasks. They can relax easily, feel accomplished readily. How others, like Gabe, aren’t satisfied until they’ve done something “big,” something creative. A literal work of art, paint on paper, or, in Gabe’s particular case, maybe a sculpture of found-items (which were supposed to be trash) that I find on my kitchen counter, or planning a multi-country trip. Paper towel rolls attached with electrical tape to the plastic box that held the salad greens; maps marked by pushpins connected with yarn. Gabe does school and homework and, given the weeknight, soccer, too. Then he likes to ask: “What else are we doing today?” And I’m like: “What are you even talking about?”
It can be really annoying, I said. He wants this crazy-eventful life. I have to remind myself that we DO do a lot. That his high maintenance, “experience the world,” YOLO demands aren’t the norm.
And YET but WAIT, I said, barely finishing my prior sentence, recognizing something that it’s taken me almost 47 years to realize. That’s, maybe, how I am, too. Words, and big questions, bouncing around in my head. No matter what else I’ve done the day often doesn’t feel right until I put a few of them them down on paper (or more accurately, right here, where they eventually become something cohesive, or close, at least). And I suddenly felt less irked at my middle child. He’s only exploring what makes the days feel right.
You can’t exactly avoid the laundry and the endless emails and the scheduling pitfalls. Maybe what I’m looking for is a reminder that what it takes is just doing that one thing, whatever your thing is (and what is it? what is your thing?) that makes it all better. That makes it all make sense.
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For twenty years - since 2004 - I’ve been writing here, in my own space, as well as others, about the quite mundane, even when personally monumental, events that make up my, and all of our, lives. I have written about when I got married, the birth of my three children, and when my father died; about when my dog, Mina, had to start taking Lasix, when I had to go to the hospital for a panic attack and about that time I was complaining about how my clothes fit, and J told me to buy bigger pants.
But I always hesitate to call myself a “writer” (even when that was, quite literally, my job). It just seems like a stretch to claim that this exercise anything of the sort when I consider the authors of books and poetry and essays that I admire. I guess that’s a little bit of imposter syndrome, but more pragmatically, it’s not helpful when I’m trying to explain myself. This thing that I do is writing, and man, do I love it. Man, do I love sharing my experiences, and hearing about yours. This thing that I do is what my days are for.
I feel like this post has an announcement-type feel, like I’m going to tell you that this is my last one ever, or I’m moving onto something new. But no, I am only working through the understanding that I’d like to keep on at it, just like always. The same old same old, appreciated anew.
In the last of my scene changes for this particular soliloquy, just one additional moment from an annual neighborhood barbecue we attended on a Sunday afternoon a couple weeks ago. Each year, we see people we haven’t caught up with in awhile, and I was talking with one woman, a photographer, who I know from both personal and professional life. She asked, “are you still a writer?” Just like that.
And I said, the opposite of smooth, “Well, not as my regular, everyday job, and…you know how it is! But I DO still. It is my favorite thing. It is my favorite. So yes. I do. I consider myself one. A writer. Yes! Thanks for asking!”
Get the words on the page, that’s the gig. That’s the fix. Here I am.