Tag: career

Career, Relationships

Day Anew

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So many sweet successes, each alone more than enough.

Today, a group of emerging higher ed superstars wrapped up our yearlong Leadership Legacy program. Before the university president’s speech, before certificates and applause and cake, participants shared the ideas for change we’d launched into existence. It thrilled me to describe an alumni mentor initiative that’s now charging forward, with current PhD students paired with graduates. This program aims to retain and support the success of underrepresented students (first-generation and students of color) by offering a connection with graduates from similar backgrounds.

Continue reading “Day Anew” →

Brain, Change, Creativity

Becoming Who

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creaturehood

As I shift, so does my son.  I invite him to “special time,” a goofy name for a powerful connection, and he first rolls his eyes. “I’m not doing that.”  The idea of playing just with me for 30 minutes is near the bottom of his list.

“You get to be in charge,” I explain.  “It just has to be between here and the park.”  Also, no screens, and no one’s hurting anyone else.  Other than that, we can do anything he wants.

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Can I throw pillows at you?”  His eyes have stopped rolling and now they’re fixed on me.

“Sure, as long as you’re not hurting me.”

“Can we go outside and play a tag game?”

I laugh “Of course.”  Tag is the one thing that I almost always resist when he suggests it.  Chase  my son endlessly around the neighborhood?   I’d rather stay in and clean hair out of the bathtub drain.  As it turns out, it’s not tag or pillows.  “Pirate ship!” he shouts, and runs into the living room to start moving furniture.  We pull out the ladder for scaffolding, king-sized sheets for the mast.  Bug creates turrets using plastic wine goblets.  He also creates something called a “maker” which is a kind of on-deck factory that turns raw materials into weapons.

If someone asked me to describe my son with naked honesty, I might say obstinate, aggressive, bright and powerful.  Curious but easily frustrated.  Sometimes cold and snubs emotional connection.  The boy hates to lose.  He’s an Eeyore on steroids.

If that same someone were to walk into our house during our first shot at Special Time, they’d see an entirely different boy.  Here is a child who is eager and spunky.  He’s creating an elaborate game with unclear structure, and he’s persevering with enthusiasm.  As he turns the form of Minecraft into a real-life activity, he’s engaging me in fizzy conversation.  He’s cracking jokes.

The visitor in our house would meet a boy who is close to his mom, sharing and cooperating, confident enough to be fine with uncertainty.  Here is a Piglet who is ready for anything.

So which boy is he?

We like to think of personality as fixed.  That person in our life is a certain set of characteristics:  maybe kind, a little introverted has good follow-through on commitments but fumbles in front of crowds. This is the person we know, and because we know she’s this way, we have a sense of predictability in our friendship, workplace, or marriage.  If people are changeable, how could we function in our roles?

Indeed, we haven’t needed to ask this question much because most of the common (if mistaken) personality theory that dominates our lives reinforces the notion of consistency.  It’s how we end up with ENFJs in workplace training with ISTPs, figuring out how to cooperate on a team.  Nevertheless, as anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) knows, the test has its flaws.  A question comes up:  “As a rule, you proceed only when you have a clear and detailed plan.”  The test-taker then has to think, In a project meeting with my co-worker?  When coaching my kid’s basketball team?  Cleaning my closets?   Working out at the gym?

Which rule for “as a rule”?  The trainer is little help.  She’ll say, “pick one area of your life and stick with that.”  This test is supposed to map a person’s defining characteristics yet allows the random selection of context and perspective?  A little skepticism is fitting.

The fact that organizational leadership and development professionals still rely heavily on the MBTI is not confirmation of its reliability.  Indeed, there is no replicable research to back it up, and the science is flimsy at best.  The lack of connection to any empirical evidence about “personality type” should gut its foundation and release its hold on us.

“What concerns me is the cultlike devotion of many consultants and practitioners to it without the examination of the evidence,” says Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

– Lillian Cunningham, “Myers-Briggs: Does it Pay to Know your Type?” in The Washington Post, December 14, 2012.

Corporate training is a $50 billion a year industry.  Its influence is one reason we still believe so firmly in fixed personality traits.  Another is based in the theory that we simply see what we want to see, that we seek out examples of certain traits and fix them to people.  Personality, then, is an illusion.

Yet another curious idea is that personality, while unfixed and changeable overall, is consistent in a particular context.

Lee Ross, a psychologist at Stanford University, has another intriguing idea. . . He thinks we actually are seeing consistency in human behavior, but we’re getting the reason for it wrong. “We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation,” he says.  Most of us are usually living in situations that are pretty much the same from day to day, Ross says. And since the circumstances are consistent, our behavior is, too.”

– Alix Spiegel, “Is Your Personality Fixed, Or Can You Change Who You Are?” from Invisibilia on NPR.

Every so often, I look up exes to see where they’ve wandered.  It’s a rare indulgence — rare enough that when I find them again, they have crossed oceans of life.  One fellow was all braggadocio masking incompetence and sloth.  He was stuck in debt and working a customer-service job he hated.  Now runs his own business.  His company lead tours in the mountains and edu-tains high school groups in the nation’s capital.  The contrast is startling.  It’s a marvel that he’s so completely not who I thought he was. . . or rather, that the man he was at that time and place was only one slice of a much larger, evolving person.

Traits may not be as inherent as we assume.  Change the context, and the person himself can change.

If I want to become someone different (as indeed I do, with regard to how I approach my career and family), it’s not going to work for me to do so in the current stage-set of my life.  If an environment rewards mediocrity, how can a person develop drive?

Shifting the situation invites a reworking of the self.

Taking on a project in a volunteer setting, or stepping into a leadership role in the kiddo’s school, or diving into HOA budget management, or committing to a regular childcare exchange with other parents in the community. . . these are just a few of the ways to “become” someone different.  A new role in a new context allows for the cultivation of qualities not yet fully formed in the familiar self.

My son and I are not “who we are,” despite the inane it is what it is trope that comforts our dissonance and excuses our inertia.  If we aim to invite a fuller version of ourselves, then we must change what we do, and where, and when, and how.

 Image:  Micah Bazant from the Trans Life & Liberation Art Series

 

 

Career

Fight, Flight, Freak

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One of my coworkers just told me I should go somewhere to hide. Security has been called.

I ducked into my office. Now here I sit, perched on the quiet, stiff chair (not the squeaky roller one) under doused lights behind a locked the door. On my credenza under two years of accumulated, unfiled papers is the list of steps for how to respond to a campus active shooter.

Someone is looking for me. Not the general Director-me, but the specific Name-me.

She’s unarmed (they think) but how would we know?

Digging through papers makes noise. The active shooter list stays buried. I remember it says we’re supposed to silence our phones. Keep the room dark. Tapping on a computer keyboard makes noise, so don’t be tempted.

Deep breathing makes noise too, I now discover.

A heartbeat is deafening.

They told me we need to make her think I’m not here.

If only I wasn’t.

This piece would make great fiction.

If only it were.

Sometime when the threat has passed and my pulse slows, I’ll write about what it’s like to be a student advisor in the age of VA Tech and the Oregon community college. I’ll describe the trainings we receive, the offices we have to call, the way skittish professors will invoke feeling “threatened” by emotional students, and the chilling consequences such a claim can have. I’ll explain how, just when you decide it’s all a little too much paranoia, a student walks into a law school class right next door and attacks an instructor with a box cutter.

Someday I’ll write that. Another day when my keyboard’s noise is no longer a danger.

This is not supposed to be the trenches. But I sit here in paralyzed silence hearing only the throb of my own blood against my skull as it primes me for attack. I know, of course, that this is the real gritty world as much as the busy street 5 stories below. All of my community is here. All the financial stressors, the diminishing mental health support, the demands for excellence in a context of dwindling resources, and the social isolation that plagues every overcrowded city. It’s all here, inside this not-so-ivory tower. The students carry enormous burdens. Which means we do too. This is the trenches after all.

I hunker down wait for someone to come for me, to tell me it’s safe now.

If only.

Career, Mindfulness

Leap Frog

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leapfrog
The Provost’s office announced it is offering up to half million dollars to a lucky PhD program at our university. My team received the news with a collective wave of nausea. Great prize, slim odds. A seventeen page proposal would be due in less than a month.

We’ve hacked through the dense foliage of earlier iterations of the RFP for three years running, and the only thing to show for our noble effort has been “great language we can use elsewhere.”

We accept the challenge this fourth time. Despite unfilled positions, anemic staff, maternity leave, and faculty stretched to breaking (or maybe because of all these things), we have to try. We tell each other to phone it in because other programs always win anyway. We say it knowing the idea is absurd, knowing we will give it our all. Because this is us, an earnest clutch of A+ students.

Also, $475,000.

My first impulse is approach-avoid this the way I do so many other tasks I despise: evade, excuse, put off, then CRAM. My rather irritating Better Self reminds me that as appealing as procrastination is, a more effective tactic might be to eat the frog. So I carve out half a day from my overtaxed schedule, shove everything else to the side, and start working.

A few hours in, I realize something marvelous.

This is a blast!

How lucky can a girl-writer get? The boss decrees that I ignore all my other business and spend my workday drafting and reworking a writing project — one whose goal is to land cash for my students. It’s a pain in the ass but it’s total flow. Challenge, creativity, reaching past my abilities to generate something meaningful. It’s a test.

A game.

So I play.

Only when I look up at the clock, close out, and plunge back into my burgeoning to-do list does the sickening stink of workplace misery engulf me.

And right there as I descend into the morass, I understand the mistake of my perception.

It’s not the task that sucks.

It’s all the tasks.

It’s the clutter, the questions with their missing answers, the half-complete puzzles waiting for someone else’s missing piece.

The desk-turned-junk drawer.

The “Do you have a quick minute?”

It’s the persistent drumbeat of financial crisis, and the knowledge that piles are growing while help is shrinking.

The hissing awareness that the only way out of a slow but steady downhill career grade is to eject from the vehicle and get behind the wheel of something else going somewhere else.

It’s the anxiety.

I carry the burden of all the tasks all the time, keeping myself frantically aware of everything un-done even while in the midst of doing. The irony? Evidence suggests this is a totally pointless expenditure of effort. All the things I set aside while tackling the Provost Award waited patiently enough. When my attention returned to those tasks, I took care of them just fine.

The world continued to turn. I continued to do my work.

As for the Provost Award? We wrote a fabulous proposal.

Our jobs are tangled up with so much of who we are. Work is values and perceptions. Work is what we believe to be real, and it holds so many of our wishes for ourselves, our families, the world. How is our performance? Are we making a contribution that matters? Can we afford the mortgage or will we find ourselves sick, broke, and homeless? Is there any joy in the work? Are we filling gaps and creating new paths?

Our livelihood is means and end simultaneously, existing in a thicket of uncertainty. Does protecting time for our families threaten our ability to support our families? Are we making a positive impact or making enemies? During the day-to-day minutiae, can we tell if our chosen methods are effective? How, under so much pressure, do we learn to do things differently?

Anxiety grabs all these drifting questions and presses them into one dense, throbbing, mass. What if I’m not good enough? What if I can’t cut it? These __________ (vague but terrible) things will happen to my family and me if I fail.

I can see the bold edges now of the lines that hitch anxiety to controlling behavior. It’s a comforting illusion. If I can clean up this mess or present this shiny object as an example of my capabilities or get this person to fall in line with my clearly superior M.O., then the giant black hole of chaos seems a little less threatening. The world feels safe (for the moment).

The problem, of course, is that this constant vigilance about every possible danger fails to keep that danger at bay. It also makes for a wretched existence, and it turns a person into rather miserable company for everyone in (her) orbit.

Life IS uncertainty and chaos. We know this. I know this.

Every so often, like when an award application turns a bright light on the flaws in my perception, I remember again that only one thing matters: This thing right here.

Like paragraph 3 of the Provost Award. Or composing this outline of a presentation. Or winding my way through one maze of inquiries that leads me to an answer a student needs.

Or sitting in the other room petting the dog while my son turns the kitchen inside-out so he can make his own eggs for dinner.

Or holding still the slack thread between my love and me.

Because I know the reel in my hands is a stage prop, and the only way to capture the shape of my longing is to let go.

When I keep such painstaking track of all things that need doing, and catalog all the possible disastrous outcomes if they are bungled or forgotten, then every single moment of my life is toil. Carrying around all that responsibility means that my feet are too heavy for skipping, my neck to bent for lifting, my eyes too fogged for seeing the wash of morning light on the willow branch across from the bus stop.

The only control I have is to give my full attention to what’s unfolding right here, engaging it as it is and freeing it from all the hooks of what it might cause or become. When I am here, I can do a much better job assessing what is effective. I can sense what brings value to my life and to the lives of the folks around me. When I see how we are faring right here, right now, I can choose my next move.

Keeping my head in the game means admitting it’s only a game.

Choosing a play.

And then leaping in.
 

Career, Determination, Learning, Things I Can

100. Things I Can Captain: This Boat, These Waters

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mother child at sea

It’s taken two years to get here. I’ve skirted the edges of this reckoning so long I know every stitch in its hem. Now I sit in front of a screen, a calculator, and a pile of paperwork to ask the question straight out.

Can we make it on my salary?

I asked the same question back in 2012 when the house hunt began. The answer was a definitive “no.” Buying this home was a hard push into a choppy sea. I did the full assessment then and knew that my income would fall short. To cover our expenses over the long haul, I’d need to earn more. Continue reading “100. Things I Can Captain: This Boat, These Waters” →

Home, Mindfulness, Things I Can

94. Things I Can Whisper: Become, Surrender

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I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am.

– From The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

 
 

Career, Change, Choices

81. Things I Can Celebrate: Five Years

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Anniversary Bed

August 23, 2010: first day on the job. This was another shift in the surge between a tidal wave of beginnings and a fierce undertow of endings. Landing a position at a university — one that had deigned to give me a graduate degree before I took off on a fateful, cross-country marriage odyssey — meant more than compelling work with college students. It meant benefits and a way to rebuild a gutted financial base. At a time when the best I dared hope for was chalk dust, this was gold.

So many things whirled and roiled to push me onto the metro that morning in August. Selling everything, leaving a home in the mountains, separation and divorce, going back to work, single parenthood. . . Every stroke felt like the last one I could possibly take. Then I took another, just as grueling. And another.

I wish I could tell my sisters that the other side of divorce is less of a slog. Isn’t that the line? “It gets easier.” Much like what my boss has been telling me every time the pace picks up at work. “Things will slow down soon.”

Five years, they still only ramp up.
Five years, single motherhood is still a steep ascent.

That said, the frantic anxiety about how to make it all work has quieted. When I press the gas on my work week each Monday morning, my mind leaves much of the domestic uncertainty behind. Eventually, my boy and I did manage to buy a home. We know our neighbors. He is rocking the classroom at school. We have a rhythm to our days, plenty of eggs and veggies in the fridge, a little cash in the college fund, a little more in the 401K. Within the few realms we control, we are doing as well as we can. Truthfully, we are faring far better than I ever imagined.

This relative peace at home allows for full presence at the office. I have attention to tackle the new set of pressures and commitments that greets me each Monday. Change keeps churning, wicked as whitewater. Like many universities, mine is trying to grow its influence under suffocating pressure to shrink its operating budget. Resourcefulness is as important as a bold voice; careful consideration as necessary as high-octane exertion. Most critical of all lately? Blind faith in the germination of sloppily but copiously scattered seeds.

I nourish and water. I pray to an absent god.

At this milestone, I can see and even feel what has broken the surface. Sturdy roots, infant limbs. Promotions and raises, geographic flexibility, new projects. People making decisions include me in conversations about the direction of our school.

All of this has meant growing up hard and fast. Five years is really just a blink. I understand now that maturity — at least “maturity” as it takes shape here at the 40+ year chapter in the story — involves going after more and more of the hardest stuff even when presented with the option to coast. This is a tough lesson to learn and a tougher habit to establish, especially when the young adult tendency is to dabble and blame, to shift responsibility and do a good-enough job. To hold out vague hope for something better down the line.

Growing up means understanding that “down the line” is stamped on the ticket I already bought and the miles I’ve already covered. My choices on Monday morning, on every morning, forge my destination.

I am learning to take on creative and difficult tasks that I’ve long assumed were the domain of people with talents and capacities entirely different from mine. I would sooner imagine myself capable of learning Mandarin than write computer code or keep tabs on a several million dollar research budget. But here I am.

This all comes at a cost, though, and it is a cost I still struggle with accepting. My days increasingly belong to tasks I would rather leave to someone else. The work I most love is crammed into the spaces between. My body is weary, my mind is sapped, and my sense of pleasure in just about everything is so far beyond reach it may as well be dandelion fluff in the last gust of summer.

So I celebrate in the least celebratory way imaginable.

I sleep.

This one weekend on the 5-year anniversary of life catapulting me into a foreign land, I finally let myself rest. Two nights ago, I clocked a solid eight hours. Yesterday, I took two naps. Last night, I managed 10-1/2 hours, and today, another nap. I dream long and luscious stories about dusty road trips and strange mountain men in dapper white suits. I wake up exhausted, walk the dog, and go back to sleep.

Tomorrow is Monday morning and I head back to the office. I’m excited to kick off the next half of this decade refreshed and restored. If the first half has taught me anything, I’ll need all the fuel I can get.

Choices, community, Things I Can

78. Things I Can Wear: This Garment of Ours

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While work hours declined dramatically during the first half of the twentieth century, thanks to higher wages, economic growth, trade unions, and progressive legislation, they have increased during the last three decades. Americans now work an average of one extra month per year than they did in 1980, and single mothers work an extra six weeks. Employees often work overtime and outside their job descriptions for fear of losing their jobs if they refuse. Cutbacks and downsizing have further increased workloads, making it all the more necessary to operate at the top of one’s game all day long, without any lapses. Fear of what one night of lost sleep could do to one’s appearance and performance the next day has become a common concern.

– Kat Duff in The Secret Life of Sleep

We know it is zip code and native tongue, it is the body that houses the name. It is a solid school building and a safe walk there. It is scouts and sports and skate parks and dance troupes with coaches as supplemental mentors. It is a small stack of cards: library and HMO, towing and voting, ID and credit. It is the transcript and the stamp of the alma mater, and the names of the friends collected in those four years. It is the legs and the shoes at the bottom of them, it is a specialist with attention enough to notice the gap and intervene early, it is refrigeration, it is screened windows, it is the magnetic attraction of luck to fortune already acquired. It is all of this as water to a clownfish.  Continue reading “78. Things I Can Wear: This Garment of Ours” →

Career, Determination, Things I Can

74. Things I Can Backstop: On-the-Job Training

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I think breakthroughs come from putting an inordinate amount of pressure on yourself and seeing what you can take, and hoping that you grow some new muscles. It’s not really that mystical.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic Monthly
 
 
When my two star students poked their heads in my door four years ago, I bit back the “no.” Their half-apology for just a few minutes had a red flag flapping over it. They wanted something big. Bigger than anything in my job description.

“A graduate student research conference,” they said. “Students run it. Students present. Faculty moderate the panels.”

Students? Faculty? I wouldn’t trust them with a bake sale. Please. Leave the administering to the administrators.

But I turned from my other work. “Come on in,” I said. “Tell me more.”

So they did. They talked about networking and research collaborations, about presentation practice and scholarly community.

I pictured catering orders and room setup, abstract review and program tracks.

The students wanted practical experience in more than just presenting research. This was the toughest part. I could get us from zero to showtime in a snap. Add the task to my list and make it happen. Anyone who manages programs and people knows that an event is an event is an event. Steering committee, marketing, budgets, presenters, tech and space. Hire a wage assistant to make calls and print name badges.

Whatever the substance of the work — in this case, graduate student advising, but it could be affordable housing advocacy or the international association of clown car manufacturers — a thousand details large and small keep the machine chugging (sometimes hacking) along. People like me pull those levers.

People like my students? They get to do cool research and write about it.

In truth, my students’ brains intimidate me a little. These folks are digging into some of the most pressing topics facing our world. Poverty, climate change, security, infrastructure, health care. They conduct research that shapes policies and legislation. As for me? Inside the university, my role is to clear paths. If I can help students through the briar patch of public higher ed bureaucracy with their skin intact, they can get on with their research.

But those two students knew better. Doctoral grads today are stepping off the stage into a 2015 world, and it’s far from Kansas or 1975. The protected academic research-and-teach career has died on the vine. Folks with PhDs today are expected to know how to do things. Like lead people and projects, like find and manage money.

Like organize conferences.

Those two students wanted to do more than show up and present ideas. They wanted to make the thing happen.

We began.

Like parenting, mentoring is agony. Every stage, every step, takes twice as long and breeds three times as many mistakes. A mentor has to will herself to sit back and let meetings unfold through hours of jumbled conversation that could easily find resolution with a few simple facilitation tricks. A mentor must step with care through one-on-one conversations to offer opportunities for reflection. Mentoring requires pointing people in the direction of resources and contacts, and letting them seek out the tools they need. Like a parent, a mentor must stand at attention behind the curtain, poised to pull the nose up if the machine takes a dive.

I did my part so they could do theirs. The students ran that first conference, and they were giddy with pride. Emerging scholars traveled from around the region and country, and the event exceeded every one of its aspirations.

Then next year, two new students showed up at my office.

And the next.

Every year for four years, I bit back the “no.” I fought through weariness and overcame painful resistance to the colossal undertaking that has yet to appear on my job description. Every year for four years, I faced a fresh opportunity to hone my mentoring skills.

Every year for four years, I sat in on panel discussion and listened as new scholars shared research and ideas on everything from labor policy to gender violence. I watched my students shine as they handed out awards and tallied the number of attendees.

The conference grew. A major TV news personality gave a keynote. A student joined us from Japan. The organizers got hold of funding from other parts of the university. They joined forces with a larger student organization to pool talent and resources. Last year, they reached out to a major international policy association to find out about partnering on the conference. The association sent a representative to spend the day shaking hands and taking measure.

Then the big national association decides they want in.

And the world bucks under my students’ feet.

Four weeks ago.

They show up at my door.

“Help,” they say. “What does this letter mean?”

A fait accompli. The national association lays out a plan for a regional graduate student conference. It will be a consortium event with nine participating schools.

I read and re-read the letter. The phrase hostile takeover hisses through my brain. I look at their baffled faces. I look at the 472 other items in my inbox that are far more pressing than this.

I bite back the “no.”

I turn from my other work. “Come on in,” I say. “Let’s sit down.”

We do. I take a breath, rub my face, then begin.

“Okay,” I say. “What matters most?” I apply facilitation and advising techniques. I guide them through their complex and understandably histrionic responses. I help them hatch a plan of action. I sift around in myself for some kind of map, knowing that from my perch behind the curtain, what matters most is reflective practice. These students have before them a chance to manage conflict and lead change with strategic and effective dexterity.

I have before me a chance to help my students learn how to pull the levers. And how hard. And which way.

In the four weeks between that letter and the association’s big conference call, the students come by. They poke their heads in. Individually. Pairs and trios. They hover around the door. They want more.

I don’t have time for this crap. We’ve talked, we only know what we know, we’ll deal with it on the day of the call. I bite so hard against the “no” that I nearly split my tongue.

“Come on in,” I say. “What do you need?”

An ear, a sounding board, an easy out?

A firm grip? A soft word?

A hand?

“Enter that call like you’re sitting at the head of the table,” I say.

“Do your research,” I say. “How can you find the budget and planning models for the other two regional conferences?”

“What matters most to you?” I say.

“Write it down,” I say.

The day of the call, four of them come. We take over a room. They take over the call. The nine other people on it — faculty and administrators from both the national association and seven regional universities — wake right up when these students chime in. With force I’ve never heard in those emerging voices, the students lean in and articulate a clear vision. They name their questions as opportunities.

I sit back and watch it unfold.

The students have swagger and expertise. Halfway in, the faculty and administrators are directing all inquiries to them.

Somehow, the students claim every part of the shiny new regional conference they’d chosen to keep, and delegate every part of it they’d chosen to surrender.

At the end of the hour, folks on the call begin talking RFPs and laying out a timeline. One of the students interrupts. “I want to say how important it is to have students involved in the planning.”

Isn’t this a given? Apparently not. The nine other people on the call marvel and fumble.

“You mean on the steering committee?” someone asks.

“Sure,” I say.

“So, you mean students will be the ones voting on things? Actually planning everything?”

“Yes,” I say. I glance around the table. Four students are rolling their eyes and suppressing giggles.

“You feel comfortable leaving budget decisions in the hands of students?”

To my left, one shoves an invisible gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Everyone else chokes back laughter.

“Look,” I say, leaning into speaker. “Students have built this thing and led this thing for four years on their own. All I’ve done is sign the forms. They are responsible and capable. I trust them completely.”

Silence on the phone. Beaming faces around the table. I take the advantage. “The thing is, our students need this experience. Academics, professionals, whatever they do after they leave school. This conference is supposed to be a learning experience. I figure, let them learn all of it.”

What I really want to say is Dude. People rise to the expectations you hold out for them. How high are you willing to go?

The grudging decision is to let each school figure out for itself who will represent it on the conference planning committee. We all know who will sit at the head of the table here.

And because no one is going to ask me, I can give my “no” a rest.

But only for a minute.

Because it’s clear that word is missing from my job description.
 

Choices, Things I Can

38. Things I Can Entwine: Tendril, Light

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This time in 2014, our faculty voted to merge with another university department. So began the Year of Pain. We forced ourselves together, cracking open cultures, grafting extremities onto an unformed core.

The fertilization plucked a thread in me. A quickening pulse, a sudden expansion (which, from another angle, is simply an unraveling).

Into that opening bloomed one opportunity after another. Phototropic absent intention, each one reached towards fervor and fed on indiscriminate impulse.

I invited them all in.

When someone needed to design and lead a graduate policy writing seminar, I drafted a syllabus.

When someone needed to mentor two doctoral TAs in teaching practice, I took them on.

When someone needed to contribute an academic affairs article for the October issue, I  sharpened my pencil.

When someone needed to present at the conference, I submitted the proposal.

When someone needed to teach a semester-long course in pedagogy to visiting Chinese professors, I rearranged my fall schedule.

When someone needed to administer a dean search, I opened the hood.

When someone needed to support all the students from two additional PhD programs because mergers mean more, I signed the job description.

Twelve months. All of this in one cycle around the sun.

This week, my supervisor handed me a piece of paper. A note. A pay increase. She also copied me on the discussion of which office I’ll be using when I work half of each week from the campus that is 12 minutes from my house rather than 45.

With all of this dizzying good news, you’d think when they let us out at 2:00pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend, I’d skip off to happy hour with friends.

Instead, I sag against my kitchen counter and burst into tears.

So weary. My everything — spinning head and sleep-starved body and stretched-thin days with my boy — all of it worn out. Yes, shorter commute, larger paycheck. Also yes, more learning, more pivoting, more work, more life.

More life indeed.

My only life.

I push off from the counter and throw back a glass of cold water. All that need is still gunning for me on the other side of the door. Its knock is insistent. No, it will not come in. I walk from the kitchen and turn Blues BBQ up loud enough to drown out the drumbeat of 40 years of mistakes.

And one year of overcorrecting. One Year of Pain.

I fit the battery into the drill and open holes in the bottoms of half a dozen plastic containers.

Then I step onto the balcony and plunge my hands into the soil.

The sage seedlings have started to unfurl, as have tiny pops of mint. The dill fans its lace as the sky moves. I lift them all into larger pots, deadhead the geraniums, pull feathery spiderwebs from cilantro already gone to seed.

Everything leans in one direction. The sun, such a piper. I rotate buckets and wedge the smaller ones in up front. The spinach is almost too leafy now and will need to go either into a larger pot or into my breakfast. As I water the hanging boxes, the clean scent of lemon verbena wraps itself around the Thai basil’s purple spines.

The lavender is the only seed that hasn’t taken. A mold furs black soil in two tiny pudding cups.That flower decided against trying in a climate too alien.

Maybe it lacked the strength to emerge from a wish for its remembered home.

The snow peas and sugar snaps are lush now, their tresses spilling over the concrete lip of the balcony. I bend and tear the creepers from one another as gently as I can. I wind them around the railing and hope the wind leaves them be.

What must they make of this strange place, up so far from the earth? Do they know this is it?

Do they understand that from here, they grow?

From here, and nowhere else?