Tag: career

Career, Things I Can

22. Things I Can Glimpse: The Cathedral

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To be deep in the overwhelm requires not just doing too many things in one 24-hour period but doing so many different kinds of things that they all blend into each other and a day has no sense of distinct phases. Researchers call it “contaminated time.”

– Hanna Rosin, “You’re Not as Busy as you Say you Are” at Slate.com

I click send on a project that’s consumed most of the morning. Before a sense of pride dares peek up out of the foxhole, another directive slams down from above. In an email, a whole group of colleagues receives word that I will provide them with a collection of updated materials by Monday. I’ve been copied in on this but not otherwise warned. At least seven major deadlines are breathing down my neck, and they all come between now and the start of next week.

Aside from those concrete projects, the inbox is spilling over, three people are waiting for replies to pressing questions, and a series of delicate emails is in the queue. These will undoubtedly trigger frustrated comments and several more rounds of correspondence.

Numb to every bit of it, the only approach is to keep moving. I open the folders and start to plow through the documents.

Then I stop.

What happened to what I just finished? All that work, and that’s it?

Click, then gallop on?

We rush from one demand to the next, never giving ourselves time to pause when one task is complete. Many of us don’t celebrate our significant achievements, let alone our everyday ones. We may mark milestones when large public hoorays are called for — retirement party, anyone? — but in our headlong race forever forward, we fail to keep our eyes open for smaller signposts of success.Hell, this year my birthday came and went all but unacknowledged. It stings if I think about it, but who has time for thinking?

So this time, I stop. Only for a moment, I turn and walk over to my office window. The one small project I completed this morning took quite a bit of creative effort. It was, in fact, a noteworthy application of skills I’ve grown over 4-1/2 years at this job. A small smile warms me. I whisper to my quiet self that I just whipped out a bit of handiwork I couldn’t have conceived of in 2010. That is really something.

Across the hazy March sky and the greening city below, my gaze dips and lifts. The National Cathedral stands on the horizon as it always does. The scaffolding is off the towers. The branches of its neighboring trees are still bare. A little light scratches across the rooftops and then disappears.

Just one small slice of pride.

This is my gift. Overdue, but so very welcome.

Career, Learning, Things I Can

9. Things I Can Forgo: Lunch

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Lunch is an hour. And it’s a break.

Sacred cows no more.

Lunch hour goes.

(Not the food part. I’m too fond of my fuel.)

—

Today the forecast was 47 degrees and wet. I trotted off to work in a thin sheath of a raincoat. At 5:30, I stepped out into wind that cut like knives. My neck shrieked. The puddles had turned to ice. Each dark step to the metro scoured my skin.

During the intervening 8-1/2 hours walled in by steel and focus, temperatures plummeted and dragged the sky down with them. I had no idea. Despite a window that can carry my gaze to where the National Cathedral rises on the hill, I didn’t see the dimming light. Despite a city outside my door where I can walk for miles through parks and neighborhoods, I didn’t feel the creeping frost.

This ignorance is the price of determination.

I shouldn’t be proud of giving up my lunch hour. An earlier me would have tsk-tsked today’s me for misplacing priorities and neglecting health. For the four years I’ve held this job, lunch hour meant walking, no matter the weather. My credenza drawer hides an iPod, running clothes, both sunhat and umbrella, both towel and soap (you never know). These feet memorized miles of concrete. Co-workers praised my dedication to fitness.

Truth is, lunch hour walks were my secret recipe for sanity.

All that walking was a way of holding on to my center while the world rushed and tilted around me. It’s easier to sprint across the wire, especially if you don’t look down. First was our imploding family and livelihood, then moving here, then divorce, then working and all that comes with doing that as a single mom trying to establish a home and a way forward. A leaden fear of financial and familial ruin saturated every moment. So I kept moving, walking, and peering anywhere but right here.

Meanwhile, something changed. Like that weather rolling in when I was facing the other way, the very world shifted into a new alignment.

The daily work — the professional this-and-that of making ends meet — began to propagate. Seeds I didn’t know had been germinating started to push through the surface.

Lunch hour used to be for air and breath and body. It was a standing date with my very own self.

Now lunch hour is for asking the next question.

(Which question, you ask? That one. The one dancing just out of reach. The one that barely has a shape yet.)

An opportunity emerged during a team meeting. My department needed someone to teach. I resisted until my Mister reminded me that I do, in fact, have most of what it takes and the resourcefulness to go find the stuff I don’t. So I agreed to it, and it ate up all my time, and I was exhausted, and the extra pay didn’t even begin to cover the hours committed.

I loved it, loved the exchange of ideas, loved making it up as we went.

Before the final class, an opportunity popped up on my voicemail. This one was even more impossible than the last. In a windowless classroom with a sputtering overhead projector — the kind that uses actual transparencies — someone had to guide the learning of 27 visiting faculty who could barely speak English.

With guidance from the dear ones, I agreed to it, and it ate up all my time, and I was exhausted, and the extra pay didn’t even begin to cover the hours committed.

I loved it, loved the students, loved the tangled and unmapped journey.

Before the final class, another opportunity strolled into my office. This was a role supporting our school’s search for a new dean. It would be a politically delicate, thankless, administrative nightmare on an accelerated timeline. I considered it, negotiating right up front with the school leadership while doing so.

I took it, or rather, it took me: It eats up all my time, and I’m exhausted, and the extra pay doesn’t even begin to cover the hours committed.

And I love it, insanity and all.

Something is growing here.

Maybe it’s just a calcification of the soul-jarring careerism that infects the Washington DC region. Maybe I’m turning into yet another stressed and stretched professional Director of (Insert Abstract Administrative Jargon Here) who’s just wearing the same grooves a little deeper into the city sidewalks.

Or maybe it’s the Powers That Be taking advantage of a semi-competent masochist with something to prove.

Secretly, though, I think it’s something else.

Whatever it is, it’s growing right here, in the place this woman inhabits.

Despite all my foolishness and self-inflicted handicaps, novel ways emerge to apply the skills I’ve been accumulating. Even though the tough spots make my head throb and my heart race, it’s thrilling to come upon a problem I simply cannot solve, yet I must solve it, and I somehow know I will solve it, even if it comes to jury-rigging a fix.

Every time I figure out some new mix of tools and techniques, new places to apply them appear. The marvel of this chapter in my too-much-of-a-life is that I keep bumbling into the outer limit of my talents and capabilities, only to find that it’s a membrane and I can push right through.

For the first time in years, I have more in my sights than just getting through the day upright.

Now I want to know what these hands can really do.

Lunch hour is a standing date with possibility.

Lunch hour is one more wide-open chance to ask the next question.

(What are the Things I Can?)

Where the unknown is unnamed, give it voice.

Where answers are missing, reach.

 

Love, Relationships

Raise the Roof

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Be in it. Don’t overthink it. Savor the moment. Ride the wave.
 
All make perfect sense. We build together the shape of what we are becoming, like a barn-raising for two. I stagger a little under the rightness of right now. It is no small thing to meander through streets and chores and frost and night with a person who sees what you don’t and is thrilled to taste what he hasn’t before.
 
Kira the Fabulous says in Traveling Light,

You realize that they are choosing to show up in your life every day and create a relationship with you. That, my amazing friends, is the most incredible gift we can give another person. That shit is beautiful.

Then the stagger becomes a stumble. Because I am a mom with a bright and crackling boy and a shiny new mortgage. I scale a heap of bills only to look down on a career that might have plateaued. In a far-off canyon, I hear echoes of a story itching to be written. I haul my strong and aging body forward through this unexpected civilization. I find myself in a neighborhood with family and friends and an HOA in the village square begging for a new Communications Coordinator.
 
How does love fit into all this?
 
I crack my teeth on the stone in the middle of Kira’s admonition. “. . . create a relationship with you.”
 
Create?
 
What is this structure we are building?
 
Because it’s good every day with my Mister. Even when it’s hard, it’s good. Yet I still don’t know if I’ve taken enough responsibility for my own life to really draft a vision of a future and commit myself to the path. I spent so many years floating through things and just “riding the wave” that when I washed up on dry land, I found I was far from any chosen shore.
 
I am caught between competing imperatives. How does welcoming the rightness of what is here relate to being mindful of goals? We fashion the future with each step we take, don’t we? While shedding attachment to ideals and playing with the soil and sand of this moment, we are also molding the home we will inhabit tomorrow.
 
So I have to ask: Would I like Bug and me to be part of a new family someday? Do I want us to welcome a greater intimacy with a wider circle of people?
 
I balk.
 
Maybe I am not ready to choose that. Maybe I want my son and me to cobble together our own modest dwelling, our mini-team of boy and mama and pooch. Or maybe I am working on some assumption that my Mister and I can love as two, independent from our children, and that what we are together gives us all that is necessary for an epic love story.
 
It’s frightening to ask these questions outright especially when I’m already in a loving, healthy relationship with a man who pours rum all over the already rich cake of our lives. Do I risk losing him by digging? By overthinking? Looking too directly into the glare must be foolish because when I do, I find I can hardly speak. The notions and narratives I carry about a post-divorce future with anyone all end in disaster.
 
These are some of the phantom ideas twining around my throat: Stepfamilies are fraught with trouble and conflict. Second marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Kids of divorce have more emotional and behavioral troubles. Children in blended families are pulled in too many directions for stability.
 
If my Mister and I are both showing up to “create a relationship,” we are inevitably weaving our families together. Two of us, three kids, four homes. Are we just blindly laying the foundation for a world of trouble?
 
It’s not that I don’t want to build a new, big, healthy family again someday. It’s that I don’t want to rush forward and erect some kind of particle-board-and-asbestos relationship that will fall down around Bug and me and anyone else who shares this journey with us.
 
To gain a bit of perspective, I dug around. Dipping into a few resources (some of this is covered nicely in a Psychology Today article, Lessons from Stepfamilies), here is what I found:
 
1. Yes, kids from divorce generally do have slightly higher rates of depression and behavioral problems than kids whose parents stay together. The key words here are “generally” and “slightly.” When you get down to specifics, you find the toughest issues occur in the first few years after divorce. This is when financial resources are strained, parents’ attention is distracted, schedules are disrupted by shuttling between homes, and conflict between parents is high. When those issues settle down (and if they are managed well in the early years), children of divorce fare as well as others.
 
2. Yes, second marriages do have a higher chance of failing. Again, however, the majority of second divorces occur during the early innings. Divorce is more likely when a couple tries to cook up Instant Family by blending everyone together too soon and forcing unexamined romantic ideals onto the new configuration. If folks in second marriages set up good systems for handling the communication and conflict unique to blended families, they often have stronger family relationships than first marriages. This may be the simple outgrowth of the reflection and adaptation that are necessarily woven into the fabric of their relationships.
 
3. As in point 1, children in stepfamilies have a measurably harder time than others. However, it is becoming apparent that a few (unfortunately common) conditions set the stage for trouble. Depression and other emotional and behaviorial issues occur in children of stepfamilies when:

  • Conflict between the biological parents is high and persistent.
  • The new couple is focused too much on each other. Parents do not put enough attention on communicating with their kids and creating systems for helping everyone thrive in the new family setup.
  • Step-parents stray too far into their partners’ domain by taking on discipline and other sacrosanct aspects of the parenting relationship.
  • Discord between various exes and spouses pulls children’s loyalty in too many directions.

Now, I breathe.
 
Three years have loped on by since my son’s dad and I separated. It’s been two years since our divorce. This long stretch is just a blink. I am still upended — not daily, but maybe bi-weekly? — by the challenges up there in point #1.
 
My financial situation is shaky which both stresses me out and limits Bug’s opportunities. Also, with the marriage behind me, I fling myself all too eagerly into the consuming swirl of new romance. I let it carry my attention off. Towards. . .? Or away from. . .? Maybe a little of both? My son, health, and work sometimes shudder and bend as waves from a booming intimate relationship reverberate past.  And finally, while I have a blessedly cooperative relationship with Bug’s father, we have a tendency to wing past each other when tricky conversations are called for. This leaves us with holes in plans and schedules that can lead to overcharged interactions.
 
Yes, I have some work to do.
 
While I long to raise this barn with my Mister, we are only just now assembling our materials. Many of the choices rest in my hands alone. Yes, I do want a someday-family. It would be lovely to build that with this man who strikes my brightest chord. Nevertheless, laying the strong foundation for such a future paradoxically requires me to square my shoulders and widen my gaze. Beyond the silvery dance as we twine ourselves around each other, I have to nourish my bond with my ex-husband. Frame out a more stable career for sound financial footing. Keep Bug’s development at the dead center of my gaze. Seed my beds with lush friendships, juicy activites, and expansive commitments.
 
It’s strange to consider that the success of my most intimate relationship might mean attending to it less.
 
Forgive me if I need a minute or seven to wrap my mind around this.
 
I can hear his pulse just there on the other side of the door. I can taste on the air his eagerness to bite into the meat of this moment and feel for the stone with me. Yet somehow I have to temper my appetite. I have to trust that he will remain, as I will, within reach. Being good to him and to us means also staying true to a future self and to a someday-family because this is who we are now. It is probably who any of us has always been even though we didn’t know it. We are far more than two.
 
For tonight, I choose to feel us as sanctuary and polestar even as we stand outside, hammers in hand, affixing walls to the beams that may someday shelter all of us.
 

Change, Co-Parenting, Home

Rough Cut

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We stand at the edge of the playground. A throng of racing children and chattering parents presses us to chain link. He asks about the house and I give him the latest update. Good news, for once. When the celebratory chaos has melted away along with the popsicles, Bug and I will head back to my office to print and sign 44 pages of loan documents. The seller’s bank has approved an extension and my sketchy but efficient new loan officer is pushing for the end of the month. Tee listens and asks polite questions. Neither of us ever bought a home before and I am now tackling this with the help of a huge circle of friends and family which does not include him.

He says that he’s heard about the housing market around the place he is considering. Four-bedroom homes there are going for about what I am paying for this cramped condo. He has dreams of a fixer-upper and his father swooping into town in a van packed with a table saw and hydraulic nail gun to help turn the place into a masterpiece.

Continue reading “Rough Cut” →

Career

Happy 100 Days: 35

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This morning, the boss-lady walked into my office to wish me a happy birthday. I reciprocated by wrapping her in a giant hug.
 
“Thank you so much,” I said.
 
“For what?” She laughed as she tried not to spill coffee on me.
 
“For being the best supervisor a girl could ask for.”
 
“Oh!”
 
“You help me realize there is no limit to what I can do here. You encourage me to find my way to do great work while giving me room to take care of my family, and you are also just a super nice person who is fun to work with.”
 
She started to tear up. It was really sweet. I told her that I have conversations about work with friends. Every time I mention something about the way my boss has gone to bat for me, given me flexibility in my schedule, or helped me think through a mistake, I watch my friends’ faces fall open in amazement.
 
“What?” I always ask. “What’s the big deal? That’s not normal?” They look at me like I just announced I’m dating Matthew McConaughey.
 
I realize how good I have it. My job keeps getting better. The main reason for that is because I work for a superstar with a big heart.
 
“You’re just really good at what you do,” I said. “I appreciate you making this a great place to work. Thank you.”
 
“It is a great place to work,” she grinned.
 
“So you can’t leave. Ever.”
 
A pause. “Yeah, well.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I am contractually obligated to be here through May 2013.”
 
I’d better make the most of the next six months.
 

Career, Happy Days, Home

Happy 100 Days: 37

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Happy News of the Day: The Powers that Be approved the promotion! This was my official first day as Director of PhD Student Services. The real fun begins tomorrow when I cruise the main campus schmoozing with folks in the know about future projects. Onward and upward!
 
So-So News of the Day: For all his sweet talk, the sexy condo is out of my league. The seller’s broker came back today with word that a $6000 special assessment for new staircases has to be included in the purchase price. The gal who owns it was supposed to have been making monthly payments but has not paid a single penny. The bank will not approve the short sale without the buyer taking on the assessment. That would be me, except that it won’t be me. Also? The condo fees were listed incorrectly. They are actually $117 higher per month than advertised. A chunk of change that size can choke you in a year or three, never mind a few decades.
 
I would have to live on credit cards and ramen for the next 10 years to afford it. So, today, I bid this dream a sad farewell. Goodbye, bamboo floors! Au revoir, living room dance space! So long, staggering mortgage and second job!
 
It’s not quite a heartbreak. A little heart-squeeze, perhaps? The regret is mixed with a dollop of sweet relief. It’s nice to be able to imagine a Christmas with gifts again.
 
I met my agent at another cute little place this afternoon. The price is right and it’s a decent location but the traffic NOISE NOISE NOISE is unbearable. Tomorrow, we head out west again to another property which would require a commute. It is not quite as burdensome as many of the places in my price range, though, and the neighborhood is close to several of Bug’s and my favorite parks, shopping, and rec centers. Also, it is 1140 square feet with fireplace and a fenced back patio. We’re still talking condo-ville in a car-clogged area, so I’ll have to see if the property itself is enough of an oasis to make up for the shark-infested surroundings.
 
Rain and snow are churning just beyond tonight’s clouds. Once the slop starts to fall tomorrow afternoon, I will have the perfect opportunity to see just how much road-time those two hundred square feet are worth.
 

Career, Growing Up, Happy Days, Home

Happy 100 Days: 40

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Less than 48 hours after making the offer on the condo, fear’s icy hands come to drag me down under the churning surface. A closer look at my budget squeezes the air from my lungs. The Wow of this has become the Ugh. What do you call buyer’s remorse before the purchase? Bidder’s remorse, maybe? If this offer is accepted, I have no earthly idea how I am supposed to make ends meet.
 
This is supposed to be the happy blog. I know. I will try to write my way there now, because nothing else is working. Thinking is getting me nowhere but further down in the cold dark.
 
Two and a half years ago when Tee’s job went away, all of our possessions went with it. Four-bedroom house, the shed Tee built for our tools and outdoor gear, furniture, appliances. All the little things a family collects over time had to go away, too: bicycles, books, dishes, linens, lamps, sleds, on and on. You can imagine. We sold tons of stuff on Craigslist. A massive yard sale that brought in $1000.
 
It was a conflagration. It was as complete as embers and ash.
 
We moved back to where we had started six years earlier. We rented a storage unit after moving in with my folks but soon realized the rent on the space would far outstrip the cost of the items inside. We emptied it, took several trips to Goodwill, and each tucked away what little bundle of marital debris we could manage in our respective borrowed bedrooms.
 
I had been out of the workforce raising Bug and being a camp wife in the mountains for five years. This set me back on the job hunt but it did not cripple me. In the wretched economy of 2010, I landed a decent job at an entry-level salary and am thankful for it every day. Even so, my paycheck does not stretch far enough to move Bug and me out of dependence on my parents. In those first panicked months of separation from Tee, I realized that no one was going to fix this for me. If I was going to climb out of my financial hole, I had to do it myself (with ample and very blessed help from the folks, of course. No way around that). Three options seemed to be available to me:

  1. Marry a rich guy
  2. Write a best-selling book
  3. Increase my income at my job

Options 1 and 2 were a bit too risky for my taste. I was fresh out of a marriage to someone whose perception of the world had never been based in a reality I recognized. I needed to place my bets on something that depended less on the whims of others. Sure, I would date (eventually) and sure, I would write (erratically), but I was not yet ready to morph into a Kardashian or JK Rowling.
I am a hard worker, though. I can kick ass when I put my mind to something.
 
Which is what I have done at my job. It helps that I love it and that working in higher ed is a great way to make a contribution while still drawing in decent benefits. I am pleased to note that 2 1/2 years into my job, I have received two small raises, a promotion, and am being encouraged to take on a greater leadership role at the university. My income has not doubled and it may never, but I have seen my effort and courage rewarded well. This gives me every reason to believe that if I keep on finding ways to grow and improve, new opportunities will present themselves.
 
It is just a little hard to remember all this when I picture being entirely responsible for mortgage and everything else my son will need to grow up safe and well.
 
A short sale can take somewhere between 90-120 days to close. This gives me a few months to tighten my belt. I think now about re-accumulating these possessions to make a home, and I see how the expense can sink a person. Tee and I took eight years to build up that foundation. It will take far more than that yard-sale $1000 to begin to re-furnish a life. If I move in the next few months, I will have to come up with stores of money I simply do not have to cover payments my parents’ largesse has helped me avoid. You know, those little things like food in the fridge, heat, and electricity.
 
I keep running and re-running the numbers in my personal budget. Where else can I shave? The internal chatter has been incessant:

If I bike to the metro every day, I don’t have to pay parking or gas. Can we get by on $200 a month in groceries? What about $150? The gym membership can go, of course. We will have to reel in Christmas and birthdays. No more eating out. I don’t need much in the way of new clothes for the next few years, and I know where to find decent used kid stuff. Shoes for Bug could be a problem. The kid needs a new pair every 6 months!

All of this, to make sure Bug and I have a home. It seems insane to do it. It also seems insane not to. With an interest rate of around 3.5% for 30 years in a high-growth area of the DC metro region, this place can be both a good home and a decent investment for our future.  If I can swing it for a couple of spaghetti-years, I may be able to come up with other creative ways to bring in money.
 
This is where the happiness warms loose the cold grip of fear.The truth is that I have every tool available to me to make this work.

  • I am already frugal to a fault.
  • My years working in a family homeless shelter taught me about resourcefulness.
  • Camp taught me to be creative with spaces and furnishings.
  • The past two years have shown me the extent of my work ethic, creativity, and willingness to try unconventional approaches.
  • I have such a great circle of supportive friends and family, I know we will never be entirely on our own.
  • Bug and I could share a room for a year and find a roommate. I know graduate students and the condo is near a university.
  • With my free weekends and my own home, I could make progress on writing projects that could bring in extra money.
  • As long as I keep my eyes and heart open, something new will present itself to help me along. It always has, and it always does.
  • A home is not the same as having a baby. It is reversible. If I get a few years into this and can’t make ends meet, I can sell. People sell houses all the time. Someone is selling this one to me.

Just because I am tired and scared today and can’t think of how to make this work does not mean it can’t work. I was tired and scared in 2010. I was blind to a way forward. Somehow, we made it here. Here is a really good place to be.
 
The  future is growing up and around me. Some of it is within my control. A great deal of it is coming here to meet me. I keep learning the lay of the land and how to move over it. Just keep walking, as they say, and the way will appear.
 
 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 88

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At the end of a long Friday at the end of a long week, I am missing my son’s birthday dinner because I have to work late. This is really okay, I keep telling myself, because I took him out to breakfast at Bob Evans and walked him to school myself. We carried the brownies for snack time in a hand-painted shoe-box. I will see him for a few hours on Saturday, and I have taken the day off on Monday because his school is out even though my university is not. And we were up late and up early, and then there is the actual swimming-pool birthday party next weekend, and and and.
 
But it is 3:50pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I am upstairs in the windowless meeting room rolling around pre-fab tables to prepare for a series of presentations by doctoral students on public policy research.
 
This is my job. I love my job. I love my doctoral students, and I am curious about their passions, even when they start growing breathless over things like “financial liberalization in emerging market economies and international capital flows.” Yes, even that.
 
Several times in any given month, I seat myself in a room like this and drink from the information fire-hose. Sometimes it is a dissertation proposal. Sometimes it is an actual dissertation defense, the candidate as crisp and polished as a new apple but damp at the temples and speaking too fast. At weekly brown-bag lectures, faculty members talk about their projects. Peppered throughout the year are seminars by visiting professors, mini-conferences, and workshops like these where budding scholars present current research in a faux-conference setting in order to prepare for the real thing.
 
This program does a fine job expanding analytic capabilities and policy expertise, but most of the PhD students are just sort of expected to figure out how to present. Some are further along the curve than others. I have been wowed by a couple of rising stars who have employed both art and editing to design trim presentations with moments of humor woven into tightly organized structures. Most, however, cram 197 words on a slide, whisper and “um” through 25 uninterrupted minutes, and slog through table after table swimming with microscopic bits of data. Without a hair of irony, they refer to the endogeneity vs. the exogeneity of their various stochastic models, and their committee members let them get away with this gobbedly-gook. Everyone in the room, it is assumed, understands this language (where do you think the students learned it?) and anyway, the rest of the feeble-minded masses can just sit in the back and smile pretty.
 
At most of these things, I try to pay attention to the presentation itself. Masters degree notwithstanding, I usually only kind sorta comprehend the first and last quarters of each presentation. The middle chunk? The part that starts when the chi-squared flashes up on the screen? That’s where my bulb dims. So, I shift gears and attend to the presenter’s tone, body language, slides, tempo. The topic is beyond me, but I hope to give the student decent feedback on areas of strength and potential improvement. I am a quasi advisor, after all, so it’s nice to have something about which to advise when the best I can offer on the subject matter is, “Love how you had both an independent and a dependent variable! Super cool!”
 
So now it’s 4:00pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday and we are starting late because a few faculty members who had volunteered to provide feedback are not here yet. The students are here. More show up to support their peers (At 4:00pm! On a sunny, 81-degree Friday!), then more, until almost every chair in the room is taken, and professors keep sneaking in and grabbing the coveted back-row seats. We all finish our supermarket cookies and settle in.
 
The first presenter begins.
 
And she is good.
 
I mean it. Good! Her topic is fascinating. She is a stronger speaker than when she started the program a year ago. Her research explores the relationship between childhood obesity and participation in certain kinds of leisure physical activity. Specifically, she asks whether spatially expansive activities (she explains, God bless her, that this means things that need lots of room to do, like soccer on a field) are more significantly correlated to low body mass than, say, activities like playing Wii, jumping rope, or even recreational swimming.
 
Relevant! Easy to follow! Her data, though problematic in ways that the peanut gallery discusses with her, are clear. She actually takes time to explain them. She even had the foresight to keep the research questions simple enough to tackle in a 20-minute presentation.
 
It is 4:35pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday. After a short break, the next presenter begins. I take a breath and prepare to busy myself with my to-do list. My list does not stand a chance. Another fascinating topic. This one is about land use in Lahore, Pakistan. He has big maps illustrating population growth in the developing world, and I learn all sorts of things about suburban sprawl, corruption, and the history of colonization.
 
By the third, presentation, I have stopped watching the clock. This one tracks the policy implications of the de-institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities in Virginia. This, in a state with active institutions 40 years after the Supreme Court case that was supposed to do away with such approaches to the special needs population? Curious! Appalling! So much more to explore!
 
It is 5:35pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday. I have a heap of questions to ask every presenter, and we have to cut off discussion because half a dozen hands hover in the air, people are sitting forward in their seats, and we were supposed to be done five minutes ago. I help one of the student organizers pack up the equipment. “This was really so good,” I tell her. “This was the first one of these I’ve been to. . .” I stop, realizing I’m not sure how to say it without insulting the entire student body.
 
“Where all three presentation were actually interesting? I know!” She says, laughing. We fold up the cords and tuck them away. “Usually once the equations come up, I’m a goner,” she tells me sotto voce. “I know I’m supposed to understand that stuff, but boy, it’s nice to hear a presentation that doesn’t take so much work to follow.”
 
We grin together. She actually had to get a half-decent score on the GREs to get into this program, and I know she has received high grades in her statistics courses so far. It’s comforting to know the bright people I revere occasionally feel like dimwits.
 
It is 5:45pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I explode out onto the sunny plaza and stride to the metro. On the ride home, I give myself the delicious pleasure of reading a Jonathan Lethem short story in a rumpled New Yorker I found in my office. I have missed my son’s birthday dinner, but traffic smiles on me and I catch Bug at home a few minutes before his dad comes to pick him up. We open the last of the presents. We cuddle on the couch and read a sweet little Patricia Polacco book called Mrs. Katz and Tush. Larnell shares a Kugel with Mrs. Katz who is alone on Passover after her Myron dies. (“My Myron,” she sighs. “What a person.”)
 
It is six years to the day after my son pushed his way into the world. Life looks absolutely nothing like I imagined it would. That night, someone dropped onto my naked chest a real boy. I felt him land there, that complete and living human, and I whispered, “Welcome to the world, little guy.”
 
The world, you know. Such as it is.
 
It is 10:40pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I am alone in the spare room of my parent’s house. The night may not be as sweet as I expected, but oh, how rich the flavor.