Tag: working mom

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” →

Determination, Things I Can

59. Things I Can Begin: The Research

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Ireland Balloon Flight

It’s one thing to talk about taking a trip. It’s another to board a flight. The in-between is the true test of commitment.

The stunning Silverleaf stopped by to comment on Sunday’s travel post. Her visit jarred me into action. I’m still months away from anything so radical as a B&B reservation. Last night, though, after reading Silverleaf’s encouragement, I edged a few minutes closer.

The goal is to take my boy overseas next summer. To shrink the options to a reasonable handful, the criteria for selecting a destination are these:

  1. Manageable for an American mother and a 9-year-old kiddo traveling as a duo
  2. Affordable on a working-mom income, saving a few bucks every month for the next twelve
  3. A place my feet have never seen (ruling out France, Germany, the U.K., Switzerland, Costa Rica, Canada, St. Lucia, Mexico, and Zimbabwe)
  4. Safe for driving (or otherwise getting around) without pressing all of my crowd-induced stress-buttons
  5. Rough in places where we can wander off the map
  6. Familiar enough that if kiddo or mama becomes disoriented, it’s possible to navigate to a helpful place
  7. Far enough that it will open a window onto the big unknown

These carry me directly across the water to the land of castles, bogs, rain, and the River Shannon.

Silverleaf’s nudge sent me bopping around the internet last night when I should have been tucking myself into bed. I zig-zagged over the map, looking for an Irish island or village that might make nice waystation for us a year from now. I bookmarked some (Farm animals in the hostel yard, oh yeah!) and jettisoned others (Antiques in the lobby? Maybe when Bug is 20).

Because it was all still rolling around when I finally did make it to bed, it naturally bubbled up in conversation today. The bubbling occurred in a brief exchange with a colleague who has more money in his bag of golf clubs than I do in my son’s 529. Travel discussions tend to involve him telling me about his most recent Icelandic mountain expedition while I tell him about the water park down the road.

It just so happens (I learned today) that this colleague is good friends with an Irish couple who owns a hot-air balloon company. It also just so happens that this colleague is also is more than happy to send Bug and me their way next June.

A blink, and the picture is another degree sharper.

A click, and we are another minute closer.

 

 

Career, Determination, Parenting, Things I Can

47. Things I Can Celebrate: A New Morning

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Tomorrow begins the new schedule. It’s my first official day on the campus just a few miles from my house.

The office waiting there is a loaner crammed with British academic journals belonging to a professor on sabbatical. Two other advisors will share the space with me on alternating days. The phone will remain our Oxford colleague’s line, and the computer being delivered this week lacks monitor and a printer connection.

My fellow advisors and I should receive an actual office assignment in January. That said, the building itself is so old, its cinderblocks and scarred linoleum are next up on the university’s demolition list. We might be in our “permanent” space for all of a year before the wrecking ball arrives. Then we’ll squat somewhere else on campus for the duration of the construction.

What fool would give up five days a week in an office all her own in a new building with reliable technology, functional windows, and a full kitchen just a few steps down the hall?

The fool who prizes time far more than space.

This is the same calculation that led me to withdraw my offer on a 2-bedroom, 2.5-bath, end-unit townhouse with a yard and a ridiculously affordable mortgage payment. That fantastic find was perfect except for its zip code. Another 10 miles west beyond the town where my son was in school, where we had begun building a life, might add another 30 minutes to a commute that was already taking 45. And that’s just one way.

The people who loved me helped me count just how many days of my precious life I’d be signing over to the VDOT highway system. Every minute in my car or on the metro is one minute away from my kiddo. Or away from my pace, my dance, my words, my breath. The true cost of all that space and grass was my relationship with everything I love.

That’s just a tad too pricey for me.

Instead I bought the condo within two miles of the metro and a few blocks of Bug’s school. I pay more money for less space. It’s been two years since I signed, and regret has yet to find my address.

Tonight, Bug buzzes through the house long past his bedtime. He’s laying towels to the dog’s crate as red carpet and lining the walls with nightlights. He piles extra pillows in under her blanket. Her food bowl and toys make their way into the room, creating a dining nook in one corner and a play zone in the other. He flips the blinds closed and clicks off all the other lamps. Shutting us in, he names my bedroom Noodle’s “Royal Palace,” and there in the shadowed light, he performs his karate kata for the recumbent queen while I intone an ancient ode.

On any weeknight before this, I would snap and fret. Get moving, Mister. Bedtime. Now. Because every minute awake is a minute less sleep, and that adds up to another morning late for work.

But tonight, I remember what waits for me tomorrow. Then I remember again when we’re brushing teeth. And again when I sit here to write. Each time, the realization cools and soothes, like air, like the grip of cramped wings unfurling from my shoulders.

Each time like the first time.

Tomorrow, enthroned on a busted office chair in my palace of mold, I will be exactly where I belong. The journey there has taken 5 years of muscle topped with at least as many months of luck. Doesn’t this happen on long rides? You see only when you’re well on your way that the landscape is changing right under your feet, and now you can map out a shortcut.

The race to the metro to grab a parking spot before they fill, to grab a seat on the train before the guy behind me does, to power the two blocks to the building before the clock strikes nine. . . That race is on hold. Tomorrow will be an easy shot to my son’s school where I can visit him in the cafeteria at lunchtime if I get the urge. Where I can arrive well before the closing bell to ferry my young prince home.

Tomorrow is the gift of inversion. Instead of giving myself to the clock, the minutes offer themselves to me.

This means the night is ours for wandering.

And the morning is mine for setting the pace.

Brain, Career, Things I Can

28. Things I Can Carry Through: This, to its End

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Gaslight /ˈɡaslīt/
verb
Alternative: “ambient abuse.”

1. A form of sophisticated psychological manipulation intended to cause a victim to question her own sanity
2. Withholding factual information from, or providing false information to, a victim, having the gradual effect of making her anxious, confused, and doubtful of her memory and perception

The President has advisors and a staff of dozens to function as his external brain. The rest of us are stuck with this measly glob of gray matter. That, and whatever spreadsheets and task-apps we’ve managed to cobble together.

On the hostile shores of the 9-hour day, another question lands. Another and another. Almost none need a simple response. Almost all demand contortions of reason and planning that border on the gymnastic. The terrain is littered with the debris of the unfinished.  Continue reading “28. Things I Can Carry Through: This, to its End” →

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.

 

Mindfulness, Poetry, Things I Can

6. Things I Can Manage: This

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Even if he nudges at every edge,
carrying his dinner to the counter to eat
alone, back turned,
before coming over to wreck the card game you’ve set up
then filling up a squirt gun you didn’t even know he owned
just so he can get you in the face
and grinning
as he says he’d like to kill you
for real
so he could get all your money
to buy himself an Xbox

Even it’s 9:54 pm and the bed contains
sketch paper, markers, silly putty, pokemon cards, library books,
and a kid not anywhere close to sleep

Even if you know the student
you dismissed from university today
and the other one with the conduct hearing tomorrow
are having much worse nights than you

Even if the dog keeps knocking her bone
under the couch and digging
at a bamboo floor
that might be the sole selling point
of this, the lone asset in an estate
from which he’d be lucky
to wring an Xbox

Even if you know the bone
is just a surrogate for the play
or walk she really needs
and your back creaks and your stomach churns
and you haven’t finished the letter to your grandmother
you started last week or called
to thank your girlfriend,
lover, or any of the circle
of angels who’ve kept you
off the cliff
for a decade
or two

Even if you don’t have one ounce
of energy left

You draw
a drop
from somewhere

Even if
thin air

and write

This:

Tonight, the sickle cuts a cool, slender tear
in the bruised night.

Later,
the boy in the back seat says
“I can see the full moon.”

This is the first time
in months
you know
what the sky holds.
The first time
you’ve remembered
to look.

“Isn’t it a crescent?” You ask.

His face fogs the glass.
“I can see the whole dark thing.”

You tell him the earth
casts shadows. “A little sun gets past,” you say.

It always does.

Even if we imagine ourselves so big.
Even if we forget to look up.
 

Home, Music

You Know All the Rules By Now

smirkpretty

Well the first days are the hardest days
don’t you worry anymore

When you’re sixteen and you pick up lice from camping out at a Dead show, you and your girlfriend walk by the People’s drug store on the way home from school. You set up chairs out on the porch in the afternoon sun, pop a bootleg in the boom box, and gossip as you comb nits from each other’s hair.
 
‘Cause when life looks like Easy Street
there is danger at your door
 
When you’re forty and you pick up lice from your son’s first grade classroom, you leave two dozen unchecked emails in your inbox, cut out of work early (again), speed over to the CVS, and race to catch the train then the bus. On the way, you send messages to your son’s dad about all the things he needs to do to treat his place. You ignore the afternoon sun and rush into your condo, making a mental note of all the places your boy had his head during the past five nights he spent with you.
 
You strip beds, pull coats from hooks, peel covers from the sofa, corral a menagerie of stuffed animals. You curse the dollhouse washer/dryer that reaches capacity at three pillowcases. You wheel the vacuum around the mountain of fabric and upholstery and giant fluffy penguins now climbing towards the ceiling.
 
You bag up all the pillows. You push two loads through. You boil water to sanitize the hairbrush.
 
Then you storm through the living room
 
and stop
 
Goddamn, well I declare,
have you seen the like?
 
by the sliding glass door.
 
The dog stirs and glances up. You look out for the first time at the fading light. It is daylight savings time. The day has hung on for you. Just barely, though. You have 30 minutes left to fling yourself out and grab her before her fingers slip free.
 
Anybody’s choice
I can hear your voice
 
You lash your lice-infested tresses into a lice-infested elastic, put on the lice-infested hoodie you wore last night, and go run three hard miles with the setting sun at a heel on your left flank.
 
You come panting back inside. The dog pushes up against you as overjoyed as she has been every time you’ve walked in that door for the whole eight years of her existence. She doesn’t know you have lice and wouldn’t care even she did.
 
Now, you can see.
 
Again.
 
Finally.
 
Like the morning sun you come
and like the wind you go
 
How your son is in the best hands now because his father is the same man who used to sit and brush your hair with such gentle strokes, you felt like you’d been carried off on a magic carpet ride. How your water pours hot from the new heater you just installed. How the juice surges from every outlet to lamp, dryer, vacuum, stove. How the bed is soft and the sleep is sound and the lock is solid and the mortgage is covered and the shelves in CVS and kitchen alike are stocked with everything you could ever need and more than you ever will.
 
How you and your son’s dad and called each other and spoke easily about how to tackle a shared concern.
 
How your Mister got on the horn and told you to tell your boy that Thomas Jefferson had lice.
 
Come on along or go alone
 
You notice how very rare and undeserved this abundance of resource for this small a problem.
 
He’s come to take his children home.
 
When you’re here today and you pick up lice from a spot on this teeming planet, you strip down to your skivvies, squirt eye-watering insecticide shampoo into your hair, crank up Daddy Yankee and boogie as you comb the nits from your hair.
 
—
Butchered lyrics are from the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.”
 

Children, Parenting

Stretch

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Under the blanket, the smell is rank. Is it him or me? My son’s hair is a chrysanthemum explosion too close to the earth. He pushes into my body, twisting the sheet and blanket away from my folded knees. Morning breath and cool autumn air snake in around my neck.
 
He bathed last night and now the faint scent of berry shampoo joins the mix. In the tub, he stretched himself to his full length. His head was submerged over ears, up to jaw, past hairline. My boy became a naked mask, bald and brown, hovering just above the surface of the water. “Put your hand under me, Mommy,” he said. I did, floating it down below his back and in the open space under his calves.
 
“You’re levitating,” I said. “Is it magic?”
 
“It’s a trick. I push my head against one end and my feet against the other. It lifts me up.”
 
If he’d pointed his toes, he wouldn’t fit. My son is this tall. I said it aloud but he mouthed, “I can’t hear you.” I dipped my hands under the water and cleaned his ears. I pressed the soapy cloth into neck creases that are quickly disappearing.
 
Now, we linger in bed longer than usual. We have time to talk about nothing. He rides the school bus for the first time today. My boss agreed to let me have a late day once a week, a 9:30-6:30 sort of day, as much for my kid as for my working students prefer after-hours meetings. The bus comes late around here. Usually my kiddo is already deep into some before-school activity and I’m parked at my desk when the other neighborhood children are lining up on the street with their backpacks.
 
When we finally untangle ourselves from the blanket, I pad into the kitchen to throw together banana-oat waffles while Bug assembles a lego spider truck. Steam rises from the waffle iron. Warm syrup. A dog walk. A long shower. I never could have imagined such weekday luxury. I drag my bike out the door and we bump to the curb where a mass of families is assembled. Is it possible this many kids from Bug’s school live in our neighborhood? My son’s smoothed white hair falls down around his eyes and he slows, wiping it back, surveying the crowd.
 
We meet Ray and Rose and Marianne. Bug presses himself close to my side and whispers something. I bend down. “There’s BK from my class.” He points. The gesture is tiny but certain. A mom with a daughter in Bug’s grade walks up to us and introduces herself. “You’re new here,” she says. A dad carries a baby girl on his shoulders while his son charges ahead. The crowd surges closer to the street as the bus rounds the bend. It hisses to a stop and blinks in dumb excitement, doors grunting open. The driver is a big man in a Redskins jersey.
 
One boy on the sidewalk screams and sobs. His backpack slips from his shoulders. His mother discharges him into the grip of an older brother who tries to cover the little boy’s mouth. Big brother gives up and simply frog-marches the shrieking child up the steps. The bus swallows them whole. Parents cluck and shake their heads. The kids all wait at a safe distance until the show is over then they press forward in pairs and trios to climb aboard.
 
Bug gives me one last appraising glance up from under his curtain of hair. He does not smile. He disappears inside, his blonde head now just a shadow passing through the crowd. I click on my helmet and wave. He takes a seat, scoots to the window, and turns away from me. He is already talking to his neighbor. The doors thump close. I throw my leg over the saddle and push off towards the metro as the bus wheezes off, carrying my son away.
 

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” →

Children, Co-Parenting

Deposed

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It is almost 6:30 pm. Congestion on 66 West backs it up all the way to Falls Church. After a grind of a day, a co-worker saves me a metro trip by letting me hitch a ride back towards home. My car waits near the station, a stack of overdue library books in the trunk alongside a bag of clothes destined for Goodwill. Somehow I will have to make room for the giant sack of special Active Maturity dog food I hope Target has on the shelf because PetSmart is in the wrong direction. The dog’s bowl has been empty for nearly two days.

In an hour, friends will be gathering for Team Trivia at the bar. As for dinner? The leftover apple banging around in my backpack will have to suffice. As we sit in stop-and-go traffic solving the problems of the world, my phone rings.

Noisy air when I pick it up. Then, “Mommy?”

“Hey, buddy. What’s up?”

“Can I stay with you tonight?” His sing-y, plead-y voice spills into the car. Sweetness bomb. My friend rocks from the blow.

Continue reading “Deposed” →