Everything Is Illuminated

Last week I went in to Bookstore to turn in an application. I went kicking and screaming, against my own will, because--spoiler alert!--I don't want to go back to work. (Work away from home, whatever, you get my drift). I happened to get the manager. I mentioned that I had worked at Other Bookstore before and we had a chat. We had common acquaintances and co-workers, all good omens and signs. He gave me a sort of impromptu interview. Hours later, I was summoned for a real interview. Everything was swimming along just swimmingly. They needed someone to shelve books--my favorite thing, no joke--during the exact hours I wanted to work. Let me say: I present well in interviews, or at least, I think I do. I've never gone to an interview and not been offered a job. At first, I didn't entirely want the job, but by the interview's end, I did. I started to want it very badly. I want Noah to not have to work weekends anymore. He often works twelve or fourteen days in a row with no day off, did you know? He's getting tired.

Then a week passed and I was not offered a job. Instead I got a postcard informing me thatunfortunately Bookstore does not have a position to meet my qualifications at this time. I would like to blame the fact that I asked for an hourly pay rate that was above minimum wage.We pay our employees seven-fifty* an hour, they informed me. If I'd had coffee in my mouth, I wouldn't have spit it at them. I'd have taken my mug, walked across the room, and poured it over their heads. Seven dollars and fifty cents an hour. I'm not in prison. I am not sixteen. Neither is anyone who works there, how the hell do they do it? Full disclosure: I told them I could not work for less than $8.50 (I shame myself. It's a low stress job, ok? I'd asked for $9.50 on my app and they'd offered me bird seed, I had to capitulate some). I like to think this is why they didn't hire me. That or they had some friend apply. I hope you enjoy your seven bucks an hour, supervisor's bestie. I am unemployed but if we meet for coffee, it'll be my treat.

This is Bookstore we're talking about, and I did describe a time when I provided excellent customer service, so that might be what did me in.

Anyway, we had, in our minds, counted tiny chickens before they were worth more per hour than a 30-year-old freelance writer with a Bachelor's Degree and a passion for the job. I was bummed, and Noah was disappointed though valiant about it, all Mr. Fitzwilliams or whatever, saying "now now" and "there there" and "hail-fellow-well-met" and all that.

But we were discussing it after dinner, putting away the dishes and drinking free company beer and wondering what we are going to do now. And I realized that I still have this stupid idea that one day everything is going to work out. I thought I had moved beyond this fantasy after my financially disastrous 20's, but no. Despite all insurmountable evidence to the contrary, some stupid bird in my heart keeps chirping that one day, it will all come together. One day good fortune will smile and everything will be illuminated and my life will shine like sunny spots and copper pennies.

And I wonder when I'm going to wise up.

I'm not speaking out of depression or bitterness here, I'm just starting to wonder when brainless optimism runs its course. The ship does not always come in. Most people work very hard all their lives and I don't know why I think so highly of myself. Why I think I'll be the one to sell the book, strike the gold, win the millions, so to speak. Why should my ship come in when so very many ships don't? I'm not talking about Bookstore job, that is not a ship, but these dreams I have of making money off my writing. Of the two of us somehow making enough money to maybe keep some chickens and travel to Europe without me having to sell my soul to an office job. There are so very many writers who don't make money, and I don't know but these days I feel silly and stupid and gauche, pressing on with these ridiculous delusions about myself, the dreams of Paris and Spain, of book deals and raises, this idea that if I keep following my dreams one day I will catch them.

Don't worry. This is just a place I land sometimes. I probably won't be here tomorrow, but here I am today.

*corrections made to reflect Bookstore's actual pay grade

Still Have

I feel like summer is almost over and I'm sad, I said to a co-worker. Walking through the empty parking lot to work at seven in the morning on the first day of August. Already hot.

Oh I don't get summers anymore, she told me. Kinda scoffed.

I thought, do I look like I'm in high school? Isn't that the last time any of us had 'a summer'?

I was thinking about all the things we hadn't done. Hadn't gone camping, hadn't made it to Elitches, had only made it to the swimming pool once.

Count it: Once.

The season isn't changing yet, but is about to change. It's tilting but hasn't turned. At night I comfort myself with this mantra: We still have August. We still have August. Autumn begins September 21st.

But I had this secret, scratching at me with claws in the dark: I was going back to work full time.

I got home late from Bookstore Job one night. (The job that is part time and demands no daycare). Noah was in bed. The girls were asleep with 'The Sound of Music' playing at the best part--the part where Christopher Plummer is singing "Edelwiess", his eyes all misty with the weight of everything that is about to end.

I crawled into bed with Ayla and began to sob. I couldn't believe it was over all ready. The seasons of the earth change, but we are prepared. Change is on the wind. We see it in the light, feel it hovering in the air. The seasons of your life can change without warning. And they don't come back. Summer ends, but it comes again. The season of having infants only comes once. When it's really over, it's over. It shocks me, realizing the time in my life when I will be pregnant, await a birth, cradle a sleeping infant, change a diaper--it's over. A season that--barring a night of heavy drinking and extreme unpreparedness--will never come again.

And then, without much warning, another season was ending too. I was going to work full time, 8 to 5, every single Monday through every single Friday. I thought about my daughters, home on Christmas break. Except they wouldn't be home. They'd be at daycare. And we wouldn't be baking cookies and taking walks in the snow and trips in our boots and jackets to the coffee shop for lattes and hot chocolates. And if they got sick? If they just had a bad day and didn't feel up to school? What would I do? I'd have to go to work anyway. They'd have to be with someone who wasn't their mom, even on the days when mom was what they really needed. I thought about summers--next summer, the ones after that. The season of going to the library, to the pool, to the park with a picnic, was already over. Instead I'd be taking the girls to day camps, different ones throughout the weeks, while I went to work. 8 am to 5 pm.

Yes, I had gone out and sought a job. But somehow it still hit me without warning. Another season was coming to a close, and I?

I just wasn't ready.

All this time, all this time I've spent at home, and it's over before I know it. It's been so hard. I've enjoyed it whenever I could. I've felt deep insecurity. Low self-esteem over the fact that I don't have a job, that I 'just stay at home', that I spend my days bargaining and begging and pleading with two tiny tyrants. I've felt deep guilt over not doing it well enough, over not wanting to do it, over not being able to afford more toys or more pairs of shoes or fancy birthday parties, because I was 'just a stay-at-home' mother. All these days, day after day for six years, of being home alone with two beings who demand and drain and take every moment of it for complete granted, who may never, ever realize everything their mother--who was once a volitient, confident, independent human being, who had a life before and beyond them, who is something in her heart that isn't 'mom' or 'lunch-maker' or 'mess-cleaner'--has given up for them.

All of that was about to end and I held Ayla for as long as I dared and cried silently the way I do because I wasn't ready for the season to change.

(Then I got up pretty quickly and left because I'm sure I can't imagine anything more terrifying than waking to find your mother sobbing and clutching you in the dead of night. And lord knows I can't afford the therapy she'd need after that.)

The season was about to change. A huge change. A time of rushing to work and rushing home and wearing fancy clothes and talking to adults and bringing home a large paycheck. Of bagged lunches and babysitters and daycare juggling. Like it or not (I think I like it) the season of diapers and formula and tiny babies who want nothing more than to sleep on your chest and gaze in wild rapture at your own miraculous eyes has ended here. We are headed into a season of teachers, home work, art projects, science projects, spelling bees, math quizzes, book orders, lunch money.

And I could spend it being away from my kids every day from 7 am to 5:30 pm, at a job I didn't care one whit about--or not.

You can't stop what's coming. But you can stop how you react to it.

In the end, we went with not.

No lots of extra money. No fancy private education. No day care or babysitters or child juggling or summer spring and winter breaks at the office and day camps.

The lesson I have learned is this: If someone asks you, "Is this a position you feel you could be happy in long-term?" And everything in you screams, 'No!'--

Then just say it. "No."

Especially when, after you pay for day care, you're only going to be able to afford an extra pack of gum a week anyway.



Miss Indiana Sophie in August 2006/yesterday.



I am Vesuvius, and I can't turn back time but I can turn down office jobs.