Sunday afternoon the sky was blue, the sun was out and the baby had reached the point in her day when there were only two things she wanted to do:
- Cry at me until I picked her up and walked her around the house so she could point at various activities she would only commit to for 30 seconds at a time
- Request foods she would only take two bites of before telling me, “all done”
Rather than spend the hours before dinner catering to the demands, I decided we’d take a walk. Of course, if Annie and I were going on a walk, Snacks needed to come, too and also Henry, my canine nephews who was staying with us for the weekend. So I set out, one arm pulling Annie in our trusty RadioFlyer wagon the other wrangling the two dogs as they bounded down the sidewalk, Snacks barking the whole way.
At one point one of my neighbors called across the street. But I couldn’t hear him over Snacks’s incessant noise. Which is exactly what I told him:
“I can’t hear you!” I yelled back.
He repeated himself.
“Looks like you have your hands full!”
The only thing I could do was agree and then enter into an extended mental flashback.
It was 2013. I was walking around my neighborhood in York. Lily and Jovie were in the wagon, the dog was dragging us down the sidewalk, barking the whole way. Various neighbors called from their porches and cars- “Looks like you have your hands full!”
I even wrote a blog post speculating on what it might be like to have an extra arm to help lessen the burden on my other two.
Back then, it felt like there would never be a day when I wouldn’t look like I was perpetually on the verge of calamity. Toting around two little kids wrangling an unwieldy dog. But life shifted bit by bit by bit. The girls grew for one. Needed me a little less. And I became more adept at juggling all the things. The dog? Let’s just say he’s maintained his youthful exuberance.
But Sunday, there I was again. Same barking dog (plus one). Different neighborhood. Different state. Same old wagon. Different baby.
Same person being pulled in two directions. Different perspective.
How odd it was looping back around to the person I was as the person I am. How in the seven years since that post there’s been so much change– moving twice , having another baby, starting a full-time job on a totally new career path– and yet here I am living the same life I always had. How amusing it was to realize that to the outside world, I continue you look as if I’m on the verge of calamity.
Have I entered into a parallel universe? Has my present life become the Bizarro World version of my past life?
Some days I get frustrated that it doesn’t feel as if I’ve made any real progress in life. Like, despite all this upheaval, I’m still puttering along doing the same ‘ole, same ‘ole. Sweeping up the pet hair. Changing diapers. Figuring out what’s for dinner. Showing up on this site periodically to whine about it.
I’m no longer a freelancer. I always felt like freelancing sounded more exciting and exotic than it was in reality. Like, in my head, when I imagine an accomplished freelance writer- it was this kind of, industrious-but-breezy person with good hair and cool glasses hanging out in coffee shops writing important, insightful pieces for Vanity Fair or The New York Times.
In reality, it was me just me sitting on the dog fart couch at 11:30 p.m. with a lopsided ponytail and outdated glasses blogging about office furniture or data management or medical billing for a dozens of different small businesses. I’m sure, had I had the confidence or the ambition, I could’ve branched out beyond content marketing. Actually, scratch that, I did branch out– finishing a manuscript for a novel and writing a bunch of short stories– I just didn’t get published (or paid) for any of those.
I don’t miss freelancing all that much. I like my job. I like being able to work with real humans again. I like talking to my students about their lives and their ideas. I like rolling my eyes at their ridiculousness. I like learning along with them. I also like being able to leave for the day. I like that home is for family. For the Brad, the kids and the pets. That I’m not constantly feeling like I need to steal hours from around the day to write about things I don’t care about.
I like that there’s more breathing room around my creative life in a way there hadn’t been when I was scrambling to use every spare minute to help make ends meet.
But there’s also a disconnect, right? I felt it the other day when I ran into a former newspaper colleague at a Yoga studio. “You still freelancing?” she asked? And I felt like my, “No” sort of fell flat. “I mean, I still write … like … for myself,” I told her.
She smiled and told me that was important to do- writing for myself. And I’m sure she was genuine about it. But this little bitchy voice in my brain started mumbling from some hidden corner. Like how adorable it was that I “wrote for myself.” How quaint. Like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t anymore. Because that’s what it feels like now. If I’m not making a living as a writer, if I’m not trying to get published, if I’m not working on a manuscript for some big project- do I still get to be a writer?
A few weeks back in in sixth period (Honors English 8), we were talking about essay writing- specifically about tackling that first paragraph where you’re trying to grab the reader’s attention and share your thesis. Normally, in classes, I don’t chime in during instructional time, just because I’m usually not an expert on the subjects we’re teaching and I don’t want to step on the teachers’ toes. But based on the questions they were asking, I felt like our students were getting stuck on the idea that the essay writing process had to be linear- you write from start to finish. When in reality, whether I was writing college papers, newspaper articles or blog posts, writing is often a roundabout sort of process.
So I thought I’d share that.
I raised my hand and asked if I could share and my co-teacher nodded and told the class that it was OK to skip around. In fact, most times I don’t write the introduction until after I’d written the bulk of whatever I was tackling. That writing itself was a way to clarify your thinking on the topic; oftentimes they might get ideas for a great “hook” as you’re crafting those body paragraphs.
While I was talking, there were kids chatting.
The teacher put her stern eyes on and corrected them.
“Mrs. Jennings is a professional writer! You should listen to what she’s sharing,” she yelled over the din in the room.
It was this out-of-body experience hearing someone describe me as a professional anything. The last time I felt like a “professional,” Lily was an infant and I was a snot-nosed assistant editor pretending I knew how to manage people and oversee the production of a daily features section.
I feel as if I’ve spent most of the last 10 years winging it. Pretending to be a content marketer. Pretending to be a web designer. Pretending to be a farmer. Pretending to be a floral designer. (I had a weird array of side hustles during my years as a “stay-at-home mom”).
Now, I’m pretending to be an educator.
I don’t know if I’l ever stop pretending to be a competent parent and actually become one. When does that motherhood milestone hit?
It’s not some sense of false modesty that I use the word “pretending.” I feel like being an adult is a lot about pretending. We’re filling these roles assigned to us or that we assign ourselves. And we’re doing a lot of winging it a long the way. Even if they are roles we went to school for and got degrees in. The translation from classroom to real world is anything but seamless.
Why was it so validating to have someone else call me a professional writer? That weeks later I’m still thinking about that moment?
The other morning, I woke up before my alarm, my brain doing this groggy sort of whirring thing it does at the start of the day. It’s attempting to make sense of the tail end of a dream or wondering why it can’t go back to sleep or recalling events from decades earlier.
This time, it was remembering the day in seventh grade where one of the girls in a group I’d been eating lunch with since the beginning of the school year told me I wasn’t welcome to sit at the table anymore.
I don’t know how I’d ended up at their table to begin with. I probably went to elementary school with one or two of them and sat there out of old habit. Assuming, incorrectly I guess, that the previous six or seven years of sharing a class together made it OK to sit there.
As someone who dreads confrontation, years later, I find myself wondering about the girl who asked me to leave (I remember her name, of course). Did she and the other girls all discuss my ejection beforehand or was it decided in a moment of annoyance or frustration? Was there a vote? How did they decide she would be the best person to ask me to leave? Did she take it upon herself? Was she nervous about it, as I would’ve been? Or excited? After I left, was she relieved the conversation was over? Or just relieved that I was gone? Does she even remember that day like I do, all those years ago?
Why was that the memory that came to me the other morning? Buzzing around my subconscious like a swarm of fruit flies around a rotting banana?
How did that moment come to be connected with all the pretending I do now?
I’m sitting here trying to piece together all these shards of broken memory and broken self image.
For most of my life I’ve made it a habit to be self-effacing, This is a learned form of self-preservation, of course. Comedians are experts at this. If you can just own your limitations, defects and inadequacies ahead of the of the rest of the world- become your own punching bag- then you’ll always beat them to the punchline. I’ve found it’s an effective tool for breaking down barriers with students- they lose their footing when I make fun of my age or taste in music or fashion sense or crazy hair ahead of them.
Ever since that day in the cafeteria, and all the other adolescent slights that coming with being a human being, I’ve kicked myself out of the lunch table.
Just by not owning my experience. By allowing people’s perceptions of me to outweigh my perceptions of myself. I’ve done this my whole life, but I got really good at it when I was a stay-at-home mom.
Somehow, losing that “professional” designation to hang my identity on, made me seem like less of self-actualized person. Even though I was working the whole time, in my mind that wasn’t enough proof or evidence or whatever that I was a successful human being.
Even though I’m working outside of the home again, I still feel untethered. I’m obviously not a middle school kid (thank god), but I’m also not a teacher. All day long I float around the building (well, not float so much as speed walk against the endless stream of hormonal humanity) from classroom to classroom and subject to subject. Supporting this student here or doing crowd control there as the day calls for. It’s like being in a series of 90-minute episodes of a weird sitcom. I don’t really have a home base. While my colleagues are all kind and welcoming, I still sometimes feel like that awkward extra person hanging around the fringes.
Come to think of it, it’s very much like how it was that first time I went to middle school. Except that in this scenario the teachers I work with would never kick me out of the lunch table. My students, however, most certainly would.
I’ve re-started yoga-ing after a long hiatus. When I went to a class Saturday, I sort of tucked myself into the back corner of the room near the window. The sun was streaming in, warming my mat. It all felt very cozy.
During poses where we faced the window, I could watch the clouds drifting by. My corner would darken and cool with each cloud. But just as soon as my mat became overcast, the clouds would roll away and the sun would come back. The whole class was like that. Light and shadow. Blinding me while I was in warrior two. Cooling me off during Down Dog. The sun and the clouds playing with each other from child’s pose all the way to savasana– corpse pose.
Reflecting on that shifting light made me think about the course of a life. How sometimes we bask in the warm glow of feeling confident of our paths and our places and sometimes we’re left in darkness shivering and unsure. Sometimes the same sun that comforts us also blinds us with its intensity. Sometimes we welcome a cloudy day to shield us from being burned. It also made me think about how this shifting light changes us and how we look to the world. How sometimes we’re in glare of a spotlight. And sometimes we’re in a dark corner. Because the light is always shifting, we’re always shifting, too. The same person, forever evolving.
Always dancing with the light streaming on us and from within us.
For someone who is always ruminating on the question of identity- the person I am in this world- this thought is comforting. We are all already the people we need to be. And the passage of time and the meandering paths we walk on serve to highlight and hone our understanding of ourselves.
It’s best not to overthink any of it anyway.
Says the person who just spent 2,000-plus words overthinking it.
It might be true that I’m destined to be the harried-looking mother juggling a baby in a wagon, two dogs and the last remaining shreds of my sanity all at the same time. But there are other identities I don’t need to fear losing.
The other day one of my middle school colleagues sent this reply to an email I’d sent:
“You should be a writer. Between this email and your documentation of when your children are sick (and emitting all sorts of pre-coronavirus-like symptoms) I feel like you could have an anonymous blog of life as a parent working in a middle school… In fact, you could title it ‘lowly bathroom escort’! or ‘already farted on twice’*… I see a future in writing for you.”
When I first read the response, I couldn’t decide whether he was messing with me. Like, had another teacher already told him I had a blog on which I wrote about life as a parent who (more recently) worked at a middle school?
Turns out no. He had no idea about it. He was just basing his suggestion on en email or two I’d written when I called out of school because of sick kids.
His response offered one of those moments of clarity. Just like when the other teacher called me a “professional writer.” It doesn’t matter that I fret and fuss over questions of identity and what I do in this life. Apparently, the person I am called to be is as obvious as the words printed on this screen.
And even if I weren’t a writer or an instructional assistant at a middle school or mother or a former newspaper editor or… or … or. It’s OK.
As we move forward as a global community, the most important designation we can give ourselves isn’t about our lives as beautiful and unique snowflakes.
I just listened to an interview with Jill Tarter, the person Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact” was based on. She works for SETI- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
The thing that stuck out to me during the interview was how for homework, she asks her students is to change their profiles on social media so the first thing they share about themselves is the word “Earthling.”
“I really like the potential of SETI for changing people’s perspective and trivializing the differences among humans, differences that we’re so willing to shed blood over, when, indeed, we are all human; we are all earthlings. We are all the same, compared to something else. And if you see yourself as an earthling before you see yourself as a Californian, then I think that sets the stage for tackling really difficult challenges on a global scale,” she said
Just that. Earthling.
And I kind of love that. Because it really boils away all the other designations into the one that matters the most. And it’s unifying. And elegant in its simplicity.
As it turns out, none of us need to keep looking for our place at the table, or our place on this planet for that matter. We already have it, just by setting our feet down in the warm soil on this beautiful blue dot.
* “Lowly bathroom escort” is in reference to one of my unofficial duties at school. (*hehe doodies hehe*). Some of our middle school friends need to be escorted to the bathroom by an adult to ensure that they return to class. I’m that adult. “Already farted on twice” is in reference to the time a student farted on me … twice.