It’s almost my birthday and I am thinking a lot, as one does when a birthday approaches, about everything. Asking a lot of questions.
I am thinking about why every book I read seems to contain a subtle but unmistakable link to the previous book I read, like a scene set in New Haven, Connecticut, or a young character hospitalized with a serious illness, or a political protest. Why are books about witches and witch trials so popular right now? Perhaps, or probably, because most men (and some women) have always been threatened by women who are strong and independent and powerful, and they still are. I have read a lot of books about the persecution of witches and they never fail to enrage me. Maybe I just want to be a witch. I also want to have to a Scottish accent. Or listen to Scottish accents. All day.
Books consume me these days. Reading always has, but lately novels are my means to escape from our ceaselessly corrosive culture. I can hardly stomach our society and the way it treats people–people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities. Basically anyone who isn’t Mitch McConnell or similar. Even though books I read have bad guys and characters have bad days and there is trauma and suffering there is also so much joy and redemption and humor and empathy and fascinating and strange and delightful people with whom I can immerse myself. Of course that good stuff exists in my real life too, but it’s not as reliably accessible. Reading is my vice and my virtue. The novels I read also help me understand why people can be such schmucks. But it doesn’t make their cruelty any easier to take.
I am thinking about earwax, and where it comes from, and where those teeny tiny flies that emerge from the drainage holes in the back of our bathroom sink come from. And how you wouldn’t want those flies to encounter your earwax. Why do the flies only appear in that bathroom? Do they have a purpose in life? If so, I am quashing that purpose. Sorry, little guys. Apparently as my birthday approaches, I am inclined to tie together loose threads. Sometimes they come unraveled again.
I am pretty sure I believe that people can change, but how much I am not sure. At the age I’m about to be tomorrow, I feel like what’s left for me to master is infinite and what I don’t understand is vast. Certainly there is plenty for me still to learn. But what’s my capacity to learn it? I played soccer last night, the second game in my 12th (?) season of playing in the Arlington Women’s Soccer League. I am fairly confident I’m never going to get any better at soccer. I would say I’m probably better than most people who have never played the game. But I am not as good as most of the women who play on my team or in our league. Admittedly, I do not practice outside of our games and I have not put time or energy into improving except for the simple fact that I am showing up and doing my best. And after all these years, I still have to remind myself every single Monday that showing up is enough.
Yesterday I was the guest speaker for a class in the school of public affairs at American University. My co-worker and friend teaches the class and invited me to talk about nonprofit communications. I love talking with students about writing and communicating, whether it’s elementary school kids at career day or college students. The crux of the conversation was that communication is all about choices. When you interview someone, you choose what to ask and how to ask it. When you write about the interview, you choose what facts to focus on and what to leave out. Your choices have immense power to influence the reader and their perception of the subject. When you’re doing nonprofit communications, you choose your audiences, and how you’re going to reach them, and what you want them to do. You can’t control what they do, but your choices can push them in one direction or another, if you make good ones. I told the class that usually the choices aren’t right or wrong, but they always matter.
In recent weeks I’ve visited a lot of college campuses. In addition to the class visit at AU, we spent our spring break touring colleges so my high school sophomore daughter can start thinking about what’s possible for her after she graduates. More choices. Big ones. Complicated choices. Seeing these colleges is exciting and also startling. I cannot quite comprehend that it’s been more than 25 years since I was one of those kids, at a point in my life when so many choices lay ahead of me–lavish, abundant possibilities. Even though I am only middle-aged now, I feel like there are so many choices behind me, so many doors closed, that I am unsure about what’s left. I have chosen my husband and we chose to have two children and we chose how to raise them. We chose where to live, and what jobs to have, and even though some of the small details may change, it feels like we’re pretty locked in to our current circumstances, for better or for worse. This is primarily because of bad choices, most of which are around money. My brain does not like to keep track of money, or calculate things, or hold onto numbers of any kind. I can’t even remember my license plate number. I think I have dyscalculia, although I’ve never been diagnosed, and people have made fun of me when I’ve brought it up.
Some part of me has always hoped that my financial foibles would be graciously overlooked because of my decency and tendency toward kindness. That I would be excused from my mistakes by virtue of my virtue. I don’t think it actually works that way.
When I was talking to the AU students, all of whom were taking notes (I hope, and not doing something else entirely) on their laptops, I kept thinking how I had to take notes by hand in college. And I went to college before ordinary people even had the internet! Not that it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a thing. Making choices was a whole different ball of wax before the Internet. I don’t know that we make any better choices now, we just make choices while information floods our brains. What did my brain used to be full of? Song lyrics? Hormones? Possibilities? Questions, for sure. That hasn’t changed.
What do I want from the rest of my life? More chocolate cake? Bigger muscles? The chance to hold more babies. Last week I interviewed four young women for a project for work. When I asked one of them–Patrese–to sign a consent form acknowledging that our interview would be recorded and excerpts from it posted online, she asked me to hold her baby. I was glad to. I hoisted the little girl onto my hip and talked with her about what her mom was doing. She played with the laminated card on which interview questions were printed and listened to the noise it made when she moved it around. She dropped it. I picked it up and handed it back to her. Several times. I continued to hold the little girl, who was wearing a denim jumper over her diaper, while we set up the camera and the lights and got Patrese set up with her mic. I bounced the baby while I interviewed her mom about how the pandemic affected her life and what she’s had to do as a result. I held her baby while I asked her about safety, and family, and the kind of world she would like to see her baby grow up in. By the time we finished talking, that little girl was fast asleep on my chest. I wondered if Patrese was going to take her back or if she was simply too relieved to have someone else holding her baby for a little while. I would’ve kept holding her too. But I handed her back, trying not to wake her up. I was thinking about all the ways the pandemic changed my life, which were different, but not entirely, from Patrese’s. I don’t know if those feelings– isolation and uncertainty, and that sense of being in survival mode–will ever truly go away, even when we’re surrounded by people and things are theoretically ok. Maybe it’s the uncertainty that haunts me the most. The constant grinding in my brain of questions that have no answers. Choices that may not be right or wrong but simply are. Maybe all I can ask for in the rest of my life is patience and the ability to take a few deep breaths and let the questions float away.
You Ask a Lot of Questions 