Last week I received emails from two people asking me to apply for two different social work jobs. Both of them were appealing; one was very full-time, and in Baltimore. I gave this some thought, and came up with a few reassuring conclusions: there are indeed jobs out there I could be passionate about and engaged in, at last I am establishing some connections around here, and finally, I'm not ready to leave my family for fifty or sixty hours a week. Not even close, I explained to my mom. And miss all this? It might be right someday, but that day isn't coming very soon.
It was good to know those things last week. But today I hit a wall. If you read my last post, you might have already seen the looming shadow of this particular wall of dirty, gritty, solid bricks. I slammed into it this afternoon after a day of tantrums. I thought to myself: full time? Yes. I'll take it. Right now, please. Sixty hours a week spent with rational adults who only ask once, who get into and out of cars without assistance or coaxing, who zip their own coats, who have learned to refrain from bursting into tears if it's time to go and they don't want to, who say please and thank you without prompts, and who don't pee in their pants? Not much, anyway? In a flash I saw myself re-oriented to working, complete with urgency, deadlines, full-time child care, and a robust sense of independent adult identity. As I hung limply over the car door in the school parking lot, watching Gabriel put on his screw-you-world toddler show (in this act, refusing to get in his seat) and Frances yelping over a stuck coat zipper and tangled backpack strap, that alternate universe looked pretty darn good.
We grumpy three came home. The children hurled demands in my direction. I gritted my teeth, reminded them of their manners, and stewed. As I made dinner, they began some elaborate pretend game with tinker toys near my feet in the kitchen that erupted into low level conflict every few minutes. My inner simmer began to bubble more violently. What was I doing hanging out with these irritating small people, anyway? Then Frances began to tap my arm insistently, and said: pause button.
That's most often used in our house to indicate a break in the pretend game, as in, "pause button. We're not alligators right now, we're just Frances and Gabriel. Mama, what do alligators really eat?" before getting an answer, then jumping back in the game with both feet. Or all four, as the case may be.
I stopped chopping garlic and turned toward the source of the tapping, which was a small person who weighs in at forty-two pounds and has almost embarrassingly wide, ardent eyes when in the heat of pretending. She repeated: Pause button, Mama. Mama, we're doing a talent show and there are 7,000 people in the audience!! Isn't that a lot? 7,000 people are watching us right now!
Then she burst back onto the talent show stage, and I began to listen to her play the MC, the performers, the encouraging director/partner to Gabriel (or whatever his stage name was), who was utterly oblivious to the 7,000 people before him and yet pretty happy to go along for the ride. Get this. I felt a new wave of irritation towards these children of mine - because it is impossible to stay mad at them.
I had been getting attached to being pissed off, because it kept the normally open, breezy doorway between us tightly shut. It allowed me to embrace the idea of leaving those irrational, adorable, crazy-making kids and finding some professional certainty and path to follow. Full disclosure here: I received my first official rejection a couple of days ago, for an article I submitted to a magazine I like very much. I've been tentatively trying on this writer identity of late. Sometimes it feels great. Sometimes it's more like selecting a pair of jeans that look just right on the rack, only to discover in the cruel fluorescent dressing room light that they cannot under any circumstances be coaxed past my hips. Forget about zipping them up.
So my funk isn't entirely due to annoying kid behaviors (though the tantrums haven't helped). I still work two days a week, with a very lovely group of dedicated people. I am grateful for the learning I have been able to do, not to mention the flexibility of the job. But the fact of it does not settle my stirred-up feeling that ebbs and flows but never quite goes away: what shall I do? Who shall I be?
The only known part of the equation is my family. I can't fool myself. I am called to spend a lot more than breakfast and bath time with my babies. Love and hate are part of all intimate relationships, right? Taking care of small children is a particularly intense experience of intimacy; I must cycle through love and hate countless times a day. This morning my heart melted into a puddle watching Gabriel play. This afternoon I could have killed him.
In my old job, I did my best to walk with the poor. I shared their feelings with them; I tolerated their painful inner lives so that they might learn to do the same. It's not so different now. I walk with the small. Sponge that I am, I share their feelings with them. On a good day, I can tolerate and contain all those extremes of emotion, and hopefully that will help them learn that it is safe to feel it all, to let the world in. They won't break. On a bad day, I need a little help remembering that despite uncertainty, frustration, loneliness, and shaky confidence, neither will I.
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