My Friday nights revolve around marching band now, so I find myself doing something I’ve never done in my nearly two decades of teaching: attending high school football games. I’m the least-sports-interested person you will ever meet and genuinely forget to look at the scoreboard. But admittedly there is something exciting and oddly comforting about the beat of marching drums held against a breeze and a glowing sunset beyond the trees of a high school stadium. I get to watch my son, in the midst of a crowd of inclusive kids, building a life beyond me. And after a decade, we have been here long enough that every dozen people or so, I see a familiar face in the crowd and wave hello. Community is such a comfort.
Last Friday night, I was at the parent volunteer table that was assigned the task of feeding band and drill team kids when they got off the field. Over a hundred of them, all hungry, waiting patiently while a few of us moved them through an assembly line, crossing names off the list, calling out their specific pre-order to the person behind me, then passing the food and drink forward to the kids. I left the game at 11pm, an hour I’d prefer to be in bed on a Friday, with a stack of garment bags draped over my arm because I signed up for washing duties to clean a few uniforms and then return them at the midweek practice.
A few days before, I’d participated in an afternoon Zoom call with the League of Women Voters after I agreed to sponsor Model Congress because I caved when the student leaders came to me desperate for a faculty advisor. We talked about opportunities for civic engagement for high schoolers and ways they can assist in voter registration drives and partner with the organization to learn the ropes of lobbying. The two women on the call were volunteers with full lives of their own just like the rest of us. It occurred to me as we were talking, just as it echoed for me again in the food assembly line Friday night, how much of our lives run on the fuel of volunteers, and how in almost every instance these volunteer initiatives are efficient and sophisticated and masterfully organized by women. I was just doing the easy part of giving up ninety minutes of my night to cross student names off a list and pass out food, but someone had to collect the yearly dues for that to happen, take the order weeks ago, handle logistics like how many hot dogs we needed vs how many pizza slices or hamburgers, organize food preparation and pick up, and then instruct volunteers like me on what to do. Funny how we are told leadership is a man’s job, but every leader I see in my community is a woman wearing ten other hats at the same time.
There’s an elementary school gymnasium in my hometown that was built in the 1950’s with the hands of community volunteers. My grandfather helped build it, beam by beam and nail by nail, and then he spent years attending basketball games and school meetings inside of it when my mom was growing up. Before redistricting, I went to school there and sang songs on the same little stage he helped construct. It’s weird to think about now, in an age when school construction is a multi-million dollar affair with bids from big contractors. (The county renovated it two years ago and thankfully left it standing for history’s sake.) I haven’t thought about that old gymnasium in decades, and I was probably nine years old the last time I walked through its doors. But I can still hear the squeak of sneakers on the shiny floors and the echo of the ceilings with traces of all the kids who ran in and out of it for decades. I’m jealous of the volunteers who built that gym and have a tangible view of what they’ve done and an assurance it stood for years and is still standing. So much community work is intangible and just becomes a memory stamp of a moment or a production that came and went. But it still feels good to roll up my sleeves and pitch in, to make something that matters in the moment.
We are always building something, aren’t we? Building lives and communities we have to live within. Building dreams, creating a life with the raw materials we are given, however imperfect they may seem. None of the materials I have are exactly what I expected them to be, but I’m still building. It reminds me of those famous opening lines in Their Eyes Were Watching God about how men are always looking beyond the shore and waiting for their ship to come in, but “women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” The dream is the truth is a phrase I need to remember more often. The truth of my life is that it’s overflowing right now, but what a dream to be here in spaces and communities where I can help. Sometimes I forget that. All of these tasks that fill my days are not without a purpose.
Like most writing I do lately, these words were written in bits and pieces and stolen moments. Ideas land in my head as I’m driving or standing at the sink washing dishes, and I tell them to wait until I find a minute to write them down. My house often sounds like such a cacophony. Electric guitar through the wall of my son’s bedroom, tween girl squeals from neighborhood friends behind my daughter’s closed door upstairs, the dog begging me for a walk, the dryer buzzing for me to fold laundry, audiobooks in my ears. We hear the term juggling to describe the lives of working parents, and it certainly feels that way most of the time. But years ago I heard the term composing instead, and it stuck with me. Maybe it’s a cacophony sometimes, but all symphonies seem that way when you’re in the midst of composing them. I’m finally beginning to hear the melody behind this score I’ve been composing for years. I haven’t just been checking lists of Sisyphean tasks, even if it did feel that way sometimes. It turns out all that time, I was building a life.
I’m acutely aware that there aren’t many years left when my life will look like this; I have four years left with my son in my home and six with my daughter. I’ll mother them long after that, but not with the close proximity I have now. My life, especially in these last few precious years, is committed to them, organized around them, and I cannot fathom making a major life decision without their support and well being at the very center of it. But I know one day that will be different. My days are so full that I can only think about the here and now, or at most, what’s needed for next week. But somewhere in the back of my head, a blurry filmstrip of my future is playing, and it nudges me like an ache of nostalgia for a place I haven’t been yet. I’m aware that when they leave, it will surely feel like the floor beneath me has disappeared, but likewise the ceiling of my life will shatter as well. What will I do and where will I go? I cannot pretend to know, but I’ve started to think about it every now and then, even when I’m trying not to. It’s unfathomable to imagine making major decisions without them at the center because right now I never would, but soon enough a day is coming when I can. Every now and then, I’ll have a moment of panic wondering if I’m doing the right things now to prepare for that time. But if the life I’m living now is one I love, I’m going to trust that’s enough to bring me to a future that belongs to me.
Though I’m supposed to hold off on specific announcements until they publicize the award on social media, I got some welcome news a couple of weeks ago that I received a scholarship to a literary seminar I wanted so badly to attend. I applied a few months prior with high hopes, but I didn’t expect to get it, so the news came as a fun surprise. In their congratulatory email, they asked for a brief bio and headshot to place in the program given to attendees, and it was challenging for me to write a bio for this, even though I’ve done it repeatedly for writing publications. The scholarships are only for teachers and librarians, and the focus is on that piece of my life, but writing and teaching are intertwined in ways it’s hard for me to pry apart. As I tried to distill a winding twenty-year career path in three sentences, I thought about that useful advice I’ve heard before: You aren’t building a career; you’re building a life. Lately I find myself in these moments when it hits me that I’ve built a whole life. I am suddenly here, in the fullness of it. Not looking forward much yet, and no time to look back. Perhaps for some people, midlife gives them exactly the life they planned, but not for me. I’ve just taken one intuitive turn after another, filling my hours with what fills me, never aiming for some magic finish line, so now it feels like I’m wandering around inside this house I’ve constructed without a blueprint, and I’m relieved to find I like it here.
If I listen to the world, I worry about the long list of hopes and desires I can’t get to yet or the terror of aging that lies ahead when I’ll find myself past my prime. But what if that’s not the way it is? What if the dream is the truth? I will make a way with whatever I’m given. I fear aging less than I once did because I finally fully trust myself. As I sat down this morning to try and finish these disjointed ideas, I vaguely remembered an Alice Walker quote I read years ago, so I looked it up. Sure enough, she says what I’ve been trying to say but better.
“Look closely at the present you are constructing; it should look like the future you are dreaming.”
Perhaps that is true for both our own individual lives and the collective communities we belong to. There is no way to get there without doing the work of here. We are always living in only this moment anyway. I look forward to a time when I’ll have fewer tasks crowding my days, but also I love these days. Both of those things are true. And truthfully, if I can do work that matters and feel like a valuable part of a community in the decades to come, what can be better than that? Nothing really. There is no finish line. I am already here.
I have no blueprint, but I lean in where it feels right and roll up my sleeves to do the work in front of me. This thing I’m composing is beginning to sound like a melody that will carry me forward to whatever lies ahead. But for now, two kids are sleeping upstairs, sun pours through the kitchen window, coffee is brewing, and there’s a long list of things to do. I’m not waiting on my ship to come in. The joy is in the work.
This was such a beautiful essay. Thank you. I hardly ever do this but I copied and pasted one of these paragraphs to save for later and come back to again -- the part about composing rather than juggling. I love that.
This is very true for me, too, and captures this new framework of mind: “I’m acutely aware that there aren’t many years left when my life will look like this; I have four years left with my son in my home and six with my daughter. I’ll mother them long after that, but not with the close proximity I have now. My life, especially in these last few precious years, is committed to them, organized around them, and I cannot fathom making a major life decision without their support and well being at the very center of it.”