what the living do
No Kings Day in DC and a summer of waiting
Last Thursday I was on a plane bound for DC on a trip planned long before Trump’s birthday military parade. I was tagging along with my boyfriend (I’m 44 years old. Can we invent a better word?) and his young son. We’d had big plans to see museums and catch up with friends who live there, but we both worried as we packed that the parade would dominate the trip and leave us feeling uneasy or unsafe.
Like most of American life right now, the political spectacle boiled in the background where we were aware of it but not totally derailed by it. We had dinner along the wharf on Thursday night, strolling back to the hotel with ice cream as we watched the sun go down along the water’s edge.The wait staff who served us were all wearing matching Pride month shirts, and the city seemed mostly untouched by political madness. The next day, we walked to the Washington Monument and the White House, but there were so many barricades up that it impeded the view. We busied ourselves in museums all day and caught up with an old friend of mine that night over dinner. Then Saturday we just tried our best to avoid the parade by paying a visit to the Planet Word museum and catching up with friends at Union Market.
We did see military helicopters flying over on Saturday night and watched troops in a long line outside our hotel where they appeared to be staying in a building with port-a-potties lined up beside it. But otherwise, the trip was completely unbothered by the spectacle we feared would derail the whole thing. This keeps happening in political life lately– the thing I fear is not always the thing that happens, but then there’s an approaching specter of something else I didn’t see coming which is not always any better.
Monday evening after I returned home, I caught up with friends – one of whom is parenting a trans child and the other who has family in Iran. There we sat at our table, mostly healthy and intact in that particular moment, but the push of political whims laid just beyond us, like a song we can hear but can’t name yet, fearing its arrival.
I’m not quite sure what to do with myself lately. I feel itchy and unsure of what’s unfolding in that larger scene while at the same time, trying to recover from intense professional burnout and stay afloat in the deep waters of parenting two teenagers. As it always goes, it’s only after you get still and quiet that you can really see the scope of what you experienced, and I think the school year that just ended took more out of me than I realized. Is it the ever-growing weight of teacher expectations that increase every year or the particular crossroads I’m at in my own life? I’m not sure the answer, but I know that I cannot push forward through the next academic year like I did the last. I’m an empty shell who craves a rebirth, and I want something to shift and feel different. I feel a little dead inside, not about any of my close relationships or my small orbit of home and family, but dead in that broader sense that leaves me asking where am I in time and space and what am I here for?
This is not a familiar feeling for me. I’m a meaning-maker who can find an inner compass in every moment, but I feel some sense of lost wandering when it comes to the broader themes in our society, and when your job is smack-dab in the middle of those broader themes, you find yourself afloat in an aimless ship. There’s a book about how to heal from burnout on my nightstand as I type this, and I’ve had it for months, but I haven’t cracked the cover yet. I’m currently losing myself in fiction instead. I need to wait it out for a while, unwind and let myself resettle before I try to fix whatever is wrong with me.
I’ll be okay in the end. I can feel one page turning to another and my life moving from the shape it was to a different shape. I have not been exactly here before, but I have been in moments similar to this, and I always emerge somewhere better and more true. When I’m in seasons like this, I get frustrated because I want my life to be that new thing already, and I want to see its specific shapes and hues, but I can’t quite see it yet. I’m waiting to become that person who will welcome the next season, but the molting required can feel slow and confusing.
As I write to you today, I don’t have any wisdom to relay, but this is just to say I am still here, trying to grasp whatever thread I can find to lead me to the next page. Spending my days with teenagers in the classroom and my other hours with two teenagers at home, I’m thinking a lot about what it must feel like to come of age in this time, how confusing it must be, and ways it is probably similar to and different from the turmoil of the 1960’s. But I am here too, in a different adolescence of sorts, not entirely immune from the feelings teenagers are feeling these days. In my mid-forties, I see clearly what parts of my life have run their course and what things need to change. This inner change against the backdrop of whatever chapter this is in America’s history is a very disorienting feeling.
In yoga class a few weeks ago, I had a guest teacher who pushed me to the very edge of what I could do and then slowed us down in the middle of the practice to gather strength for the second half of the hour. As I sat in child’s pose, she said Space is the container of all transformation, and that line has been running in my mind ever since like a mantra. Sometimes your life is quiet on the outside, but there is an inner storm brewing that leads to real transformation. All I need is space and assurance that the path will reveal itself when I’m ready to see it. Maybe that’s the way to move forward to whatever is coming with direction and intention. What if I began everyday by asking myself that simple question— What would give me a little more space right now?
I could make the list and check it off as these summer days dwindle: dog walks in the morning before it gets hot, watching rain drops splash on the patio, watermelon with flaky salt, purging my closet of all the things I once loved but don’t anymore, putting my phone away and ignoring news alerts, planning road trips with my kids, clipping backyard flowers to bring them to the dinner table, reading books because I love them and not because I aim to teach them, leaning on people who are willing to stand firmly for me as I rest and wait.
The usual life interruptions have hit me hard lately. In the past three weeks, I’ve had a compromised debit card I had to deal with, a broken garbage disposal, and a broken AC unit. Last night, my garage door wouldn’t close, and after trying all of my usual tricks (it’s finicky and we have a history), I reached out to the repairman I’ve used once before. It’s hard to find space for bigger questions among the piles of what it takes to live a life. As I was counting all the annoying things that have gone wrong, I remembered that Marie Howe poem “What The Living Do” — a poem I love so much that turned me on to her work years ago for the first time. It’s such a easy thing to forget, in the debris of life and the worries we shovel like dirt inside our minds. I’m reading Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible right now (beautiful read but amplifying the pressures of a dying planet and the conflict faced by adolescents in our age), and there’s a line in that book that echoes Howe’s ideas, too. The teenaged narrator says, “I felt an itch and thought, Is there a tick crawling on me? Right this minute? Burrowing into my skin? And then I thought, Wait. Forget the tick. Why are we always complaining? We get to be alive.”
Get to be alive. A fact so searing in its simplicity that we forget that simple truth. I get to be alive. To fly on a plane to a city that isn’t mine, to feel annoyed at the pulse of politics impeding my thoughts, to swat mosquitos on my back patio, to worry about how to pay for a broken AC, to take out the trash and vacuum the floor, to welcome an extra kid at the dinner table even when that means stretching a planned dinner to accommodate an extra appetite, to sweat in the summer heat and lament that it’s raining yet again. This is what the living do. I get to be alive and feel itchy and crave change, to move from one shape to another, and to let the path reveal itself to me when it’s ready.
Very relatable. Thanks for putting my feelings into words.
Once again, I feel you’re speaking my jumbled thoughts. I am in still burnout and limbo. I retired two years ago after 26 years teaching high school math, most of those years as a solo parent. But I didn’t really retire from schools until a year ago since I did 8 months of long-term subbing for my former department, begrudgingly since they were desperate. I’m supposed to be building my own business as a home organizer and I do have some clients and gratefully a partial pension that pays for housing at least. But most days in my unstructured time, I feel adrift. I know the marketing and networking steps I need to take to find more clients but rarely motivate myself to do them. So instead of hustling like all of the entrepreneurial talking heads tell me to do, I read too many substacks and too many novels and watch too much Britbox and then take on easy, quick-fix jobs like helping a friend clean houses, teaching jazzercise, and doing Door Dash deliveries, none of which pay even a third of what I bill my own clients at. I have a degree in mathematics and a masters in education, one child in college and the other in law school. But I’m burnt out and adrift and didn’t even recognize it until my cleaning company friend mentioned it the other day. Because I’m someone who has always pushed through and gotten done what needs to be done. You have to as a dedicated teacher and parent. But I’m a self-employed empty nester whose daily schedule revolves around a 15-year Chihuahua with bladder issues, dreaming of a European cafe lifestyle, writing my long overdue mystery novel, or exploring New Zealand more because both children now live there.
I know I’ll figure it out soon and create the lifestyle and business I retired from teaching to pursue but it’s comforting to hear that I’m not alone in my burnout and my itching for change. Thank you for your words today!