I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(19)

Three days after September 11, 2001, my boss asked me to accompany our chief operating officer across the street to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, where they needed to create a crisis communications plan to use in the event of biological terrorism.

“Why me?” I asked. I didn’t even work for the CDC—they were just our neighbors.

“They need someone who can understand what they’re saying and write fast, and I told them you could do it,” he said.

Me! They needed me. Because I was good at what I did. Something breathtakingly terrible had happened in the world and everyone felt helpless, but I could do a tiny thing to help. That felt like success, for a few days anyway.



* * *



As the “war on terror” raged, the world spun into a state of heightened unrest. The longer we lived, it seemed, the more terribly human beings treated each other. The nightly news became more frightening, not less. The planet suffered more, not less. And I felt more aimless at work, not less. The hits of success at my ACS job were regular and sweet, so why, when I got home at the end of the day, did I often feel as adrift as I did after a day at SuperBank? I waited for a sense of completion, the peace I expected from a job well done, but it didn’t come.

What did I think would happen? That I’d do the job for a few years and then they’d say, Well, cancer is over, you solved it. And then I’d do every other job in the world to finality, and every company on earth would eventually close because I finished everything? Step forward to accept your prize and be turned into a rainbow—the work of the universe is over!

For the first time in my life, I began to realize that I couldn’t reach that prize I was searching for, because there was no such prize. Not in these jobs, or in any job. I could plug away toward triumph and fulfillment, which shimmered on the road ahead, always so close, but no accomplishment would ever be the A+ I needed to feel I’d done enough. The best I could hope for was to make some small dent of impact on the ever-increasing mess of our world and to enjoy it for the fleeting moment it lasted.

What I’d learned about entropy came back to me: We are always moving deeper into chaos. That thought lodged in my soul and got stuck. What if this is it? I often thought. What if work is just a thing we do to distract ourselves from the fact that the world is falling apart? In that case, it doesn’t even matter what job you do or how well you do it. Why do any of us clock in and out every day? Is this why people take early retirement from their accounting firms and go work as fishing guides?



* * *



A month before I left to have my first child, I told my supervisors at ACS I wouldn’t be coming back. Take your maternity leave and get paid, they said. You might change your mind. I said no, I couldn’t take money from a nonprofit for a job I didn’t intend to return to. I wanted to be with my baby for a while, to figure out what parenthood was like and consider the future. I would always work in some capacity, I knew, but I needed to think about how. I needed to think about this:

All this time, I’d wanted to do a job so well that I’d feel done. I wanted to accomplish enough to be good enough. But if that wasn’t possible, then the very condition I’d been working so hard to avoid—being uncertain and unfinished—might be unavoidable. It might just be how life was, and everyone else had known it all along, like they all knew what a lobsterman was, and I’d been working my ass off like a mouse on a wheel, not realizing that I was running toward cheese that wasn’t even there.





This Guy


Hootie and the Blowfish played a concert in our college gymnasium. (Hellooooo, 1990s.) It was the last campus show they did before hitting the big time; the next night, they were on David Letterman. As they launched into the opening notes of their breakout hit, “Hold My Hand,” some inebriated boy off to the side of the speakers threw his hands into the air. “HOLD MY HAND!” he yelled. “HOLLLD MYYYYYY HAAAAAAAND!”

Who is that drunken fool? I wondered.

Ladies and gentlemen, that drunken fool is now the father of my children.

(For the record, he is not regularly drunken or foolish.)

If you met him, you would want to marry him. But you can’t, because I already did. You know how people say, “You just know,” and you roll your eyes and make that gagging motion with your finger in your mouth? Well, I just knew. We officially met my junior year, his senior year, a week or so post-Hootie. He walked over to my group of girlfriends where we were leaning up against a fence watching a soccer game and asked us, “So what are you all doing tonight?” We had plans to go to an off-campus house for a guy’s birthday party, so I said, “We’re going to Dan’s.”

“You’re going to dance?” He started dancing, waving his arms around in an approximation of a hula. Then he took my hand, lifted it over my head, and twirled me.



* * *



On one of our early dates, we were curled up on the sofa in his apartment watching a movie. I was in agonizing pain from monthly cramps. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it—nothing fans those sexy flames like period talk—but it had reached a truly distracting level of misery. Eventually I had to fess up as to why I couldn’t get comfortable. “You probably just need some naproxen,” he said. “I’ll go get some.” He paused the movie, put a blanket over my legs, and drove off to the pharmacy. When, upon his return, I marveled at his behavior, he explained that he’d grown up with a twin sister. “Girl stuff,” as he said, didn’t faze him.