I'm Fine and Neither Are You(4)

I had never wanted out back then.



I was thinking about this on my way to work as the driver behind me began honking like a maniac. As my eyes refocused, I realized I had drifted a teensy bit out of my lane. But it wasn’t as though I had swerved to the other side of the road while texting and driving. And at least I had not been fantasizing about making not-so-sweet love to a stranger, as I sometimes did during my commute or while I pretended to watch Stevie clod-hop her way through ballet practice.

The driver who had been tailing me skidded into the next lane and flashed me the finger. Always eager to demonstrate my black belt in passive aggression, I gave him my best pageant wave and zipped past him.

The drive from my house to the development office at the far end of the medical campus was just three miles, but it took twelve to twenty excruciating minutes to get there depending on what time I left and how many roads were closed. Sanjay was constantly telling me to bike—it would be faster and good for me, he argued. He was probably right, but I was afraid of navigating traffic on two wheels and did not want to give my husband an opportunity to sleep with other women after I was flattened by a truck.

I’m grateful to have a job, I reminded myself as I began a claustrophobic spiral through the employee parking garage. Even at 8:32 in the morning, the only spots left were for electric cars. I pulled my gas-guzzler into one of them and scribbled a note on a piece of paper explaining that I had circled the whole garage to no avail and had to get to a nine o’clock meeting.

I am grateful to have transportation, I thought as part of the windshield wiper came flying off when I lifted it to tuck the note beneath it. I sighed, picked the rubber strip up off the pavement, and tossed it on the hood so I could deal with it . . . Tomorrow! I thought, recalling the Frog and Toad book I’d read to Miles and Stevie the night before. I will do it tomorrow!

As a child, I had loved the way books transported me into another world. As an adult, that magic had not worn off, and Frog and Toad remained my favorite children’s book characters. Jenny adored them, too, and no surprise—she was so clearly Frog to my Toad. Reminding myself I was thankful for the very things that were irritating me was a move stolen straight from her website, Sweet Things.

Just the week before, she had posted about how she was anxious for Matt to get home from his latest business trip. She had paired the post with funny pictures of her staring at herself in the mirror, cursing the fact that she spent her teens coated in baby oil instead of sunscreen. She was prone to these kinds of corrosive thoughts when she was alone too long, she said.

It was only after she reminded herself she was grateful for Matt’s position at a small venture capital firm—which kept him on the road for at least half the month—that she had immediately realized that all of her best ideas were the result of, as she had written, “the mental space that comes from being by yourself for stretches of time.”

I wouldn’t know. Since Sanjay worked from home (and lately he was working more, I had to admit), the only alone time I had was in the car. Yet the point stood: gratitude was at least mildly effective. And on a day like this one, I needed to remind myself that there was a good reason a sane person would pull herself out of bed at the crack of dawn, spend all of her waking hours tending to the needs of other people, and then do it again and again and again.

It was a labor of love. Or something like that.



“Morning, Penny.”

I hadn’t yet turned my computer on when Russ came barging into my office. It was a luxury having an entire windowless, shoebox-sized office to myself. Especially since it was rumored that soon we would all be working side by side at long tables so we could collaborate—or however the university would fictionalize the latest cost-reduction initiative.

As long as I had a door, however, I expected Russ to knock before throwing it open.

“I didn’t mean to spook you,” he said, sitting on the edge of my desk.

I glanced pointedly at the chair across from my own. “Who said I’m spooked?”

“Baby keep you up last night?” he said, looking down at me. I would never understand how a man who spent hours on his pecs each week could so blatantly fail to address his nose hair situation. Russ was the co-director of medical development—a title that had been created just for him after he protested when I was promoted to the same position first. However, he was sharp as a scythe and had taught me a lot about the art of closing a difficult “give,” as we referred to charitable donations made to the university’s hospital and medical school. As such, I tolerated more of his antics than I probably should have.

“He’s six , Russell. So no, he did not,” I said, as though my champion sleeper of an infant had not evolved into an elementary-aged insomniac with a chronic bedwetting problem. Sanjay felt this was the result of my coddling Miles; he said I had created a reward system in which our child was given attention and affection in exchange for destroying any semblance of REM sleep I might have otherwise enjoyed. I didn’t know what else to do—I couldn’t lock him in his room and insist he roll around on wet sheets until morning. And Sanjay was such a heavy sleeper that by the time he was conscious enough to be of any use, I was already wide awake and finished with putting Miles back to bed.

Russ regarded me skeptically. “You just look tired.”

I leaned back in my chair to escape the cloud of his coffee breath. “You know when you say that you’re basically telling someone they look awful, right?”