Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  My partner and I presented our work and then we hung on. We wanted to gauge where we were in this mix and hear what ideas the other teams were mining. Were we on the right track? Was there something we had missed? As I struggled to listen to the next team I could hear my kids—who were ten and twelve and knew better—getting into it three rooms away. Of course they were. I could hear them through a closed door. Of course I could.

  I thought what I always think: They are definitely going to live with another family after this call.

  Suddenly, screaming. Suddenly, yelling. Suddenly, was that crying? It was so high-pitched I couldn’t tell which kid it was or if it was even real. They loved doing that whole fake-cry thing with each other, and maybe that was the case this time. I was hoping so hard. But yeah, I don’t know, it was pretty loud and slightly hysterical.

  I put my phone on mute and kept trying to listen in. That’s when I heard the footsteps running down the hall toward my room.

  Goddamn it.

  My daughter came flying through the door, attempting to mouth something at me as I closed my eyes, violently shaking my head while waving my one free arm at her. I pointed at the direction of the living room.

  “Get out,” I mouthed back. “Get out of here.”

  Exasperated she ran back into the kitchen, grabbed a Post-it and quickly jotted a note down in pencil. She screeched back in and thrust the note at me, with a worried look on her face. At this point I could hear my son crying in the other room. The thought If everyone’s okay I’m going to kill them flashed in my head.

  Maybe you’re better than me, but I for one cannot read child-drafted notes and concentrate on an intricate forty-friggin’-person conference call at the same time.

  I put my index finger up in the international symbol of “Give your mother a goddamn minute,” and I tried to listen, unmute, say something on the call like, “Yup, okay, that timeline sounds good,” remute, then read the note that said in all caps “HE’S BLEEDING.”

  It had finally happened.

  The day had come.

  I left my room, still on the call, and made my way down the hallway to find my son splayed out on the couch surrounded by no fewer than fifty-five bloody tissues.

  I mouthed, “OH MY GOD!”

  She mouthed back at me, “I TOLD YOU!”

  He looked over at us with Kleenex stuffed up his nose and his face red and puffy from crying. But he also seemed to have calmed down. Given things didn’t seem to be at DEFCON Grab-Your-Jacket-We’re-Going-to-the-ER, I looked around, did an exaggerated shrug, and slowly backed away and down the hall while still listening to this pileup of a conference call.

  My daughter, incredulous, mouthed at me, “What?! He’s bleeding!”

  And I just looked at her and made a few emphatic gestures; I’m not even sure what they were or what they were supposed to mean. Looking back, I think I was just trying to confuse her to buy time.

  I was on that call for another thirty minutes. Thirty. More. Minutes. As I sat there, trapped, I wondered if my kids had packed up their belongings into old-timey bandannas on sticks and left me for good. As soon as the call was over, I raced out of my room, sliding on my socks Tom Cruise in Risky Business–style, exploding apologies.

  By that time, the storm was over. The tears had long since dried and so had the blood. Turns out when you’re wrestling with your sister on the couch, even though Mom probably wouldn’t want you guys doing that, like, at all, sometimes your face is going to meet your sister’s cement block of a knee and next thing you know, What’s up, Most Important Conference Call of Your Mother’s Life?

  “You told us never to interrupt you when you’re on the phone unless one of us is bleeding! He was bleeding!”

  I considered the overwhelming and irrefutable evidence and countered with, “I think you guys should be bleeding more than that. Like maybe a level of bleeding you can’t control on your own.”

  Utter silence as they sat there, stunned.

  “Are you serious?”

  I stand by it.

  My partner and I had our work shot down over and over again; almost all of us did. The focus of the work had also changed completely, away from women and toward something else. Something shinier, something futuristic. Women? So last year, so not #trending. But that’s how these things go. Work gets killed, directions change, you keep going. None of our ideas made it through to the final. I still don’t have a Super Bowl spot to my name.

  But for a time I was the coolest mom around, especially to my son, a Patriots fan. I was working on a Super Bowl commercial. And not just for any old thing, but for a car company. An American car company.

  Even when we watched the final spot during the Super Bowl and I said, “That’s where my commercial would’ve been,” it still somehow felt like the biggest thing I had ever done. Because as time goes on, it gets easier and easier to believe in never. When you are not twenty-five, not a man, not living in Brooklyn or Silver Lake or wherever the cool kids are living these days, when you are disappearing from the radar of American culture both at work and at large, it just gets easier to get the message.

  Because what are you going to do? You’re already tired. And you’re asking yourself all the time, Is it worth it? Do I still want to fight this fight? Do I even have any fight left in me? Or do I want to be with my kids and get by and do nothing all that great professionally? But also, why does having kids suddenly make me irrelevant? All these fucking dudes have kids.

  You just start to accept there are things that will never happen, things that have passed you by, things you’ll never achieve in a million years. You have plenty of evidence to support this line of thought. But then sometimes, out of nowhere, those things come. And you will find yourself doing the most unbelievable things. Like working on something, anything, to do with the Super Bowl. And you will say equally unbelievable things, like telling your children that maybe next time they should bleed just a little bit more.

  I Am the One Woman Who Has It All

  As an inhabitant of planet Earth, I’ve heard a lot of talk about “Can women really have it all?” or “You can have it all, just not all at the same time.” Well, guess what, everyone? You’re wrong! I do have it all. Me! I have all of it.

  I have two kids and the unspoken pressure to act like they don’t exist when I’m on a conference call.

  I have a professional mandate to know what’s happening in pop culture and an eleven-year-old who tells me “to stop trying to act so cool.”

  I have no problem lying about “having a meeting” when I’m with my kids and no problem lying to my kids about “needing to work” when I’m on Facebook.

  I have flexible morality and rigid immaturity.

  I have kids who have forced me to do everything in my life with greater efficiency and the professional assumption that I’m now less efficient after having kids.

  I have the beginnings of an elderly lady stoop and the unsightly chin and neck pimples of a fifteen-year-old.

  I have decades of professional experience and decades of life experience that tell me never to refer to myself as “seasoned.”

  I have pointless meetings at work and at home. Pointlessness is a key component of my brand.

  I have male colleagues who tell me I’m not aggressive enough and I’ll never get what I want out of my team and female colleagues who tell me I’m too aggressive and I make them sad.

  I have the perseverance to pump breast milk eleventy times a day while on a weeklong business trip and the denial of expensing the cost of shipping said breast milk home because most women would probably spend a week away from their four-month-old breastfed baby probably that would be pretty likely that it wouldn’t be work-related in any way OH MY GOD DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW VOLATILE I AM RIGHT NOW?

  I have righteous anger and more righteous anger. In fact, I have so much righteous anger do you think maybe I’m in the Bible?

  I have a delusion I’m in the Bible and the makings of a quite
popular secular martyr. Do you think maybe I’ll end up on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday?

  I have a fantasy I’ll end up on Super Soul Sunday and the deep knowledge that if I ever met Oprah I would definitely ask her for money, even though that is definitely not in keeping with the tone of Super Soul Sunday. Like, at all.

  I have breadwinner status and lead-parent status. I have so much status.

  I have the confidence to speak my mind, asking hard-hitting questions about the project I’m working on and the ability to keep my ears from bleeding when a roomful of male clients explain to me what I don’t understand about the female target audience.

  I have the ability to listen to your rah-rah, pro-family work-culture speech as if I’m hearing a fairy tale for the first time and a deep wellspring of cynicism that makes me want to pat you on the head for being so cute with the lying.

  I have pizza delivered and more pizza delivered. I have all the pizza.

  I have frustration and irritation. Actually those are pretty much the same thing.

  Hold up.

  Wait.

  Maybe I didn’t understand the question?

  Undone

  Yellow legal pads are where my lists live. The work list and school list, the house list and project list. Maybe because they’re humble and utilitarian, work in paper form. Or maybe I’m subconsciously lulled by their soft yellow, a sly message to slow down—to stop checking off and instead start checking in.

  I’ve been a list maker since I was a kid; that’s when it started, I realize now. I never appreciated what I accomplished each day, I only felt frustrated by what was left undone. Undone of course being the perfect word for my mental state related to my list-making habit. I am constantly undone by being undone.

  Although I now have fortyish years of evidence to the contrary, deep down I must believe that someday I will actually be done. I’ll look down and all I’ll see is a satisfying patchwork of crisscrosses and highlighter slashes.

  There will be nowhere left to drive, nothing to buy or sell, nothing that needs replacing. The dog will have enough food until the end of time, and every appliance we own will be in fine working order. No teeth will need to be cleaned or x-rayed, filled with fillings or slathered in throat-gurgling fluoride glop. Our weight, blood pressure, and general health will be excellent and unchanging (please, please, please). Children will not grow bigger or taller and therefore will never require new sneakers and socks, shirts or jackets. Their books will always be age-appropriate and perfectly challenging. We will never catch a cold. I will not slip on wet leaves in the woods and come crashing down on my ribs like I did that one time; there will be no medical bills. I will not workout or floss, because I am all done.

  Maybe normal people use lists as they’re meant to be used, as a daily reminder of things that should be taken care of somewhat soon. I don’t like to do things that make sense, so I use lists as a way of outlining how theoretically busy I am while also setting myself up for an infinity loop of self-loathing over my failure to get an impossible amount of things done.

  I remember when my daughter was a newborn, a miserable, always-screaming-in-my-face newborn, and my son was barely two years old. It was our first summer in our first home and to say there was no time for its upkeep would be like saying Grey Gardens felt a little lived-in.

  In our suburban neighborhood, houses were neatly parceled out with small backyards, shrubs were trimmed, and flowers freshly planted. That summer our yard grew wild. Country wild. To keep up the most base level of appearances, my husband would hurriedly run our lawn mower over our patchy front yard. But our backyard grew out of control, tall grass and weeds. Our dogs, also thoroughly neglected that summer, wore a path through the jungle to do what they needed to do. They must’ve felt like they were always on a great adventure, stalking squirrels and beetles in the outback.

  I remember standing in our kitchen, in front of the sink—bouncing my restless, crabby daughter as she struggled against my neck and chest, clobbering me with her tiny, little balled-up fists—while I peered across the street to the neatly manicured lawn of our retired neighbors. Their bright green and patterned grass like Astroturf and cheerful white planter boxes overflowing with red geraniums practically shouted, “What’s up, loser?” from across the street. Our neighbors were out there every day, tending, watering, trimming, and weeding. In the fever dream that is the first few weeks with a newborn, I watched them keep up appearances as I bounced and rocked, unshowered, unrested, and usually unfed.

  I tried to wrap my head around having that much free time or caring that much about my lawn and flowers. Or going to bed early and waking only once I felt rested. I imagined walking freely around a yard without another human fused to me, what it might feel like to swing both arms or bend over completely without fearing a baby would fall out of some sort of wrap contraption and right on to her head. It’s amazing I had been able to do those very things—thoughtlessly and without the proper amount of appreciation—all my life, and now they felt like the equivalent of a space mission.

  Although I felt ashamed of our unruly yard, by the end of the summer I felt grateful our neighbors had been right there, smack in my line of sight. Because every time I looked across the street, it reminded me this wouldn’t last. Our babies wouldn’t always be babies; our kids wouldn’t always be kids. For now, our house reflected the messy process of becoming a family of four. We were swamped with chaos and uncertainty that, at its root, somehow felt hopeful. We were saturated with physical closeness, with need. This was no place for to-do lists, because everything we needed to do was always right in front of, on, or next to us.

  Over the next couple of years, I realized lengthy to-do lists were a symbol of luxury—of having the time or money to do something, anything, outside the circle of one’s immediate needs. The temporary absence of my paper lists were also symbolic of something else that had gone missing—my mental list of things to fix, to make better, to push harder in my own life.

  While I’m sure the desire to improve, improve, improve loomed in me since I was a kid, it really caught fire when I started my career. I mean, obviously. Bosses, tasks, processes, projects, clients, office supplies, coffee, locations, deadlines, politics, career trajectories, bonuses or lack thereof, promotions, annual reviews, coworkers, HR, there is no shortage of things to get on your high horse about. No shortage of things that are inefficient, dumb, and in need of serious improvement.

  It was always like a vacation from panic for my husband when I was completely satisfied in a job, because those stretches were few and far between. Anywhere from three months to two years in a job would be followed with three to five years of pissing and moaning, burning out and freaking out. My next move always utterly unpredictable and not always sensible.

  One time I had had enough and quit on the spot, with no backup plan, no savings, no nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did stop at the store for beer on my way home. When Jon pulled up in front of our teeny-tiny rental house in Sellwood, Oregon, I stood outside on the front porch waiting. He got out of the car, the look on his face reflecting his confusion as to why I was standing there waiting for him to get out of his car.

  “I quit my job.”

  Without missing a beat or uttering a single word, he got back in the car, started it, and drove directly to the store for more beer and cigarettes. He had been with me long enough to know that just because something might prove catastrophic, didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it anyway.

  Our lives—as a couple, as a family—have always been governed by my dissatisfaction implosions. The lists were simply an attempt to supply answers to my endless questions: Was this my life? What was my next move? Why is this house so small? Is this all there is? What I’m saying is, I’m both a joy to be married to and a dream to manage.

  So when one child arrived and then another, the relief I felt at being released from my desire to upend things over and over again cannot be overstated. In fact, it was a release f
rom being able to plan anything at all. I had lost control, and no list on earth was going to change that. Like a sudden and slick ocean breeze snaking through an overheated cabin, everything cooled down. For the first time since I could remember I didn’t constantly wonder, Well, what’s next? but instead, How are we all going to get to the end of this day in one piece? There was no point in jotting down lists targeted at the future, because the future as a concept felt nonexistent. I was able to experience a little something called “being in the moment.” Maybe you’ve heard of it?

  It was a relief to no longer focus on myself, even if eating Wheat Thins and Hershey’s Miniatures for lunch might have taken that to the extreme. It was refreshing to get out of my own head and submerge myself in someone else’s world, try to crack what they needed, even if the inability of an infant and a toddler to communicate those needs drove me mad.

  Introspection is necessary, but it’s also exhausting. And the desire to improve is admirable, except when it renders you unable to appreciate anything about the life you already have.

  I suspected that once my kids were more independent the gears would again creak back into their relentless, familiar rhythm. I would once again start to wonder about my life, my choices, and my work. I would once again begin to think beyond today and into the threatening future. I would return to my search for what wasn’t working and what should be fixed. I would go back to looking forward instead of at everything and everyone that was right in front of me.

  I wish I could bottle the essence of that summer and those early years, the nowhere-but-here part. If you had told me then that I’d want to retain anything from those crushing minutes, hours, and days I would’ve thought you were two slices of bread short of a sandwich. But the window into everything being enough, me being enough, was precious and finite. The rest of it can still go—all those fluids and schedules, Cheerios in snack-size bags and cumulative gray-hair-and-wrinkle-causing fatigue. But not worrying about next week or next year because it might as well be a hundred years away? I would spritz it on my wrists like perfume.