Not Yet But Maybe Soon
One of the things I like least about distance learning is that I get to hear how my kids talk about our family in class. Every parent knows that moment. The one where your kid says the true, but most embarrassing thing you could imagine.
“My mommy’s favorite drink is wine!”
“My dad goes to work and pushes buttons all day!”
“We watched this movie over the weekend and the guy in it said a bad word and my mom said we shouldn’t be watching it but we did anyway.”
I just got out of the girls room to give Rowan some vital supplies and heard Willow telling her teacher all about her mom who is an author, well an author for grown-up books with bad words in them sometimes, but how her mom the author should come and talk about how to be an author to the class. On the one hand, that’s amazing. I want my kids to know what I do and be proud of their mom. On the other hand, I’m mortified. All of my insecurities come out and start playing their same old tunes. (In my head this appears as a very loud mariachi band for some reason.) Am I an author? No one wants to publish me. Why did I waste so many hours of my life of this book? Does the world really need another me writing silly stories?
There’s something difficult about being in the state of “not yet but maybe soon”. I grew up in a world where, whether or not it was accurate, there was a way life went. You’re a kid. You grow up. You maybe go to college, maybe learn a trade, and then you get a job and get married. If you’re a woman, you have a couple of kids, work some sort of part time or very flexible full-time career until they are school-age, then you go back full time, work your way up whatever career ladder you have, retire, drive off into the sunset. If you’re a man, you pay your dues, prove company loyalty and eventually retire with a pension and drive off into the sunset.
This isn’t that world any more. I’m not even entirely sure that story was true when I was a kid, but it’s definitely not true now. People move around jobs a lot. People move around the country a lot. I graduated college one year before the 2008 recession and was lucky enough to get a job. I saw my peers struggle to find work in the middle of a recession and we’re watching it all happen again now. There is no “way life goes” anymore. In many ways, that’s freeing. So many more possibilities. But it’s also terrifying. It’s hard to know where you are without those familiar guideposts.
When the twins were in first grade, I was helping out with a pizza party and I met another mom who I had known of, but never actually talked to. (Fun fact: When your kid has type 1 diabetes, you end up helping at a lot of pizza parties, cookie decorating tables, and popsicle days!) This mom was, and is, intimidating. She is fierce, straightforward, beautiful and has a high powered job at Microsoft. So when she asked me what I did, I went into this long-winded anxiety driven answer about how I was working on this book, and it was about community, and about these values, and I knew I’d have to self-publish but that was ok because it was really good practice to just keep writing, and on and on and on. Finally, I stopped talking and this fierce, strong woman looked me dead in the eye and asked, “Why didn’t you just say you were an author?”
I decided right then that I wanted her to be my friend. I needed someone who could cut through my bullshit and all of that annoying anxiety. Because maybe the reality is that I’m not in a a “not yet but maybe soon” place, I’m in a “yes now, but even more so later”. There’s no clear path anymore, but it doesn’t mean I’m not traveling in the right direction.
What new paths are you forging for yourself today? What makes you feel like an imposter but is just your insecurities playing those same old tunes?
