Twelve Months and Three Backpacks

We went back to school shopping yesterday and it wiped me out. Three kids, multiple stores, multiple lists, everybody needing something different and nobody agreeing on anything. By the time we got home I was frustrated and done.

Somewhere in the middle of putting it all away I realized that last year we never did this at all.

I ordered Maddie's shoes online. That was back to school shopping in August of last year, and it wasn't because I was being efficient. It was because getting her into a store was more than either of us could handle and I knew it, so I didn't even ask her.

She was sick last year, and she was miserable, and she wanted nothing to do with school. I couldn't really blame her. Meanwhile Allie was starting kindergarten and could not wait to get on that bus with the big kids, and Liv was doing what Liv does, floating through, thrilled about her friends and entirely uninterested in the schoolwork portion of the program. So there was joy in the house. There was just also something very wrong underneath it that I was managing in the quiet spaces between everything else.

I don't think I understood how bad it had gotten until we went to New Hampshire a few weeks ago and Maddie spent the entire trip in the water, hours at a time, wanting to go out on the tube and then wanting to go again and then wanting the boat to go faster than it was already going. She could not get enough of it.

And then somebody pointed out that last year she barely went in at all, and the little bit of tubing she did was slow and steady because slow and steady was all her body could handle.

I knew that, obviously. I was there for it. But hearing somebody say it out loud while I was standing in the same spot a year later, watching her hang off the back of a boat asking for more speed, hit me differently than remembering it on my own ever had.

Last year in New Hampshire we were still four weeks out from things hitting crisis level and I had no idea. I thought I was already in the hard part.

Four weeks later I took a leave from work.

That was the decision I didn't want to make and then had to make anyway. I needed to be able to pick up the phone when the school called, which some days was more than once, and I needed to be able to get her when she needed to be gotten, and I needed to be at the appointments, and there was no version of that where I also kept doing everything else at the same time.

Work was its own kind of bad by then, and I'll be honest that I told myself the leave was about Maddie, and it was, but it wasn't only that. I went back and forth for a long time about whether to stay or go. I eventually left, and I left for more reasons than the job. I'm not going to get into all of that here. Some of it isn't only mine to tell and some of it I'm still writing about somewhere else.

Maddie is going into seventh grade now. She is not thrilled about it, because she is twelve, but she is healthy and she is doing so well and I could not ask for one more thing than that. Allie is a first grader who still thinks the learning part is actually the best part of the whole operation. Livie is still floating and I hope she never stops.

And I'm leaving for Washington in a few weeks.

Last year at this time I genuinely didn't know if I was going to make that trip. I remember signing up for it and I remember being so excited, and then things with Maddie got bad enough that I almost didn't go. They leveled out just enough that I decided to, and I went, and while I was gone she went into crisis. I've carried that around since.

This year there's none of that. No going back and forth with myself, no bargaining, no half of my brain sitting in Connecticut waiting for the phone to ring. I get to go and actually be there for what I'm there for.

I write about leadership and steadiness and capacity, so I want to be careful that nobody reads this and thinks I've arrived somewhere, because I haven't. Somewhere in the last several months I also became the bookkeeper for three separate entities, which was not a job anybody gave me so much as a job I took because I couldn't stand not knowing how the numbers worked. I do the books for Kyle's contracting business, where everything has to be tied back to a specific job or you can't answer the only question that matters, which is whether you made money on that one. I do them for Leaders on Edge. And I do them for the foundation, which is a nonprofit and therefore an entirely different animal with restricted funds and functional expenses and its own filing at the end of it all. Three sets of rules, three ways of being wrong, and the sum total of my formal training is one intro to accounting course I took during my business degree. So no, I have not figured anything out. I have a job, a company, a foundation, a memoir, three sets of books I only half understand, and a house that always needs something.

But I have peace, and it took a long time to get here.

I'm happy on the good days and I'm happy on the bad days too, and I did not see that coming. Every hard thing in the last year turned into something I needed to become whoever it is I'm still becoming.

Last August I was ordering shoes online because a store was too much for my kid.

This week I was exhausted in a checkout line listening to that same kid tell her sister that a color wasn't for her.

I'll take it.