the hunker down years

When I was a kid, not sure how old, I think the summer between 3rd and 4th grades before we moved overseas, I was visiting my great grandparents’ house in Wells, Nevada. I loved that house and still have dreams that take place there from time to time. I remember the eat-in kitchen so well (the nerve center of any home, right?), and how the main bedroom had doors to both it and the living area (or maybe it was another room...my memory is fuzzy all these decades later). The house was sort of circular in that way. During this one particular visit, with my brother and some of my maternal cousins there as well, I took a break on the couch in the living room. At one point, my face turned toward the back of the couch, I could hear someone at the doorway wondering out loud if I was asleep. I stayed quiet and still for some reason, pretending to be asleep, I’m not really sure why. Did I want them to try to wake me up? Did I really want to be left alone? Either way, the end result was that I missed out on dessert and, insatiable sweet tooth that I was and still am, this experience/memory haunted me for years. Why didn’t they at least check to see if I was truly asleep, whispering in my ear that dessert was ready. Just in case.

I’d kind of forgotten about this memory until recently because it just seems like such a perfect metaphor for middle age reflection, looking back on the potential of your younger self. I've spent most of my adult life mostly happily moving from one opportunity to another, embracing the hummingbird analogy before Liz Gilbert described it as such. Somewhere along the way, I think it was probably during grad school, I felt like I was finally finding my focus. I wanted to make more and better art. I wanted to show and maybe even sell my art. I wanted to help others develop their own creative practice. I wanted to teach. And I've already written on this blog about all the things other than teaching that I've done over the past 15+ years since grad school and my postgrad teaching fellowship ended.

I've been at my current day job nearly five years, the longest I've ever stayed in one role. The past year has been pretty stressful for various reasons. Concurrent with all this, I started contemplating just what was it I wanted to be when I grew up, and that lead me back to teaching. My goal out of grad school was to teach at the college level (hence pursuing the MFA, terminal degree for studio art), a dream I mostly abandoned after two years of applying to full-time gigs (I turned down a couple of adjunct opportunities because the pay was less than the cost of the part-time childcare needed to make the schedule work, which is a topic for a whole 'nother blog post). I started to wonder, now that I’ve been around elementary, middle, and high school kids because of my own growing children, if maybe teaching at the middle or high school level was what I wanted to do, after all.

At the beginning of the last school year I started volunteering every Monday morning in my daughter's 5th grade art class. I explored local single subject credential programs as well with an eye on teaching high or middle school art, in that order. To be honest, I wasn't super confident I'd still have a job after February, but when my role survived three rounds of layoffs, the April deadline for application materials, which would have required volunteer hours at a middle or high school, something I didn't have already, were simply too much for me to squeeze in on top of a full-time job and everything else. I decided to shelve the idea until this summer and hunker down a bit longer, counting my blessings that I still had a job that I've enjoyed enough to hang around this long.

But then my daughter's art teacher told me about a program to increase the number of art teachers in the county, teaching while pursuing the Career Technical Education credential. At last, I thought, I'm about to benefit from this thing I've heard about before: serendipity! I was accepted into the program, with a couple of weeks of professional development this summer and the program beginning in the fall, with the one significant caveat that in order to actually enroll in the program, you have to have a CTE gig lined up by the end of summer. If it sounds tricky to find a teaching job before you have the necessary credential, it is! I found ONE qualifying position in Alameda County. I applied, interviewed, and visited the school site to give a demo lesson over the span of just three business days. I then waited to hear back. And then I waited a week longer than I was originally told. And during this time, I started to secretly wish for rejection. Sure, part of this was fear—it would be a big transition and a big paycut and I was nervous about both—but part of this was legitimate hesitation that, while potentially a way to get back to teaching, this particular role wasn't really what I wanted to teach, and probably not worth such a significant life change. And I'll never know if I would have been offered the position since I withdrew my application at that time. Because what I've only recently come to understand about myself, and perhaps this is the downside of the lovely hummingbird analogy described above, is that I have a really hard time saying no when personally asked to do something, even if that thing isn't quite what I want, because I'm either seduced by the potential that opportunity represents (I'll do this thing I don't really want to do because maybe it'll lead to something I do want to do!) and/or I don't want to let someone down. (I missed out on dessert once, I'm not going to miss out on it again!) I also had to honestly reckon with the fact that part of what was seductive about pursuing this opportunity was, wow, what a great story it would be to find my way back to teaching after 15 years! I was so excited to finally prove to all my doubters that I wasn't actually a lost pigeon after all, to prove to them as much as to myself that the hummingbird approach works, that there is a pot of success at the end of the rainbow of failures.

Alas.

So here I am, early summer break, recommitting to my day job. I was honest with my manager at the time when I felt the transition was something I might actually pursue since there was a lot of potential movement internally as well and I was having a hard time faking it. But to be honest, I'm not sure I’d do that again. I thought they might fight to keep me; they did not. I felt rushed to make a decision because, frankly, they seemed eager to develop a transition plan. And I get it. In my performance review a few weeks later, which I wish was more than a 30-minute Zoom meeting that I could reference because now I’ve forgotten the exact language used, the sort of “if I can be honest with you” feedback, after otherwise mostly positive feedback, was that I should really think about what I want from this role in the near and not so near future because at times I seem a bit noncommittal, a bit wishy-washy about projects and potential opportunities that have come my way over the past few months. I should probably consider being a little more like a jackhammer (those were not the words/analogy used, of course, but in keeping with the typically rambling themes of this blog post).

This feedback had me shook for weeks. On the one hand, I feel like I’ve been working so hard for so much of my life, getting my first real job the summer between junior and senior years of high school, working three jobs my first year after high school, while attending community college full-time, barely able to pay my minimal expenses, and continuing to work 20-32 hours a week during the 5 ½ years it took me to finish my bachelor's degree. I worked throughout grad school, first in retail until I was eligible for more creatively aligned, campus-based roles like teaching assistant, studio monitor, and other opportunities more tied to my longer term goals post-MFA. I worked for two non-profit arts organizations simultaneously between college and grad school and took a really similar job to these after grad school, after my micro biz that I’d worked so hard to start and grow fizzled after I took a break with the arrival of baby #2. I accepted my current day job after failing to monetize any of the projects, podcast included, that I worked on between my former day job and this one. It was initially part-time and delightfully unrelated to anything I’d done before, allowing me time and mental energy to continue to push creative projects forward (until the pandemic started just six months later and I transitioned to full-time about a year after that). In short, I thought I'd made it pretty clear that yes, I'd like dessert, even if it means waking me up...if you get my meaning.

Anyway it’s just weird to feel like Sisphyus pushing that boulder up the hill for nearly three decades (it's a tired but apt metaphor), albeit in an at times haphazard way, only to be told you seem a little like a tumbleweed leaving your fate up to chance and circumstance. Not even a hummingbird, an actually super focused and incredibly hard working bird that eats WHILE FLAPPING ITS WINGS for crying out loud, who honestly isn’t that much different than a jackhammer if you really think about it (and a jackhammer isn’t even a bird so maybe not the greatest analogy after all, Liz!). 

On the other hand, she (my manager...and maybe Liz, too) was not entirely wrong, either. Has nothing changed since that time I pretended to be asleep on the couch? Am I just waiting for someone to notice me and care enough to nudge me awake, to present me with some delectable opportunity to devour? Did I not learn my lesson that if you wait for someone to tell you dessert is ready, to nudge you awake, you might miss out? Or is it just hard to talk about future interests and goals—where do you see yourself in 3, 5, 10 years—when you'd rather just be making stuff. 

In my newsletter update from late June I briefly wondered, if you remove the idea of passion central to Gilbert's hummingbird/jackhammer thesis, are folks like me more like tumbleweeds. And maybe the tumbleweed has gotten a bad rap as an essentially dead plant rolling around wherever the wind takes it. Maybe there is some beauty in the way that, unafraid of change, it lacks roots, frees itself from attachments, and opens itself up to opportunities to move and keep moving, slowly breaking down so that its seeds can be released as it moves. Maybe, if I’m a tumbleweed, I just haven’t yet come to rest so that my spores may germinate. Maybe I’m taking this tumbleweed metaphor too far (just be grateful I didn't use the word moist).

All metaphors aside, the events of the past couple of months jarred another memory, this one of Another Mother Runner’s Dimity McDowell’s post from September 2013, which I read when my own kids were just 5 and 7 months, when I reopened my Etsy shop thinking business would slowly pick back up just in time for baby #2 to start part-time daycare in February of the next year (that did not happen…I ended up being a full-time stay-at-home parent for longer than I’d planned and eventually got a “real job” I was never very satisfied with right around when baby #2 turned 2...it was not an easy time). That line that Dimity’s mother says to her has stuck with me all these years as it had stuck with her then: This is not the easiest time of your life. Put another way, these are perhaps, for many of us working parent (creative?) types, the hunker down years.

Many days I find success in focusing on the positive aspects of my current role: decent pay, autonomy and flexibility, the ability to work from home in my backyard office/studio surrounded by foliage and critters, working with truly great people, occasional travel, and, while in tech, for a company that I do believe in, especially, not surprisingly, the more niche creative things folks are doing with our products. But some days, I'm not gonna lie, I feel like Katy Caboose, defiantly striving for greater creative fulfillment and ready to fling myself off my rails and high into the trees at any moment. "Head in the sky," indeed.