personal eye

2008-01-23T00:24:06+00:00

We joke about people being married to their jobs, but the numbers in my own life tell quite a tale. A typical workday sees me awake for 17 hours. I spend nine of those with co-workers. Since Jeff and I keep slightly different work schedules, I only see him for about five hours per weekday.

The jokes become less comfortable when you realize that you're spending more hours per day with your co-workers than you do with the person you married. Co-workers don't have the same commitment to permanence that spouses do; they are people you spend time with, but not people you share everything with. I marvel at how few people find this strange or unusual.

A co-worker of mine died this past week after an extended illness. I did not know her as well as many of my co-workers did, but I was greatly saddened by her death. I enjoyed her company, though our social circles did not overlap. She was well-liked, and with reason. She was both pragmatic and knowledgeable, and -- important for someone in my line of work -- embraced computers and technology to a level that was not often seen in the books-and-paper world of libraries.

We had warning, of course; the quiet step of co-workers passing news down the hall told us that she had been worsening fast, but no endpoint or timeline was given us. I assumed days, not hours, but I was wrong. Another quiet step, another knock on the door, later that afternoon passed the news to our department.

I ached to see my co-workers cry, those people that I spent more time with on a daily basis than my spouse, but whom I didn't feel I had permission to hug. Later that afternoon, I was approached by other co-workers who asked, "Would you mind designing the memorial flyers?"

I did not cry then, not to the level of my co-workers, but the tears came when I slotted her photo into the layout. The combination of personal distress and professional graphic design was too dichotomous for my brain to handle well, and it unsettled me greatly when each step of the design approval process brought fresh tears from my co-workers. Someone had to approach the project with a professional, not a personal, eye, and evidently that someone needed to be me.

If you like the people you work with, the line between professional and personal can blur all too quickly.

I got word late last week that the funeral would be Monday, and harbored plans to attend the services between taking the last remaining visiting friends to the airport. As the weekend went on, I realized that my plans were plausible but perhaps not well thought out; by attending the funeral I would miss out on the last few hours of visiting with two people who had flown from South Carolina and Arizona to stay with us.

On Sunday night, I made up my mind to skip the funeral. I should have attended, but I also should have spent time with my houseguest-friends; given no good option, I chose to side with the living. I thought about her as we had lunch and bought coffee and gradually talked faster, trying to fit in months' worth of conversations in the half-hour left before airport time.

I thought about how the professional and personal worlds collide, whether we want them to or not. I put Jake and Scott on planes and thought of Helen, and wished them all well.

All three mattered, but choices had to be made.

Another woman's daughter

2001-05-11T18:46:02+00:00

I fear the days you stand outside my door,
too timid to ring, too determined to leave. Your
presence comes and goes, waning and waxing with the moon's
movements, from new to crescent to full. A tune

composed of someone else's notes, you are
as familiar as my dreams and fears and as far
removed from my life as I could have made you.
Was I wrong to sacrifice you to the hesitant altar

of selfishness, ambition, greed? It is easier to think
of planned vacations and toys than to sink
emotions, time, love—myself—into the bringing of life,
and thus I chose. You, my uncompleted link

between husband and self, future and past,
my choice between motherhood—or writing, at last --
never became more than a half-imagined dream.
In mind, my images of you were always precast

into the shapes of shoes that I never could fill…
throwing down stick and helmet, swearing until
a referee saw the error of his call…
an artist, pulling form from ether, remaining still

and unswerving in the face of criticism… Fainter
images: woman, lover, mother. Of these, the remainder
missing is 'child,' the starting point of living.
I make no apologies. I am not 'mother.' Instead, a painter

of words, images, stories, but not lives. Should she find
me in the hereafter, I will ask her to find
forgiveness for me, making her another woman's daughter,
for I hadn't the courage to birth her as mine.

* * * *

Have you ever been haunted by the thought of a person who was never born? What if the person was never born because you were too afraid to have children of your own, or because you felt that you were incapable of meeting your own standards as a parent?

After talking with Brad last night I was left with the image of a dark-haired girl suited up as a hockey goalie, throwing down her stick and helmet and screaming at a referee because of a bad call. That, my friends, is the kind of child I'd undoubtedly have.

Or, at least, I think I'd have. But we'll never know, and sometimes I wonder what she might have been like.