Sunday morning. Thirty-four days until September 19.
I counted them in Sundays this morning. Five. I don’t know why I hadn’t counted it that way before. Thirty-four days is accurate but abstract. Five Sundays has a texture to it. Each one is a specific thing that will happen and then be over.
What I did with that information: put it down, picked up my coffee, and found myself rehearsing a question I have not been asked yet.
The question is: what do you do?
Not from anyone specific. Zoe’s college process starts this fall, which means rooms full of parents making small talk at information sessions and campus visits. Max’s lacrosse season is already underway, which means early Saturday mornings on sidelines, which means the same question from parents I have never met. People ask it automatically, the way you ask someone how they’re doing without expecting a complicated answer. I have been answering it the same way for twenty-four years. Senior director at a software company. Sometimes I add the industry, sometimes the company’s approximate size, always the same sentence shape.
I have been practicing a different sentence. Not because anyone has asked. Because it keeps showing up in my head on the way from the coffee maker to the desk.
The consulting answer is ready. More or less. It gets better when I say it out loud. I help enterprise software companies keep their accounts, specifically in the window where most accounts are already lost before anyone notices. Something like that. I have said it out loud twice now: once to a former colleague in May and once, in August, to the last name on my list. It makes sense to people. It does not require a detour through the last twenty-four years or a long setup. The value is in the sentence.
I mean it, too. I want to be accurate about that. This is not a story I am telling people to sound coherent while I figure out the real thing. I think the work is real. I think people will pay for it. I think I can do it without the institution behind my name. That last part is the one I am still testing, but the test runs in the actual doing, not in the rehearsal.
What I do not have yet is language for the other thing.
I named it yesterday, in this space, for the first time in that form: I keep writing toward the person who is in those rooms right now, reading situations that nobody else seems to be reading, with no language yet for what she is doing. The one who will spend twenty-four years learning something without anyone asking her to teach it. That is what the document is for, or what I said the document is for, yesterday, for the first time.
I cannot say that sentence to a stranger. Not because it is untrue. I have been testing it in my head on these Sunday mornings and it keeps coming out sideways, or too long, or like something I am still convincing myself of rather than something I know. The consulting answer is clean because I have had it longer, or because it fits a shape people already recognize. The other answer is still finding its shape.
Maybe the consulting answer has to come first. Maybe the other answer is what I earn permission to say once the floor is established. Maybe “both” always meant in sequence, not simultaneously, and I have been sitting with the ambiguity because deciding on an order felt like more commitment than I was ready to make.
Six weeks ago Doug asked if this was about leaving something or going toward something. I said “both.” I still don’t know which version I meant. Or rather, I know what both versions mean separately. I don’t know which one is more true when I say it out loud to another person, in a real conversation, without the buffer of a draft.
Five Sundays. I counted them and then I put the number down. I don’t know what I expected counting to do.