There was a call at 2pm yesterday where I was required to be enthusiastic.
Not explicitly required. Nobody said “Leigh, please be enthusiastic.” It was a strategy alignment session with three people from the product team and two account reps who are newer, still in the phase where these sessions feel useful and useful-feeling. I have been doing this for 24 years. I can find the value in almost any meeting if I try, and I tried.
What I noticed about twenty minutes in was how good I am at it. The follow-up questions, placed at the right moments. I said “that’s interesting” three times, and each time I meant it at roughly 60 percent. I flagged an action item before the call ended, which is something I do automatically now. The people on the call probably thought the meeting had gone well.
It went fine. Which is a word I have been using at full price for longer than it’s been true.
I went downstairs for coffee afterward and Zoe was at the kitchen table with AP History note cards arranged in a grid in a system I recognized from my own junior year. She made an aggravated noise at the stack.
“I have to get this entire timeline done by Thursday.” Not a request for help. Just the announcement you make to whoever is in the room.
I said the thing I have said to her probably forty times: “Sometimes you just have to get through it.”
She said “I know,” in the flat, patient way of a 17-year-old who knows.
I poured my coffee. She went back to the note cards.
I don’t think that was the wrong thing to say. Getting through things you don’t love is a real skill, and she is going to need it. I believe that. I believed it when I said it.
But sitting back at my desk fifteen minutes later, I started to notice the thing I hadn’t meant to say alongside it. I have been the person who gets through it for 24 years. Professional, organized, good at hitting the right notes in sessions that will not change anything. I built a working life on the gap between what the job required and what I actually felt. There is real competence in that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
What I also know: there is something I am modeling for Zoe by staying, and something I am modeling by going. I have been so focused on the mechanics of going that I haven’t thought much about what it will look like to her when I do.
Or what it already looks like. She lives here. She is not not paying attention.
The email is at four days. No response. Four days is fine, and I mean that at about 80 percent, which is better than where I was at 72 hours.
Three names still in the note. I checked this morning, not because anything had changed, but in the way you check something when you want to confirm it’s still where you left it.
I keep thinking about that call. How easy it is to be good at something once you’ve detached from it in a particular way. The professionalism doesn’t disappear. It just becomes autopilot. You know exactly how far the tank is from empty and you’ve gotten very skilled at not looking at the gauge.
Zoe finished the timeline last night. I think. I heard her go upstairs around 9:30 and the note cards were gone in the morning.
I don’t know what she sees when she watches me go to work and come back. I have never thought to ask. Maybe because I already knew the answer. Maybe because I didn’t want to. I haven’t decided which.