It is Sunday.
I know it is Sunday before I look at the phone because of how the house sounds when nobody else is moving yet. Max is still asleep. Doug has his run on Sunday mornings, so there is a short window when the kitchen belongs entirely to coffee and whatever I am trying to think through.
Yesterday I added a note to the unnamed document. Something from a meeting in 2017 I have never described to anyone. I wrote it because it belongs in the collection, or I think it does. I do not know yet where it fits. I wrote it down anyway.
I have been sitting with that note this morning, trying to work out why it feels like the same kind of thing as the other eight stories. I think I have it now. Or a version of it.
All of the stories in the document are things I saw and did not immediately say out loud. The 2019 renewal. The telecom account. The napkin at the conference dinner. Each one is a case study in professional attention, a story about noticing something that was not being noticed and acting on it. That is how I have thought about them. Evidence of a pattern I can name and, eventually, hopefully, sell.
But they are also all things I held privately first. I noticed and then sat with what I noticed before I did anything about it. The noticing happened somewhere quiet. The action came later, if it came at all.
I catch myself wanting to make that into something significant. A theory about how I work. Some insight about interiority as a professional asset. I should probably not do that. What I can say, more plainly, is that I am a person who sees things and does not always name them in the room. Sometimes that habit has served me. It gave me the patience to read a situation correctly instead of reacting to the surface. It gave me the 2019 save. It gave me, eventually, most of what is in the document.
It also gave me eleven Sundays of saying “fine” to my mother.
I called her at ten, which is when I usually call.
This is the twelfth Sunday since I started the blog. I have said “fine” in some form on all eleven previous ones. I have thought about this. I wrote about it a few days ago, in fact, and I named three reasons I keep defaulting to the abbreviated answer. None of the reasons were wrong. But I have noticed that naming a pattern and changing it are two different operations, and I am considerably better at the naming part.
Today I got on the call with something in my throat that felt like the other answer trying to come up. Not a speech. Not the whole truth delivered all at once. Just: I’ve been thinking about something big and I haven’t known how to say it. Nine words. That was all it would have taken to open a door.
I said, “Not bad. How are you?”
She told me she had been to the garden center with my aunt and they had found a climbing hydrangea she had wanted for three years. We talked about the hydrangea for a while. It was a good conversation, actually. My mother knows a lot about hydrangeas.
I want to be honest about what happened there, because the temptation is to write this as a near-miss, as another failure of nerve, and I don’t think that is quite right.
The first eleven Sundays, I did not feel the alternative. The alternative simply did not come up. I defaulted before I even registered the choice. Today was different. Today I was aware, in real time, that I had something to say and was choosing not to say it. The choice was fully mine and I made it with full knowledge of what I was doing.
I am not certain that is better. I think it might be a step. I cannot yet tell if a step that ends in the same place counts as progress or just as a more detailed version of staying still.
She asked at the end of the call how work was going.
“Fine,” I said. “Busy.”
The hydrangea conversation was good, for what it’s worth. She has been wanting one for years. I hope it grows.