Thursday morning. The dinner was last night. Max ate, asked two questions about nothing related to what was happening in the room, and was excused by 6:50. Then Zoe and I were at the table with the dishes still in front of us, which is when the real conversation started.
I’ve been trying to write about it since seven and I keep writing around it, which is how I know I’m still absorbing it.
The morning conversation lasted fifteen minutes. Zoe already knew everything and asked why I had waited. I gave her the edited version and then the honest version, which I had figured out in the kitchen after she left: I wasn’t protecting her from anything. I was protecting myself from what it feels like to be known by someone who loves you. Those are not the same thing, and I kept treating them like they were.
Dinner was an hour and forty minutes. Not all of it was the hard stuff. Max was there, and we talked about preseason and whether he needed new cleats and what was wrong with the Bluetooth speaker. Normal dinner. Then he took his plate to the sink and went upstairs and the table got quieter.
What she said first was: “You keep mentioning something you’re writing that isn’t this.” She meant the blog, and she meant the other thing I’ve been calling the unnamed document in these posts.
I was surprised she remembered it. That sentence makes no sense to me even as I write it. She has read every post. Of course she remembered it.
I told her what it actually is. Not what it will be, which I still do not know. What it is: a series of stories about what I’ve noticed over 24 years in rooms where decisions were being made. Why accounts go sideways. What the people handling them can see that the dashboards can’t. Seven stories so far, a meeting note from 2017 that doesn’t fit anywhere but that I cannot take out, and two sentences I have not been able to finish because I don’t know what comes after them yet.
She listened. She did not say “that sounds good” or “you should do that.” She said: “Why do you keep describing it like you don’t know what it is?”
I didn’t have a quick answer. I’m sitting here an hour later and I still don’t have a quick answer. Which is information.
What I told her after a minute: I think I keep not-naming it because naming it commits it to something. If I call it one thing and it turns out to be another, I will have been wrong about it, and I have been far more willing to be wrong about the consulting plan than about this. Out loud, I mean. In front of people.
She thought about that for a second. Then she said: “The consulting thing you keep calling ’the plan.’ The other thing you keep calling ’the document.’ You say both of those words differently.”
I asked what she meant.
She said: “The plan sounds like something you’re going to do. The document sounds like something you’re already doing.”
I don’t know what to do with that yet.
I built the timeline with consulting as the floor and the writing as a thing I figure out later, after November 14, after I am not Leigh-from-the-company anymore. The sequence was: notice given September 19, out November 14, figure out what “toward” actually means sometime in December. That was the order.
Zoe may have scrambled the sequence a little. Or she may have just said out loud what I already knew and had not yet finished admitting to myself. I cannot tell which one it is from here.
What I had not thought about before last night: the unnamed document is going to be different when I am writing it as just Leigh instead of as Leigh-from-a-company-she-is-leaving. There are things I have not let myself put in it yet for reasons that will expire on September 19. I do not know what those sentences are. I know they exist.
September 19 is thirty-seven days away.
I am sitting here Thursday morning with the coffee getting cold, and a seventeen-year-old who has apparently been watching me more carefully than I knew said something last night that I cannot figure out how to put back down.
I’ll let you know what I figure out.