It was Zoe who said something, which I did not expect.
Thursday evening, kitchen table. She had her laptop open and the particular posture of an assignment she hadn’t started yet. Not distress, not complaining, just that specific stillness that means the work is there and she hasn’t touched it. I know that posture. I have deployed it myself for thirty years and I am hoping I haven’t passed it down, though that may be wishful thinking on my part.
I had my laptop open too. I was nominally getting to an email that had been sitting since Tuesday. What I was actually doing was in a different tab: the document I’ve mentioned here before, the one I still won’t name, which is three pages now without an obvious genre. I keep going back to it. I have run out of ways to describe it as provisional.
Zoe looked up and said, “What are you working on?”
I said, “Something for the blog.” Adjacent to the truth.
She nodded. Filed it. I filed it.
Two hours later she was getting water and I was at the sink and she said, in the casual way of something she had been holding since the table: “I’ve been reading it. By the way.”
“The blog?”
“Yeah.”
She got her water and went upstairs.
I stood at the sink for ninety seconds, maybe two minutes. Zoe doesn’t say things she hasn’t been thinking about. She is 17 and she is methodical and she chose that particular moment, on her way to bed, after two hours at the same table. She could have said it at the table. She didn’t.
I have no idea what she has been seeing.
Here is what I have been sitting with since last night. I went to work at 22 because I needed income and a health plan. I took the first job that called back, which was an account coordinator role at a small marketing firm, and I was promoted twice in three years because I was organized and showed up on time and read client materials before meetings, which turned out to be a lower bar than it should have been. I was not following a vision. I was following a yes. And then that yes led to another yes, and I was thirty before I stopped to ask whether I had ever actually chosen this, and when I stopped to ask I got distracted by a deadline and forgot about the question for another nineteen years.
Zoe is starting to put together college applications in the fall. She is at the stage where adults ask her what she wants to study and she gives an answer that is partly real and partly assembled from things she has absorbed about what she is supposed to want. I recognize that stage. I remember being in it. And I cannot tell from where I’m standing whether what she absorbed from watching me, for seventeen years, is that you follow the first yes and get good at it, or something different. Something more deliberate. Something she got from a version of me that was paying more attention than I was.
I hope it’s the second one. I’m not sure I’ve earned that hope yet.
The blog started as a commitment device. A public record I couldn’t take back. Somewhere in the last two months it became something I reach for rather than something I owe, which is a small distinction and also the only distinction that matters to me right now.
Thursday evening I had an email sitting since Tuesday and I chose a different document. Small choice. The kind you don’t notice until someone asks what you’re working on and you have to decide, in the half-second before you answer, how honest to be.
I don’t know what Zoe has been reading. Whether she is watching me leaving, which is the decision I have made and am not yet executing, or whether she is watching me stay, which is also true, every morning I log into the same job, while the two calls I’m waiting on still have not arrived.
She hasn’t said anything else. I haven’t asked.
I’m not sure which answer I want.