trial that never came to pass. On the evening I flew home to Chicago, I felt a
heavy dread settling over me, knowing that I was about to step back into my
everyday routine and the fog of my confusion.
My mother was kind enough to meet my flight at O’Hare. Just seeing her
gave me comfort. She was in her early fifties now, working full-time as an
executive assistant at a downtown bank, which as she described it was basically a
bunch of men sitting at desks, having gone into the business because their fathers
had been bankers before them. My mother was a force. She had little tolerance
for fools. She kept her hair short and wore practical, unfussy clothes. Everything
about her radiated competence and calm. As it had been when Craig and I were
kids, she didn’t get involved with our private lives. Her love came in the form of
reliability. She showed up when your flight came in. She drove you home and
offered food if you were hungry. Her even temper was like shelter to me, a place
to seek refuge.
As we drove downtown toward the city, I heaved a big sigh.
“You okay?” my mom asked.
I looked at her in the half-light of the freeway. “I don’t know,” I began.
“It’s just...”
And with that, I unloaded my feelings. I told her that I wasn’t happy with
my job, or even with my chosen profession—that I was seriously unhappy, in fact.
I told her about my restlessness, how I was desperate to make a major change but
worried about not making enough money if I did. My emotions were raw. I let
out another sigh. “I’m just not fulfilled,” I said.
I see now how this must have come across to my mother, who was then in
the ninth year of a job she’d taken primarily so she could help finance my college
education, after years of not having a job so that she’d be free to sew my school
clothes, cook my meals, and do laundry for my dad, who for the sake of our
family spent eight hours a day watching gauges on a boiler at the filtration plant.
My mom, who’d just driven an hour to fetch me from the airport, who was
letting me live rent-free in the upstairs of her house, and who would have to get
herself up at dawn the next morning in order to help my disabled dad get ready
for work, was hardly ready to indulge my angst about fulfillment.
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit. I doubt that my
parents, in their thirty years together, had even once discussed it.
My mother didn’t judge me for being ponderous. She wasn’t one to give
lectures or draw attention to her own sacrifices. She’d quietly supported every