WHEN ELI WAS IN FIRST grade, his classmate Trevor punched him in the stomach at recess, out of sight of the teacher. Trevor had been a turd all year, and in the preceding months, Eli’s reports of shoves and name-calling had slowly increased. I counseled him with all the typical approaches, but nothing was bringing resolution. I would occasionally daydream about giving little Trevor a piece of my mind and maybe slashing his bike tires but didn’t indulge the thoughts for too long. Though tempting, intimidating first-graders didn’t seem like the right approach.
After the punch, Eli seemed genuinely upset about the seemingly inescapable situation. Uncharacteristically, he said he didn’t want to go to school the next day.
That evening, after tucking Eli in bed, I emailed his teacher, Ms. Green.
Her kind and quick response: “Hmm. It sounds as if we should have a phone call.”
When we spoke the following evening, I gave Ms. Green the rundown, explaining that my main concern was Eli’s growing stress.
“I’m not sure how I should direct him,” I said.
“I think the best thing to do,” Ms. Green said, “would be to help Eli regain his confidence in handling this difficult dynamic himself. So perhaps you could tell him something like, ‘Eli, I know that you will know how to handle things with Trevor if something happens. You can tell him you don’t like it, you can talk to Ms. Green, or you can walk away. But whatever happens, I’m confident that you’ll know what to do.’”
I let out a relieved sigh. That, I could do.
And if it proved ineffective: the tires.
The next afternoon, I met Eli at the school gate so we could ride our bikes home together. As we maneuvered to escape the dismissal crowd, I registered Eli’s smile, his relaxed shoulders. When we broke free, I put my foot up on the pedal as I waited for him to fasten his helmet. I took advantage of the lack of eye contact, saying, as casually as possible, “So how’d it go with Trevor?”
“Good,” Eli reported. “He pushed me a little today, but I yelled, ‘Stop it!’” He kicked off the ground and pedaled ahead of me to the wide paved path running through our neighborhood that would take us home. And just like that, the Trevor situation was behind us.
As it turned out, the bigger problem wasn’t Trevor but Eli’s crisis of confidence. Ms. Green’s advice was both timely and timeless. Her careful words that evening permanently shaped aspects of my parenting. Thanks to her counsel, I ask the boys questions like, “Well, which way are you leaning?” or “What’s your gut on this?”And even now, we conclude plenty of tangled conversations with, “You can trust that you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”
After my appointment with Dr. Cooke, this simple assurance—the one I so desperately needed—was inaccessible to me. My confidence had been badly shaken; I was deeply unsure of my ability to handle regular life, to say nothing of the endless frightening possibilities that played on a loop in my head.
If you can’t trust your own inner voice, then what?
I walked down the hall to the principal’s office, passing the happy noises emanating from the kindergarten classrooms, punctuated by exclamations and the gentle redirections of the teachers. A student banished to the hallway to finish an assignment saluted me with a chipper “Hello, Mrs. Chavez,” in order to further procrastinate writing out the alphabet on the lined sheet of paper. “Oh, do we have library today? And can I get the book that Dominic had?” The kids had been clamoring over Robert Munsch’s Purple, Green, and Yellow since I’d introduced it as a read-aloud. It had been one of Amy’s all-time favorite books, and reading to the students about Brigid drawing on herself with super-indelible-never-come-off-till-you’re-dead-and-maybeeven-later coloring markers was as much fun for me as it was for them. I loved watching their little expressions evolve from shocked to perplexed to intrigued by Brigid’s naughtiness. I gave a little disclaimer about not drawing on ourselves after each reading, just in case.
“No library today for you, but you can check that one out as long as Dominic returns it,” I said, answering without breaking stride, refusing to get sucked in by his delaying tactic.
I loved this job; I was perfect for this job; the job was too much. Perhaps all of these things were true. I didn’t know anymore.
I don’t know if I can do this job next year, Shay. I practiced saying it to myself as I walked through the main office to her door.
I knocked on the open door and stuck my head inside.
Shay was looking at her computer as she nodded and slowly said, “Yes …just give me a … second.”She finished typing and made two quick, satisfied clicks with the mouse before looking up at me. “Done. What’s up?”
Her expression slid from curious to concerned as she registered my uncharacteristic brittleness, drawn face, and puffy eyes. She stood up and, as I sat down in front of the desk, closed the door behind me. I started to cry as she returned to her seat and placed a box of tissues between us.
“Julie, are you okay?” Shay moved through most of her days like a sprinter, a tiny powerhouse of efficiency commanding the nearly eight hundred students in our elementary school, but now she sat still, waiting for me to respond. Her hair was shaped into a fashionable bob with gentle waves; her blue eyes, the sort that crinkled happily when she smiled, were wide and waiting, focused on me.
“Well, no,” I said, with a short sob. “I’m sort of losing it. I don’t know if I can do this job next year, Shay.”
I had hoped to feel relief after releasing the words but was instead slammed by a wave of helplessness. I didn’t want to quit this job, but I was desperate to feel better. I needed to feel better.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I think I’m having a nervous breakdown. I don’t know if maybe the job is too much. Mando is traveling all the time and the boys have so much happening and I’m totally overwhelmed.” I grabbed a tissue and Shay slid the box a little closer to me, her brow furrowed. She waited for me to go on.
“I went to see my gynecologist hoping to get a recommendation for a therapist, and she told me I needed to quit my job.” Shay’s eyebrows lifted. “At first I thought she was wrong. I mean, I love what I do. But I’m just not sure.”
She nodded. “Well, I can’t answer for you, but I do know that this is something that can happen when you go back to work, Julie. The working-mom meltdown is a real thing. My husband once had to come home from a trip to England when the kids were little. I called him and told him to get on a plane that day, and he had to pay a ton of money to change his ticket.”
I laughed through my tears. It felt impossibly wonderful to find something funny, to feel solidarity and comfort.
“Julie, this is a real thing,” she repeated. “There are tricks you have to learn. Like when the kids have events, you always sign up to bring salad because you can buy it in the bag. Or bottled waters.” I remembered I needed to bring snacks for both boys’ baseball games later that week. I’d been chafing all season long at the stupidity of it. At the beginning of the season, I had gently suggested that snacks were superfluous, contending that they weren’t four years old anymore and therefore didn’t need rewards for managing to tie their own cleats and walk upright on two legs. But some of the other moms had disagreed. So I’d signed up. Why did I always sign up?
Shay tilted her head. “Again, I’m not you, but I did happen to notice that you’re still volunteering in the classroom, even though you’re now employed here.”
I nodded, tears still sliding.
She softened her voice before she said, “I think talking to someone is a really good idea. You have your review with me next month, right?”
I nodded again.
“Okay, so let’s talk about the job then. I think you need to take care of yourself for now. We don’t need to decide anything today.”
Nod, hiccup. We both stood and she walked around to the door, opening it with her right hand as she squeezed my shoulder with her left.
“Thank you, Shay.”
I walked back to the library, reversing my path down the shiny floors of the hallway. The student had managed only to write letters A and B.
“Twenty-four to go, buddy. Get that pencil moving.”
As I walked past him, the pasted-on teacher smile faded from my face as the anxiety began to spike again. I may have been moving, but I certainly wasn’t making progress.
Since I couldn’t puzzle out my next move, the logical step was to begin polling those closest to me. Though our tight budget was greedily gobbling up the extra income, we weren’t solely dependent on my job. To even consider quitting was a privilege afforded to me that, even in crisis, many women don’t have. As should I or shouldn’t I became my rumination of choice, my desperation leaked into my relationships, creating unbalanced conversations that always centered on me. It seemed all I had to offer was my corrosive need.
I called Amy while I was home from school for lunch, the house quiet. She was at work but picked up, walking away from her desk to take yet another phone call from me. She listened as I cried and told her how scared I was. “Amy, do I quit the job? I just don’t know what to do.”
“Not yet, sissy. Don’t do anything right now.”
In the evening, my mom and dad FaceTimed me as they drove to Costco in Japan. “I’m not sure if I should quit,” I told them.
My mom was careful but supportive when she responded with “Julie, if it’s going to make you feel better then I think it’s fine to let go of the job. I had a really hard time working when you guys were young because it created too many moving parts.”
Dad nodded along with Mom’s assessment but weighed in with “I don’t know, Jules. I think it might be good to wait on this one.”
Cathie came over the next night after the boys were tucked in bed. Mando was out of town, and I sat cross-legged next to her, turning my water cup around and around in my hands as we sat on the couch. She couldn’t believe Dr. Cooke’s advice, asking, more than once, “She said what?” She was especially emphatic that there was no urgency in making this decision, pointing out that I had manufactured a deadline in thinking that I had to decide now for the upcoming school year. “Julie, people quit midyear all the time, so if you start in the fall and it’s too much, you can leave. I don’t think you can know that right now. Just finish this school year. You’re almost there.”
But I was wired and stressed, my exhaustion growing by the day. Something had to change.
Out of all my people, Mando was trying hardest to figure out the situation—and me—looking, as he always did, for the shortest distance between the problem and the solution.
We stood together in the kitchen one evening as he made dinner for the boys. I perched on the barstool across from him.
“I don’t think Dr. Cooke was right, but I do worry about the job overwhelming me because I’m doing way too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a lot—the job, the kids, school, baseball or whatever sport, volunteering, laundry, all of it. I feel like there’s not a spare minute in my schedule.” I reached in vain for the words to adequately describe my packed days. And what remained unspoken was the mental load: the intangible, invisible stresses that hide in between the items on the list. Even love and care—so necessary and beautiful in family life—have a cost.
“Well, nothing has slipped around here,” he said.
“Right, but that’s insane,” I said. He looked surprised by the force of my tone, his eyebrows raising a fraction before he turned to pull shredded cheese out of the refrigerator. “I added thirty hours of work to my already busy week, and nothing in your life has changed? That’s not normal.” Bills, rides, coordination of the kids’ schedules, dentist appointments and allergy shots and mail-in ballots, buying socks and underwear for growing children: I still managed it all.
“Okay,” he said, clearly not sure where to step. “Look, I’m just telling you what I see.”
“So do you think I should quit?”
“I don’t know, Julie. I really don’t think that’s it.”
“Allie thinks I seemed like I was more relaxed when I didn’t have the job. And she’s right.” Strangely, I hadn’t spoken to my best friend about any of what was happening until after my appointment with Dr. Cooke. But as soon as I began polling,Allie was promptly added to the list of regular consultants. Of course, she had noticed I wasn’t quite myself: I sent fewer ridiculous GIFs, didn’t regularly attend our book club, and often seemed distracted and preoccupied. But she didn’t want to add additional stress by broaching the topic; even among friends, this is terribly normal. How do you tell someone you love that you miss them without seeming needy, that you’re worried about them without hovering like an overprotective mother? The right words often escape us.
Mando used the tongs to check the underside of the quesadilla before setting them on the cutting board and turning to me.
“Okay, so then maybe you need to quit,” he said matter-offactly. “We can figure that out.”
“But I think I won’t have enough to do if I quit. Or, worse, what if I quit and I don’t get any better? It’s not like I can get this job back, and a school job is really my only option since the schedule matches the boys’. And we’re definitely using that money.”
A small muscle in his jaw flexed as he flipped over the quesadilla to brown the second side. “I don’t know, then. We can figure it out if you need to quit, but again, I’m not sure that’s the answer.” I had talked us around and around in tiny, frustrating circles.
I thought someone could tell me what to do. But even when Dr. Cooke did just that, it wasn’t enough. The person I needed to hear from was me, but my voice was conspicuously absent. I filled the silence with all these opinions, but the undertow of the polling succeeded only in pulling me farther from the shore of myself. And, too, I drifted farther from Mando, who waited on the beach, wondering where his wife had gone.