Reunion

As is the case with so many jobs, mine poses many challenges. Beautiful, organic, interpersonal, influential, compassionate, creative...yes. But there are days when I leave this job and feel the weight of hurt feelings, political interactions, mistakes, and anxieties about what I cannot predict about future hurt feelings, politics, and mistakes. The job can seem too big on those days, mis-sized in relation to the vast world that surrounds it. I know that I have lost perspective, but I am stuck. As I make my way out the door, across the street, and down the busy sidewalk toward the bus stop, I breathe slowly. On some days, and in some weeks, the heart is heavy, and the process of breathing through and around it is pained and confusing. On many occasions, I do ask, "Is this the right place for me?" Is this the best way for me to give back to the world? Am I doing my best work here? These are questions I might hold on to for days until a mindful process of gathering perspective reminds me that, yes, this is good. I consider the alternatives: I imagine myself in other corners of the world, in other clothes, reading other books, working differently with humans and their complexities. And I re-choose this job of all jobs. But there is the immediacy of the melancholy that can come with the doubt on those tougher days, when we wonder whether we've chosen rightly; and the contorted view of the job's importance, its sense of urgency, its undertow can trap the mind back at the desk (or wherever we locate ourselves in our work).

The fortune of what awaits me at the end of those days is medicine to this melancholy.

With the coming of my second child, I have developed a vicious hold on the hours at home, devotedly turning my attention to family and decidedly not looking through the technological portals that might lead me back into the complexities of work. That walk to the bus leads me to the cross-city journey to reunite with my children after hours away from them, and I find a deep sense of responsibility in sorting through the layers of weight that work worries might give me as I walk out the door. As is often the case, I cannot make sense of it all in the 20-minute trip, and so I try earnestly to tuck it away. I use words in my mind—om namaha—and the fundamental rhythm and sound of the breath to get perspective. But even then, as I walk down the stairs to my children's school, I might still be holding on.

And then I see them. My daughter rushes out of her play, breaks into laughter, and hurls herself into my arms. And I smell her: a tiny, warm, sweet little body that came from mine. I can smell the crackers she ate at lunch, and the paint she used in the art center. I feel her little muscles so alive, the soft clothes that I have washed over and over, her beautiful baby hair. Together, we gather her belongings and I exclaim joyfully as I look at the art she made for me, and together we walk excitedly down the hallway to baby brother, who is often fast asleep in a late afternoon nap. And then I have the delicious chance to walk over to his crib and gently rub his belly as he slowly awakens. He sees me, he smiles, and I pick him up and snuggle into his neck. Pure baby: my milk in his belly, the baby food I have made him in his belly, the sweet lotion we put on his face, the softness of his wispy hair, his little body fitting so perfectly into mine as I carry him. Over and over, like on the day he was born, I kiss him and whisper and press my face into his cheeks. And I watch him look all around the room at his baby friends: proud. My mommy's here now.

And as I push the enormous stroller of babies and bags down the city streets toward their beautiful father, I forget about my heavy heart.