A terrible thing happened to me a few months ago: I discovered wrinkles in my cleavage.
This may not seem like a big ol’ deal, but life is changing fast, and wrinkles in the cleavage, well, that just seals it. For one, the doors of the strip bar are now closed. I used to think, “Well, I could always go serve drinks at the strip bar.� I figured if I got fired from my teaching job for getting a tattoo in the wrong spot or making the wrong queer quip to the wrong kid, or showing Michael Moore films and teaching Sherman Alexie books, then I could always answer the perpetually running ad in our local weekly and go serve drinks to drunk or creepy straight guys. But even Fox’s has some standards, and wrinkled cleavage along with butt cellulite? Snowball’s chance.
Unfortunately, with the wrinkles have appeared some difficult attitudes. For instance, I also can no longer bring myself to consider voluntary welfare or unemployment. Don’t get me wrong – I have never volunteered to be a card carrying member of the working poor, though I have stood in both of those long lines. But I used to be able to consider it on the bad days, the days when a kid came to school after watching her best friend kill herself, the days when I found myself becoming the meanest teacher I ever had. Now, the thoughts of bailing just don’t come. Even if the career is soul sucking and miserable, it’s food on the table three weeks out of the month. Even if we never have grocery money the fourth week, I can overdraw my account since I know there’s another check coming. I have grown too old to consider a voluntary move to the dole.
There are no more twenty-something escape routes. I am firmly encrusted in middle age and forced to take my career path seriously. My friends have all written books, got great jobs, started non-profit agencies and businesses. So it’s hi ho, hi ho and back to school I go. Last summer I took out a fat loan and enrolled in an administrative credentialing program on top of full time teaching.
I will not be able to rest doing the full time work of mediocre teaching like my colleagues who married doctors or real estate agents. Teaching well, of course, is a seventy-hour a week gig, and teaching poorly can be done in thirty-five. I’ve been skating in the middle with a forty-five hour average for almost ten years now. Doing enough to feel prepared and competent, but not so much as to win awards and miss watching my kids grow up. Until the cleavage wrinkles appeared, that is.
Because now I’m having to suck it up and join the big kids. I’m moving into administrative work and embracing the 70 hour week.
I’m going to school full time and working full time. Two days a week I do not see my kids at all, as I am gone before they get up and home after they’re in bed. I’m trying to get a gig working at kid summer school while going to wrinkled cleavage summer school. Once I get certified as a principal, I’ll work more hours than my combined school and work hours now. I’ll chaperone dances, where I will separate hormonal teens who are “freak dancing� in blatant disregard of school rules. I will send home girls whose thongs show and boys with beer ads on their shirts. I will give lunch detention to smart asses. I will try to convince embittered 35 year vets to either retire or be nice to kids.
I will not have time for poetry slams or roller derbies. I will not have skin for new tattoos. I will not write novels or read at festivals. I will administer. I will learn what to administer. I will have time only to administer.
Granted, I’m not thrilled about this. And I’m betting my soul that it’s not all true.
The days after my first child was born I wept and moped and wept and moped and could not bring myself to find my center, find my joy. My teen-aged breasts produced milk enough for quadruplets, and my baby snacked in 4 minute feedings every twenty minutes. I limped through my days still sore from a tear during the birth, soaked in milk and panicking that the baby would starve. I believed the prospects of bathing and feeding myself to be impossible. It all seemed impossible, and the thought of working or going to school while keeping the baby and myself alive was just crazy.
And now I’m here again. Weeping and moping and staring at the wrinkles in my cleavage. Weeping and moping.
About a month into motherhood, the baby went to sleep. She hadn’t slept until then, at least not that I remember. I knew I should be sleeping too, felt guilty for not sleeping, but the fall sun shone onto my little writing desk and the journal I bought to write about motherhood sat in its little plastic sleeve getting warm in the light. I pulled my torn body into the chair, pulled a sweater over my milk-soaked nightie, and stared at the pink and blue handmade paper. I had bought it the day I cancelled the abortion, the day I decided to go ahead and do what was clearly not possible.
I opened its cover and began to write. It doesn’t matter what I wrote, and I can assure you it was crap, as perhaps this is crap. What matters is that into the ink soak the paper with my anger and fear. Inarticulately, I mourned the child I could no longer be and drenched pages in my sadness. And when I was done? A miracle. I felt human. I felt normal. I felt like myself.
I peer down now into the valley between my breasts, breasts which finally produce nothing but wrinkles. I remember deciding a long time ago to choose to be a mother and be myself anyway. I remember how writing kept me alive. This work thing can’t be harder than that was, can it? Midlife, too many responsibilities, the prospect of entering the middle class can’t keep me from what is real, can they? As sure as I eventually slept not only with that first baby, but with the second, and with the two sleepless step-babies I picked up a few years ago, as sure as I can still put pen to pulp, push keys earthward, I will hold onto myself through middle age. And maybe I’ll be able to buy groceries without going into the red.
Sarah Talbot lives without sleep in the lutefisk capital of the American West. She has so many children she doesn't know what to do.