I’ve been dreading a conversation that hasn’t happened yet.
Next year my oldest child will start a new school. New parents to get to know. New drop offs and pick ups. A new PTA board to throw myself into. New moms’ nights out I’ll probably help plan. Someone is going to ask what I do, I’ll feel that lead weight in my stomach, and I will already have signed up for three committees before I answer.
Ohh.
My eyes will dart somewhere else — next to their face, above their shoulder, or fixed on some point in the distance. I’ll smile and say something about just trying to keep up with two wild boys. Or joke about being a professional volunteer. They’ll laugh. I’ll ask what they do. We’ll move on.
I’ve been doing this longer than I realized.
Freshman year of college, a friend had a problem with me. I’d bonded with one of our mutual friends over our shared love of the band Thursday. And with another friend over our love of kids — I didn’t even want kids at the time, I was just a lifelong babysitter, a kid at heart. She said it didn’t make sense that I could be both of those people. Then she called me fake.
But I was both of those people. And more.
I still am. And I still feel that conflict. The sense that being too many things makes people uncomfortable.
Walt Whitman said it like he’d never once been told to pick a lane: I am large, I contain multitudes. Easy to say when the world is young and so are you and nobody’s asking you to compress yourself into something that fits on a name tag. The poet Fernando Pessoa spent his whole life asking a different question. How many am I? Not a declaration. A reckoning. How many selves are in here, and how many of them will never see the light of day?
I’ve been asking that question for a long time. I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing.
I have been, at various points and often all at once: a barista, a bookseller, a publicist, a program director, a bar fly, a cosplayer, a writer, a civic organizer, a PTA board member, a mutual aid coordinator, a trinket collector, a community builder, an advocate, a reader, a sports fan, a mom, a partner, a neighbor, a person who shows up. That’s not a brag. It’s just the list. And for most of my adult life I’ve been asked, implicitly or explicitly, to pick one and lead with it.
That gap — between what I actually am and what I’m allowed to say I am — is not new. But right now it’s all I can see.
Moms aren’t supposed to still be figuring themselves out. That’s not the role. The role is to be the steady one. The one who already knows who she is so everyone else has room to become who they’re becoming. We get to be complicated before kids. Maybe after. But during? During you’re supposed to have it together. During you’re the container. Not the one still becoming.
So you compress. You edit. You hand people the thirty second version and hope it’s enough. And after a while you forget there was a longer one.
I forgot there was a longer one.
I do a lot of work that doesn’t come with a paycheck, which means it doesn’t always count as work. It counts as hobby. As personality. As background. So when someone asks what I do, I disappear. Professional volunteer. Smile. What about you?
The editing happens before I open my mouth. The compression is so automatic I stopped noticing it.
Roxanne Gay writes about being a bad feminist — someone full of contradictions, who loves pink and listens to music she knows is terrible for women and calls herself a feminist anyway. Not because she has it all figured out. Because the alternative is pretending to be simpler than she is. I read that and felt something loosen in my chest. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Not resolution. Just the refusal to keep making yourself smaller so other people don’t have to deal with the full version of you.
I contain multitudes. I’ve always known that. I just never thought I was allowed to say so. Never thought I was allowed to take up the same space I kept making for everyone else.
Recently, some friends left a care package on my doorstep. It included a small, hand-lettered card covered in colored dots. Don’t forget who you are. And then the list. Boy mom. Smart. Writer. Colorful. Advocate. Neurospicy. Beloved. Free.
Nobody asked what I did. They just told me who I was.
I’m still figuring out what to do with that. Right now I feel a little adrift — like I’m floating, untethered from the thing that used to tell me where I stood — the meetings, the planning, the sense of somewhere to be. But also like I want to work on fifteen things at once and just hope everyone’s okay with that. It’s disorienting. It’s also, weirdly, a little freeing.
What do you do.
I’ve been dreading that question.
But lately I keep thinking about a different one.
What do you like to do.
Ask me that and something else happens entirely. My brain turns on. I smile before I know what I’m going to say. I lean in.
Because that question doesn’t ask me to be legible. It asks me to be real. And I have a lot of material to work with.
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