On being replaced

As many of you know, I have another baby: the book I'm writing about the time Bob's liver failed. (A memoir about illness, healing, authority, submission, faith, and doubt.) This past weekend I started writing about the part where Bob and I both are replaced at work thanks to medical leave. Very easily replaced. I kind of like how it came out: 

Bob and I have been away from our jobs one and two months respectively. Pretty much all during seminary Bob coached basketball to teenage boys in North Minneapolis, mostly Liberian immigrants on the edge of trouble. You could say that Bob has a benevolent outlook, and he does, but it’s more than that. It’s about this man’s bona fide zeal for sports. In all the modest places we’ve lived in, never a garage, closets or no, we always made room for his collections of golf bags, baseball bats, basketball paraphernalia, sports theory books, and buckets of assorted balls and gloves. No matter how strapped our budget, we always subscribed to the golf cable channel. Sit on any toilet we’ve ever had, you’ll have a stack of sports instructional magazines at your fingertips. I used to think Bob’s clipboard that is a whiteboard with the permanent basketball court lines etched in black, omnipresent in our apartment, was quaint. How cute, an itty bitty gymnasium! But to Bob it’s not just a cool clipboard for basketball lovers, it’s a serious tool to diagram plays for the team. He used it a lot.

Presently, an intern coaches Bob’s team. And he is kind enough to call every once in a while to update Bob on the team’s progress. I don’t totally get the obsession with sports but I admit its inspiring to see the boys get excited about playing together.

An intern has taken over my job too. In a way, I’m glad that my tasks are covered. Yet the fact of the matter is, we are both replaced by 22-year-olds. Sometimes when Bob is in a moment of cognizance, we joke about how exchangeable we 40-50-somethings are. I’ve known for years that my interns are on a faster track to greatness than me. After their internships these young people moved on to work overseas, learn languages, make films, study law, lobby congress, direct nonprofits, or be theologians and philosophers. Their visions and dreams read like a laundry list of all the things I wish I’d done before I got a husband, children, and car payments.  

Seismic shifts in routine reveal the truth of what does and doesn’t matter, and it’s usually not what you originally thought. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have other things to worry about, such as my dying husband, I could be bothered by the fact that my twenty-something intern is now “me” and I’m professionally invisible. But I’m not bothered. I’ll care about that later. 

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More later! Two years and 131 pages done, about another 100 pages and who know how many years to go.  Time to go to my day job.

With love, T