A Fixer Without a Fix

On sitting in the discomfort I spent a lifetime avoiding

The first morning of my freedom, I went to a dance class.

I did not know the steps, nor the name of the steps. What? There were names for the steps.

My teacher was from somewhere other than Switzerland. She had the energy of a warm climate, she was free to be herself completely. Secretly I desired to be like that also, but did not know at the time.

I unfortunately had two left feet and a finance background.

She said step, ball, change. What? I knew how to step, but there was no ball or change. The woman in the mirror looked agitated about her hips. I had rhythm in my head, arriving about a half second after everyone else’s feet had already moved on without me. The teacher caught my eye in the mirror and smiled the smile of someone who has seen this before.

Decades in conference rooms. I knew how to run a meeting, speak in front of groups, walk into a room and own it before I said a word. None of that translated into a hip roll.

I left drenched in sweat and laughing at myself the whole walk home. This was freedom, apparently. Not knowing what I was doing, in public, on purpose.

The next week I signed up for a painting class.

I have always loved to draw. A pencil, crayon, or a pen and a small or large piece of paper and I am as happy as I can be. I love restaurants that give you a jar full of crayons to draw on the paper table cloth, and I draw my favorite palm trees in all different colors.

Painting was not that.

There were rules, underpainting, color theory, white space. Wait for this layer to dry before you touch that layer. I did not want to wait for layers to dry. I wanted to draw the thing and be done with the thing.

My teacher walked by my canvas and paused a beat too long.

I was not a painter. I was a woman who liked to draw, alone, palm trees, flowers, cottages, clouds and rain.

Two classes in. Two things I was bad at.

I told people I was finding myself, partly true. I did not tell them what I was avoiding while I did it.

When I left my corporate job my daughter had turned twelve not even six months ago.

Twelve meant teenage years ahead of us. Six years, maybe more, of a kind of closeness I had never had time for. I had been working full time since she was four months old. Twelve meant I finally had the time.

I did not entertain that thought. Not once.

I went to dance class and painting class instead. I looked for anything that would fill the hours the way a job used to fill them. A fixer needs something broken to fix. Without a job, I went looking for something else to solve — a hip roll, a paintbrush, anything.

Not working had never been in my world. My mother worked in corporate too, soon as she arrived in New York City from West Bengal. My mother-in-law was a doctor, three children and a full practice, home late most nights. My husband and I were raised by women who left the house every morning. Staying home with a child was a way of life I had never once tried on for size.

And underneath that, something even more difficult to write, even after a decade, I am more comfortable in a conference room than at home waiting for my daughter when she gets home from school.

I did not say this out loud for a long time.

Then she turned fourteen.

The daughter who played piano at the conservatory, top grades in school, quiet, obedient, respectful. The daughter I had built a whole identity around raising well, stopped performing.

I do not mean the piano, though eventually that too. I mean the performance underneath everything, the one where she did what was expected and I mistook that for who she was.

She stopped. She never said the words, but I heard them anyway. I am not living by your rules. I had no idea who was sitting across from me at the dinner table.

For the first time since she was born, I was not in control of the outcome. A fixer without a fix. Thirty years of conference rooms and I did not know how to run this meeting.

Somewhere in the middle of not knowing who was sitting across from me, I got angry. Not at her. At my parents.

I come from a chaotic house. I had never forgiven them for it, though I would not have called it that at the time. I had simply filed it away, the way I file most things, under so what, keep moving.

My daughter refusing to live by my rules did something my own therapy had not yet done. It made me look at my rules. Where they came from. Who had handed them to me and why.

My father had his own trauma, one I did not see clearly until I became a mother myself and had to face mine.

My mother left for one year when I was four. I have written about that before. What I had not written about, what I was only now starting to understand, was what I had built on top of it without knowing I was building anything at all.

She sat across from me and refused to perform, and I did not sit in it. I could not have. I was a fixer. Give me a problem and I will find you a solution before you have finished the sentence. But there was no fixing this, no five point plan for being looked at by your own child and not recognized. So I did what fixers do when there is nothing to fix. I filled the silence anyway. The capacity to just look at her and let myself not know did not yet exist. That came later, and it came slowly, and it is still coming.

We are all parenting through our own wounds, whether we mean to or not. I did not learn this in therapy. I learned it at my own kitchen table, from a fourteen year old who refused to keep performing so I could keep believing I had done it right, and from a fixer’s very slow, ongoing education in sitting still.