I unloaded my feelings. I told her that I wasn’t happy with my job, or even with my chosen profession—that I was seriously unhappy, in fact. I told her about my restlessness, how I was desperate to make a major change but worried about not making enough money if I did. My emotions were raw. I let out another sigh. “I’m just not fulfilled,” I said.
I see now how this must have come across to my mother, who was then in the ninth year of a job she’d taken primarily so she could help finance my college education, after years of not having a job so that she’d be free to sew my school clothes, cook my meals, and do laundry for my dad, who for the sake of our family spent eight hours a day watching gauges on a boiler at the filtration plant. My mom, who’d just driven an hour to fetch me from the airport, who was letting me live rent-free in the upstairs of her house, and who would have to get herself up at dawn the next morning in order to help my disabled dad get ready for work, was hardly ready to indulge my angst about fulfillment.
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit. I doubt that my parents, in their thirty years together, had even once discussed it.
My mother didn’t judge me for being ponderous. She wasn’t one to give lectures or draw attention to her own sacrifices. She’d quietly supported every choice I’d ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit her turn signal to get us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first and worry about your happiness later.”
* * *
There are truths we face and truths we ignore. I spent the next six months quietly trying to empower myself without making any sort of abrupt change. At work, I met with the partner in charge of my division, asking to be given more challenging assignments. I tried to focus on the projects I found most meaningful, including my efforts to recruit a new and more diverse crop of summer associates. All the while, I kept an eye on job listings in the newspaper and did my best to network with more people who weren’t lawyers. One way or another, I figured I’d work myself toward some version of feeling whole.
At home on Euclid Avenue, I felt powerless in the face of a new reality. My father’s feet had started to swell for no obvious reason. His skin looked strangely mottled and dark. Anytime I asked how he was feeling, though, he gave me the same answer, with the same degree of insistence that he’d given me for years.
“I’m fine,” he’d say, as if the question were never worth asking. He’d then change the subject.
It was winter again in Chicago. I woke in the mornings to the sound of the neighbors chipping ice from their windshields on the street. The wind blew and the snow piled up. The sun stayed wan and weak. Through my office window on the forty-seventh floor at Sidley, I looked out at a tundra of gray ice on Lake Michigan and a gunmetal sky above. I wore my wool and hoped for a thaw. In the Midwest, as I’ve mentioned, winter is an exercise in waiting—for relief, for a bird to sing, for the first purple crocus to push up through the snow. You have no choice in the meantime but to pep-talk yourself through.
My dad hadn’t lost his jovial good humor. Craig came by for family dinners once in a while, and we sat around the table and laughed the same as always, though we were now joined by Janis, Craig’s wife. Janis was happy and hard-driving, a telecommunications analyst who worked downtown and was, like everyone else, completely smitten with my dad. Craig, meanwhile, was a poster child for the post-Princeton urban-professional dream. He was getting an MBA and had a job as a vice president at Continental Bank, and he and Janis had bought a nice condo in Hyde Park. He wore tailored suits and had driven over for dinner in his red Porsche 944 Turbo. I didn’t know it then, but none of this made him happy. Like me, he had his own crisis brewing and in coming