Hi there!
In my last post, I shared that some big changes are happening in my life. In the intervening weeks, the end has drawn nigh.
I’m down to my final TWO WEEKS of my career as an English professor. As happy as I am to be retiring (especially amidst the untrammeled horror of AI), it is also extremely unsettling to think of myself as not a professor. It’s been a major feature of my identity for decades. For all those years, every book, film, TV show, video game, and cultural event I’ve read, viewed, played, or simply learned about has entered my brain filtered first through the lens of teaching.
I’m not sure I know how to engage with a text anymore without figuring out how I would teach it.
In fact, this semester, which my students all know is my last, students have caught me several times saying something like “next time I teach this, I’ll…”—and they always remind me that there won’t be a next time.
Holy cats, that’s true! My identity as a teacher expires in a few weeks.
Who am I if not that?
Obviously, I am other things than a teacher. I know this. I’m also, for instance, an author. And a wife, a mother, a friend. I’m politically passionate and culturally curious. And probably dozens more things I could list if I let myself actually celebrate myself. Like most of us, I contain multitudes.
But at the moment, it’s tough to imagine a me that doesn’t teach. It’s kinda terrifying.
Again, I’m really happy to be retiring. I’ve clawed my way through my work days for the past few years, pretty miserable about every aspect of my job except the actual teaching part (and that part is less fun since the dawning of genAI).
What can I say? I’m complicated.
I don’t plan to sit in a recliner and rot in retirement. I’ll write. I’ll read. I’ll hike. I’ll travel (hopefully there’ll be more chances to go overseas, but if not, there are more National Parks to cross off the list). I’ll break out my old crafting skills and learn new ones. There’s an art collective in our new town, and I’ve been perusing their menu of classes (Pottery! Stained glass! Watercolor!). Now that we’re moving to a home with a decent plot of land (1/3 acre), I’m gonna garden my ass off, too.
That’s the other huge change: at the beginning of NEXT MONTH, we’re moving 2000 miles back to our hometown area (we’re from St. Louis, but we’re landing on the Illinois side of the Mississippi this time). We’re all thrilled to be getting the family back together after almost twenty years of this massive distance. But OMG it’s an upheaval.
Until we relocated to California in 2008, we’d moved fairly often—the longest we’d stayed at any one address was about 4 years, and the longest I’d lived anywhere in my whole life was 8 years. So we were always in a state of near-readiness for moving. I flattened and saved all the packing boxes for their next use, I collected nothing (except books, of course, but those are necessities amirite), I didn’t even have many knickknacks, which I saw as extraneous crap we’d only have to pack. We were always streamlined for the next move—even after we bought our first house (we’ve now bought four altogether).
When we moved into our house in Roseville, we settled the fuck in and rooted deep. Also, our financial situation improved dramatically (thank you, Night Horde!), which took us from going through frequent “no-spend zones” and creative bill-paying to not having to worry about a budget at all. I’m still talking about a basically (upper) middle class lifestyle, not wild riches or wild indulgences, but it felt pretty nice to be able to buy what we wanted when we wanted it.
Now I have like ten different collections, from fancy fountain pens to humble Funko Pops. And about twice the books I had 20 years ago. And my husband has been building collections of his own.
OMG WE HAVE ACCUMULATED SOOO MUCH CRAP IN THIS HOUSE!
More than the herculean task of sorting through all that and deciding what really matters, what we just want to keep even if it doesn’t matter that much, and “why the hell did we even buy this?” the highest hill we need to climb is the digging up of the roots.
Though every day we’ve felt the pain in the distance between us and our older sons who stayed back in the Midwest, we have loved every day of life in California. We love this house no one has ever lived in but us. We kinda forgot how to live anywhere else.
We’re hardly the only people to pick up stakes and completely change their lives. We’re certainly not the only retirement-age people to do it—in fact, it’s the normal course of things, to downsize and get closer to the kids. Most of what’s going on in our lives just now is so normal it’s mundane.
But boy howdy, it sure feels earth-shattering when you’re in the midst of it all.
I’ve had to set aside writing on the fourth Signal Bend Heritage book until this move is fully behind us. I’m about 25% into it, and the story is still cooking, but I simply cannot put 3-4 hours of quiet together in any day just now, and it’s frustrating as hell to try to get in the zone and have 4 million distractions poking at me every minute. What I’m doing instead of formal writing is letting it spool out in my head as it wants and taking notes as ideas form and set. (Which is what I used to do when I was writing maniacally and the next book was screaming at me before the one I was actually working on was done.)
So I’m confident I’ll be back to writing in earnest as soon as I get the boxes unpacked and have feathered our new nest—but I might not quite make my own personal end-of-summer deadline for publishing SBH4. I’ll keep you posted on developments there.
The next time you hear from me, I’ll no longer be a Californian. 😀🥺😍😭
I hope your summer is all sunshine and rainbows!
xoxo
s—