The other day I had lunch with a friend. She told me about the grueling process that had consumed her for the past few months... her professional review. It involved written evaluations, student feedback and analytical measurements of her performance. The effort had been both exhausting and unsettling. Would she be rehired? Was she an effective teacher?

 

 

It had taken a tank of energy, but at the climax my friend had arrived at a new vantage point. She had credible assurance that she was making a difference.

 

While I did not covet the sixty hours logged after already bulging workdays in which she had created the final report, I did wonder how to calibrate my own progress as a wife and mother. I remember writing a timid letter to a friend who knows the unedited version of my life. In a fragile moment of uncertainty I exposed my bare neck.

 

"Is it enough to just stay married and show up for my children?" I felt like a mediocre mother, in a vanilla marriage. 

 

Her response was on a postcard, and I can still see the opening sentence in her distinctive script.

 

"YES!!!!IT IS!!!!!"

 

I suppose there are ways to measure a life off the employment grid. Micah and Chara both called me last night as they rode separate trains in different cities. Hosanna almost missed her flight yesterday, until I asked what time she would land in Chicago. Suddenly her eyes got flinty and she realized she had been reading the arrival time as the departure time. She scrambled into high gear and John dashed her to the airport. Hosanna texted to thank me as she slumped into her seat. John likes me too, or so he professes. Some days I wonder why, considering my myriad flaws.

 

As I ascended the stairs today I paused to look at the photographs that chronicle the last thirty years. Feelings leaped from the frames to kindle my heart like a fire from a match spans the gap to ignite a wick. There is one of John and I at the first marriage conference, and another of us strolling on the beach. They are windows into our shared history with an inexhaustible reservoir of affection. I can gaze a thousand times and the emotions will still pour out like water from an underground spring. Some photographs paint his hair as brown as chocolate, others portray it as gray. It is like a wrinkle in time to see them side by side.