Wednesday was one of those weekdays that make you feel like Friday, but you dare not wish for it because there is so much left to do before the week ends. I wish my mama had told me there would be days like these. But she didn’t. And now, there are too many days like these.
For the past month, my team of four had been racing to design a software application for a client. No matter how unrealistic the schedule was, we got the development done. Then come this week of deployment. I literally spent all week running around the building, chasing approvals. (If you’ve worked for a big corporation, you know what I mean.) We had a test run on Tuesday to work out any kinks and reduce the risk of something going wrong on the actual day of deployment: Wednesday.
When Wednesday finally came, I was still chasing approvals—up and down the stairs, asking people to click the button. (Note to self: if you really need someone to do something, email is not very effective.)
A little after noon, I finally got the last two approvals. Late in the afternoon, we were ready to start our deployment.
But it didn’t go right. In fact, everything went wrong. We spent the next few hours trying to resolve it. At the end, exhausted, we called it a failure. We closed the laptops, picked up our coats, and dragged ourselves to our cars.
Normally I would click play into one of my many Spotify playlists and cruise home planning for the weekend. However, that was a pleasure my mind couldn’t indulge on Wednesday.
As I drove home, I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I did wrong. Because when you are the project manager, your principal responsibility is to stay in front of issues, to neutralize them before your team encounters them. Though the production environment is not our purview, I second guessed myself, maybe I should have asked someone to verify that all was as it should be. Is this what my coworkers are thinking? I wondered. Maybe they think it’s my fault. Maybe it is my fault.
The drive home was both long and short. Then I was in my driveway.
Work and family are a married couple head locked in love and war.
When your workday is shitty, you try not to bring it home—by that I mean, bringing the exhaustion and frustration back to your family. But we are only human. Or so we tell ourselves, so we can live with ourselves. And they know it. So they forgive us long before we forgive ourselves. How else would they smile and tell us they love us after we’ve just yelled at them for no other reason than that we left our patience in some cubicle hours earlier?
But I try to do better. Better than what I see and hear in the news, better than what I suspect is our nature. Better than what I learned from my parents.
Like encouraging my kids to demand I defend my “No” answer to their requests; suggest they live with someone for at least a year before getting married. I once took my 8-year-old to the middle of nowhere and encouraged him to jump off a cliff into a dark, cold lake. My parents would never. In fact, I got beaten for going to Badala, the river between Koindu and Nongowah.
Not only wishing they learned but actually paying for lessons in musical instruments.
See, in the Maninka tradition of which I am a member, my clan is forbidden to play any musical instrument or even to sing. So, I only learned to clap instead. But even that depends on my mood and the pain I sometimes feel in my fingers. Often, it’s all off beat; I can’t even cheer a toddler to shake their arms.
But the Atlantic is so wide—when you cross it, you are allowed certain liberties. So, I wish my kids things my parents would never wish for me.
How come some years ago, for her ninth birthday, I bought my daughter a piano because I heard her making perfect notes on her little toy one. We got a teacher, and she started taking lessons. As it sometimes is with kids, her interest in piano was fleeting. Then it was violin. Then a violin teacher—who, we later found out, was actually a cello player. Go figure. I was in my twenties when I first saw either instrument, and I still can’t tell the difference.
The piano is no grand piano—our house isn’t big enough for that. It’s a used one we got from a nonprofit organization. At times, one of the keys would refuse to make a sound in the middle of a song. Since getting it, it’s only been tuned once. Needless to say, it’s badly out of tune to trained ears. That’s what a teacher told us. Which is why we got it tuned that first—and only—time. I think it plays perfectly well.
We kept the piano, all these years, sitting in the house waiting for someone to take an interest. I tried. But my fingers don’t dance, especially not left and right on their own separate waves. When he was six, my son took an interest. He started tapping the black and white keys and making melodies with the help of his sister. We got him a teacher. Six months later, we went out of the country, and upon our return I never called the teacher back. A couple of years later, he still remembers a few of the tunes that teacher and his sister taught him—or that he taught himself from watching YouTube videos.
When I walked into the house that Wednesday, he was sitting at that old tan piano facing the bay window, playing bits and pieces of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I closed the door quietly behind me, dropped my bag to my side, leaned back on the door, and just listened.
I love music—all types of music. The dance kind, and the quiet type that knows how to find its way somewhere deep in the body, so you believe in the presence of the soul and the existence of God. I wish I could play music. Oh, how I wish I could! But I think it’s too late for me. So I wished my kids could play. When they do, I know what Jimi Hendrix felt when he closed his eyes.
I think my son knows how much I enjoy his playing—how I often stop what I am doing just to listen. And he knows I especially love when he plays the national anthem. I suspect he realized I was in the house, stopped in my tracks listening to him. So he transitioned to the national anthem and played it perfectly, to the last chord. And I was happy. I was thankful.
