I opened my laptop.
I opened my design files.
I want to explain something about graphic design.
Good graphic design is not decoration.
It is the construction of meaning through visual communication.
It is the specific skill of making a thing visible that was previously not visible.
I had been doing this for eleven years.
I had been doing it in fifteen-minute increments between children for most of those years.
I was, in those fifteen-minute increments, better at it than most people were in full days.
Because necessity and constraint produce a specific sharpness.
You learn to know exactly what you mean when you only have fifteen minutes to mean it.
I opened the file.
The file was something I had been working on in fifteen-minute increments for three months.
A portfolio.
Not a portfolio of my client work, though my client work was good.
A portfolio for a position I had seen advertised in September.
A senior design role at a studio I had admired for six years.
The kind of studio whose work appeared in the publications I had been reading since I started my career.
The kind of studio where being hired would mean something specific.
They had reached out to me.
Not cold.
They had found my work.
A project I had done for a nonprofit two years ago had been featured in a design publication and they had contacted me three months ago asking if I was open to a conversation.
I had been managing that conversation in fifteen-minute increments.
Answering their emails carefully.
Sending samples.
Working on the specific portfolio they had requested.
Carter did not know.
Not because I had hidden it.
Because when I had mentioned, five months ago, that I was thinking about pursuing a new opportunity, he had said: you already have enough on your plate with the kids.
He had not asked what the opportunity was.
I had not pushed.
I had just done the work.
In the fifteen-minute increments.
For three months.
Today I had four hours.
I worked.
I worked with the specific focused attention of someone who has been rationing a resource for months and who has suddenly been given an abundance of it.
I finished the portfolio.
I wrote the cover document.
I reviewed everything twice.
I sent it.
I sat back.
The house was quiet.
I heard, from outside, the sound of leaves.
October leaves.
The specific dry sound of them.
I thought about Carter.
I thought about: you’re just always tired and no fun anymore.
I thought about the golf bag.
I thought about what fun had meant when he first said he wanted six children.
Fun had been the chaos.
The noise.
The full dinner tables.
The being in the middle of it.
He had said he wanted the work.
He had meant it, I think.
And then the work had arrived and the work was actual work and he had decided that the noise was exhausting and the chaos was too much and he had removed himself from the middle of it.
And I had stayed in the middle of it.
Because the middle of it is where the children were.
And the children were what we had built.
But somewhere in the removing of himself, Carter had also decided that the staying was something to be looked down on.
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