She Walked Forward

I

February 1st, 2024, was the day I knew my life would change forever.

I had just published my memoir, I'm Not the Manager Here and understood on a cosmic level that all the years of toil had been worth it.

I had achieved the goal. I was soaring.

In complete contradiction to the book's title, I had also received a promotion at work. From laundry attendant to warehouse manager, I was moving up in the event rental company I had been working for over the past five years.

It felt like everything was coming together. Everything was coming up, Lindsay.

On February 1st, 2024, I walked into my giant warehouse with a stack of freshly published books to gift to my coworkers. I was eager to start managing. 

After years of toil and uncertainty, it felt as though my feet were finally planted on sturdy ground.

II

The problem with selfies is that we often only take face shots. It's tricky to get a full body pic of ourselves, and typically, the lower half isn't nearly as interesting as those beautiful head canvases we carry around on our shoulders.

So naturally, we focus on the upper levels when self-photographing.

We smile big and goofy or gaze longingly into the lens. We give off flirtatious half-grins and purse our lips together to make them look enticingly kissable.

Arguably, playing with selfies is the greatest gift that modern technology has ever given us.

And yet, where is the homage to the legs? Who is giving tribute to the feet? Those sturdy appendages that get us where we need to go.

My life was about to change.

Just not in the way I had hoped.

III

The job wasn't as glamorous as I imagined. I'm not sure why I thought a warehouse manager position would be glamorous, but the mind works in mysterious ways. I was imagining business meetings and, I dunno, carrying around a briefcase and shit.

Instead, I was alone in an echoic warehouse for most of my day, counting inventory and writing job description manuals.

The work was laborious and lonely, much of the time. However, hard work has never scared me. Growing up, I was a farm kid and made a hefty penny picking rocks out of Dad's canola fields whenever I needed some extra coin. Hard work is the way of my people, and I've rarely shied away from a task needing to get done.

And yet.

The long days were draining both mentally and physically. When getting home at night, usually after a nine-hour shift, I was too exhausted to write. I was too exhausted to do much of anything.

I'd plop myself down on the couch and be fast asleep by 8 p.m.

IV

Only weeks after the launch of the book, the sales plummeted. No new orders were coming in, and I was too tired and depressed to advertise. I both literally and figuratively placed I'm Not the Manager Here on a shelf in my office and completely forgot about it.

With the loss of my book sales, I lost my online writing community as well. I stopped chatting with my writer friends and stopped posting my regular stories.

The familiar grip of depression had caressed my aching feet, and at any moment, I knew I could be pulled down into the deep.

V

"I think Divorce is our only option," he said as I stared at my husband dumbfoundedly. We had been fighting, sure, but it wasn't anything we couldn't handle.

Except it was.

A separation is difficult to bear at any time in one's life. The hurt feelings, the desperate attempts to save the marriage, the frantic acts of addiction you succumb to in hopes that it will solve your insurmountable woes.

The anger and rage that lawyers are paid to fuel. The children.

Oh, for the love of God, won't someone think of the children?

They truly were the real victims during the separation. Despite our valiant attempts to save them from the fighting, as teens, keeping them in the dark was nearly impossible.

VI

Now, it was the end of August. I had taken to going on long midnight walks with the dog. The house felt isolated and too cold for late summer. I thought that taking photographs of the park at night might be a fun side project to get my mind off the dumpster fire that this "Year of Lindsay" had become.

Except I couldn't focus on photography. I couldn't focus on the long grass surrounding the pond or the way the stars flickered in the blackened sky.

The unforgivable loop running through my head was the image of the kids telling me point-blank that they wanted to live with their dad.

This meant that beyond the sheer devastation of not having my children with me full time, I would also have no claim to the family home as I would never fight to remove the children from the one place they could still feel secure.

I had until October to find a new home and somehow drag my tired body into this new existence I was facing.

I pointed the camera to my feet and took the photo. It came out blurry around the edges because my hands were shaking. The blurriness felt right. My future was as hazy as the shadowed threshold of that picture.

Maybe, subconsciously, I was telling myself that the only way forward was to walk.

VII

September came and went in a flash. I found an apartment for me and the dog and began to try to rebuild whatever had been lost with my kids.

It is ruinous to feel rejected by one's children. I mulled it over in my mind. What had I done wrong? What kind of mother was I? Why hadn't I done more to fight for them?

These, however, were the wrong questions to be asked. I only learned that recently after a ton of therapy.

I should have asked why we forced them to choose in the first place.

VIII

Separation is a messy and tragic thing. It brings out the worst in us because we are told by the onlookers to "stay angry" and to never give in. We set out on this quest to clean the other out, and inevitably, someone, typically the person with the cheaper lawyer, will be deemed the loser.

Luckily for me, because I undoubtedly had the cheaper lawyer, Jamie and I came to our senses before things got too volatile.

We saw the toll it was taking on our children and ourselves and knew we must stop the madness.

At the core of the thing, we had always been best friends. For the past twenty years, our friendship got us through the trials of young love, new parenthood, business ownership, and eventually losing a business.

At 18 and 21 years old, we were ill-prepared for the road ahead. We didn't know the struggles and the heartache that was laid out before us.

Our legs were wobbly, our feet unsure of the path forward.

And yet.

We hung on closely to one another and walked together into the future. Despite all the challenges, we held each other up along the journey.

And now, 17 years later, how could we forget that?

IX

Christmas had always been our holiday. We avoided big family get-togethers and hauling the children around to countless in-laws' homes and instead opted to spend our holidays tucked away in our little home, just the four of us. It had been our tradition for years.

Christmas Day was reserved for only the four of us.

I worried endlessly about how this Christmas would look. Once again, a ritual we had engrained into our children for their entire lives would now have to be shattered to smithereens.

We would have to begin building new rituals and new traditions.

Jamie reached out in the first weeks of December, asking me what I wanted to do about Christmas. I was too nervous to tell him, plead with him, that I wanted to be there with the kids and himself and have at least one more Christmas, just the four of us.

I didn't have to say anything, as it turned out.

He mirrored my sentiments, explaining that he couldn't imagine not having all four of us together for Christmas.

X

It has been nearly one year since I walked into a warehouse, imagining that this was going to be the beginning of a great new life. I've since resigned from the manager position because, honestly, there's only so much stress a gal can handle in her life.

I'm also splitting my time between my new apartment and my old home. I've built a new and flourishing relationship with my kids, and something remodelled and good is being built between Jamie and me.

I look at my photo of those sturdy feet in the darkness and feel so deeply for the woman taking that picture. She didn't know what her future held. She was scared and insecure about her ability to walk out into the world alone. She feared solitude and the dark future she couldn't help but see before her.

And yet.

She stood alone in a park at midnight, photographing the very feet that would bring her to this place today.

She walked forward.