Meg Hannah House won third place in this winter’s Writing It Real No-Contest Contest for her personal essay “He Was Surprised And So Was I”. Our contest was designed so that entrants wrote in response to words they came across in print or heard on TV or the radio or overheard in conversations. All of those who entered received my reader response to their work and entrants were then encouraged to send revisions based on those comments for final judging by a guest judge. In Meg’s case, although I’d given her detailed response that she took to heart, she wasn’t ready to rewrite, and her original entry was entered into the pool for final judging by Anna Quinn, who wrote in choosing Meg’s piece, “Very relatable. Many people would identify with the author’s struggle to reconcile her ‘calling’ with real-life situations. I like the idea of ‘start with what’s in front of you.'”
 
Upon notification that her writing had won third place in our contest, Meg wrote, “I feel a little embarrassed. After I submitted the original writing exercise, and received your very helpful comments, I got stuck and felt as though the writing raised some questions I wasn’t ready to answer. I didn’t end up doing a rewrite. I’m not sure it’s ready to publish!

Even so, Meg has allowed us to publish the work Anna judged. There are times when some readers ask for more and others are content with what is on the page. Only the author can decide if a piece needs to reach deeper or is already satisfying. And, of course, writers can always continue to write more pieces on the same concern or obsession, recognizing that one piece of writing can’t answer all of one’s questions on a topic.

He Was Surprised And So Was I
by Meg Hannah House

I remember the evening two springs ago, when the words came out, in a rush. I was setting the table; he was in the kitchen, opening wine for dinner.

“I was thinking today, you should buy the wine store.”

The thought had hit me sideways earlier in the day, as revelations for me often do — coming unbidden while I take a walk, or do dishes, or toss wet clothes into the dryer.

He should buy it. We should buy it.

My husband Doug had been taking what I’d come to call a semi-sabbatical, working at a wine shop after selling his consulting firm. But he’d decided it was time “to get a real job,” and a ream of resume paper, a new suit, and a few interviews later, he was discouraged.

We’d both felt weights lift off our shoulders with the sale of the consulting firm — a business I’d begun to think of as “the other woman” or a particularly troublesome child. Yes, it had given us a livelihood — and begun filling savings and college accounts, had let me stay home with the kids. But it had also given us personnel crises, months without paychecks, and taken Doug away from the family more than either one of us had liked.

For me, the business had been my reason and my excuse for staying home after our second child was born. I was hesitant to add more stress to a household where at any moment Doug might pull an all-nighter or a crisis might take him away from vacation. I was also unsure what job I wanted to go back to.

Not that there weren’t good times in the 13 years Doug ran the firm. But Doug was reluctant to re-enter the consulting world, even as an employee. He was good at it — insightful, analytical, a maker of great presentations. But just because you’re good at something, doesn’t make it right.

So we were surprised and yet not surprised when I voiced my revelation. And though we spent several months analyzing numbers, discussing scenarios, projecting profits (and losses), and studying spreadsheets that stretched 5 to 10 years down the road, I think we knew that absent some terrible secret hidden beneath this 20-year old wine store, we would buy it … together.

“I want both our names on the papers,” Doug said. “I want this to be an ‘us’ thing, not like the last time.” And I agreed. It would be a part-time gig for me — I help with marketing, keep the books, step in where needed. Doug’s the long-time wine aficionado and businessman.

The new job fits Doug like a glove. “A bad day in the wine business beats a good day in consulting,” he likes to say.

“Do you know as much about wine as Doug?” friends sometimes ask me. I answer, “No, but I’m enjoying the ride.”

Enjoying the ride … is that enough? Where else could I find a more flexible part-time job? I can still ride my bike on weekdays when the trail is clear, play music with my friends, pick up and deliver my teenagers when needed, write when I want to.

But since it seems like forever, I’ve struggled with the idea of vocation, of call. The question seems to be my constant companion — from the days in college when I was looking for a job to today, at 47, when I wonder at times, “what am I supposed to do? For months, I’ll be too busy to wonder, but the question always comes back.

Years ago, at home with two small children, I sat on the front stoop one warm morning, praying into my coffee cup. “What am I supposed to do?” I don’t expect or experience direct answers to my prayers, but that morning, the answer came from somewhere: “Start with what’s in front of you.”

I’ve struggled with that answer over the years as well — what if what’s in front of you is always the laundry?

I talked to a career counselor once who warned me away from the question of vocation. “Oh, I wouldn’t go there,” she said, as if it were dangerous territory. But I wanted someone to engage me on it — not to suggest that I work in a bookstore because I liked books. Such answers seemed too small to me.

A few years later, another revelation came in the form of a phrase that popped out in my journaling: “The idolatry of ‘it.'” Was the idea that we are called to one thing a form of idolatry? Did the idea distract me from the callings right in front of me?

So my journey so far has led me here. Starting with what’s in front of me, I’ve become a wine store owner, a committee chair, a cyclist, a writer, a singer, a wife, a mother. These days, I see that my role as daughter and niece are coming to the fore as my parents and aunt age. Start with what’s in front of me indeed. There seems to be an awful lot in front of me.

I still succumb to wondering at times, “Is this it?” “Is this where I’m supposed to be?”

For the New Year, I began reading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. His thesis: that call comes from inside, not from a voice outside. I like his ideas, yet when I read his stories, they are clean of any of the messiness of sick children, of money problems, of laundry, of children calling for forgotten lunches or clarinets, of cat litter boxes and dirty sheets.

And I’m not sure how to reconcile the two — the high level calling, the letting my life speak, to the phone call to help a sick relative.

I’m a life long Presbyterian in the reformed tradition — church reformed, always reforming. And on a personal level, I cling to the present continuous part of that phrase.

Maybe I’m called (fated? doomed?) to continually ask my vocation questions — to keep asking, “What am I supposed to do?” even as I stay elbow deep in the messiness of life.

****

Here are the responses I sent to Meg:

Meg,

I enjoyed this journey into your vocational ideas and the way you refer to the messiness of running a household and raising children and being there for teens and relatives. I like the way you pop the thought to your husband Doug that he should own the wine store and how the two of you get to work together figuring it out. I like the way you accept that your vocation can change by looking at what’s in front of you.

I wonder if a revision might not start with you in conversation with someone about wine–I like the question do you know as much as Doug does about wine and what you answer. That could be an opening. Then you can show the readers the shop, your husband’s pleasure, how you bought it because of your revelation and the way you worked together to make it happen. You can show how this job contrasts with the one he had last and what you are grateful for about that. You can write what he says about the bad day, good day. I like that line.

Then you can explore the idea that he was surprised and so were you when you blurted out your revelation two years ago. You can talk about where you were in things that day– your feeling that you didn’t want to see Doug go back to his old job, your needs as a spouse and mom and one looking for time to develop herself and find a vocation. I think what you are saying is that contrary to advice about a calling coming from within, it may also come by looking at what is outside of you, in front of you. You have found that your calling may be to be available to bring help, stability, and joy to others.

I don’t know how that fits with reform but perhaps that is something you can write about and explore.

I think in a revision, this will be of a piece. I would love to see those kids and what they think of the wine store, how it is a part of your community, how the relatives that need you view the store. I think if you make the shop central to the essay — let it be the place you are writing from and describe it — you will find that thread about your vocation fits in.

Yours, Sheila