The Sunday-night dread.
I did not always call it that. I called it planning. I called it reviewing. I called it the responsible preparation of a woman who needed to be ready for Monday and readiness required a certain amount of Sunday, which over the years required more Sunday, until Sunday had become an annex of Monday, a preparatory space rather than a day of its own, and the only Sunday feeling was the dread of the Monday that was coming and the readiness that was never quite enough and the sense, persistent, unreasonable, and real, that the week about to begin was going to ask more than I could give and I was going to give it anyway and that giving was going to cost something I could not quite afford.
Sunday is mine now.
All of it. The morning and the afternoon and the evening that used to fill with the particular grey anxiety of a woman assembling herself for the week. Now the evening is dinner and the program and early to bed if I want to, which I often do, which is a fact I find quietly thrilling still, the permission of an early bed on a Sunday without the guilt of wasted time, without the knowledge that the preparation is incomplete, without the dread.
I do not miss the dread.
I also do not miss the performance of certainty in rooms where I was not certain. The faculty meeting where everyone spoke with a confidence they did not feel about things they did not fully know and the performance of certainty was the currency and I was good at spending it and it cost me something every time. I do not miss the emails that arrived at nine in the evening and required a response that needed to be calibrated for tone and implication and the management of a relationship that would be affected by the calibration. I do not miss the annual renewal season, the particular quality of February, which for twenty-five years meant waiting, means something different now.
February means the sea now. Or the memory of the sea. Or the garden catalogues and the planning for spring in a life where spring is something to look forward to rather than a semester to survive.
I do not miss any of it.
I am glad it happened. I am glad it is over. Both things, at the same time, without contradiction, which is how I feel about most of the chapters that are finished. Glad they were and glad they are done and glad to be here, in this chapter, in this Sunday, which is entirely mine.
