Between Rooms podcast Chapter 1

Chapter 1 opens with the narrator on the first Monday of her retirement, standing inside the newly built life she has carefully designed after decades of holding everything and everyone together. The chapter begins with the image of an old blanket preserved in a cedar chest, a quiet object that carries the weight of childhood memory and bodily recognition. From there, the narrative moves into the present: a new home, a new marriage, a son entering adolescence, and a woman no longer tethered to the relentless demands of public education leadership.

On that July morning, the narrator sits on the deck of her new house overlooking the thirteenth fairway, drinking coffee that is still hot — a small but powerful symbol of a life no longer organized around urgency. For years, she has been the person who steadies what tips, absorbs what breaks, and keeps moving when things hurt. Retirement should feel like freedom, but instead it feels unfamiliar, even disorienting. At 8:02 a.m., her body instinctively remembers the executive leadership meeting she would normally be attending. The meeting continues without her, and she is forced to confront the unsettling truth that she is no longer needed in the way she once was. 

The house itself becomes a central metaphor. Every detail — the gray glass tile, barnwood mantle, gold fixtures, wine bar, game room, deck, fire pit, and windows filled with light — reflects the narrator’s effort to build a space of warmth, permanence, and safety. Unlike the untouchable homes of her childhood, this house is meant to be lived in, spilled in, laughed in, and claimed. Yet even as she stands inside a home she chose and paid for, she remains emotionally “between rooms”: between career and retirement, urgency and rest, motherhood and release, survival and arrival.

Her son, Drake, moves through the chapter as both witness and emotional anchor. Having moved more times than the narrator ever intended, he represents her longing to finally offer stability. When he finds her sitting outside and asks why she is there, she answers, “Because I can be.” The moment is light, but beneath it is a deeper promise: she is not rushing away, not chasing the next role, not disappearing into another crisis. She is choosing presence.

The chapter also introduces the narrator’s growing awareness that strength has come at a cost. She reflects on years of managing damage, absorbing chaos, and becoming the reliable person others could depend on. But now, in the quiet, she begins to understand that what looked like competence also left bruises. The absence of crisis feels almost suspicious. Lightness arrives, but she waits for the catch.

By the end of the chapter, the narrator walks through the house at night, locking doors and touching the granite she chose. The exhaustion she feels is no longer the exhaustion of survival, but of arrival. Still, the chapter closes with a lingering tension: even in this new room, even beside Lance, even in the home she built for herself and Drake, her body still listens for the next room that might need her.

This opening chapter establishes the memoir’s central themes: the complicated aftermath of survival, the identity crisis that follows a life of caretaking and leadership, the longing for safety, and the uneasy transition from being necessary to being free. It positions the narrator not as someone who has neatly overcome her past, but as a woman learning, in real time, how to inhabit peace.

Transcript

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Section 1. Becoming the strong one. Chapter 1. Between Rooms. The blanket still lives in a cedar chest at the foot of my bed. I don't take it out often. When I do, it smells faintly of cedar and thyme. The cotton grid is thinner now, the edges worn from decades of folding and unfolding. It looks harmless. Just a blanket someone might drape over the back of a couch. But when I touch it, my body remembers before my mind does. For most of my life, I've been the person who stays upright when everything else collapses. If something tips, I steady it. If something breaks, I absorb it. If something hurts, I tell myself it isn't that bad. From a distance, that kind of behavior looks impressive, competent, dependable, very strong woman energy. Up close, it's quieter than that. Things hit. They just don't echo. My first Monday of retirement fell the first week of July, which feels like cheating if you've spent your entire adult life in public education. If you're going to walk away from weekly executive leadership meetings, you should at least have the audacity to do it in October or April, something dramatic, with flair. Instead, I retired in the one month when teachers and principals are already pretending they're not checking email. That Monday morning, Lance had left at 6.30 after a quick kiss on the forehead so he wouldn't wake me. By 7 o'clock, the house was still and unfamiliar in the way only a brand new house can be. We had just moved in fully that weekend. The house itself was new to us, but not new to me. For six months before we moved in, I had been living in it mentally, selecting wall colors, replacing flooring, choosing finishes with the kind of attention I once reserved for curriculum maps and strategic plans. I padded through the living room barefoot, stepping around a tower labeled office, with a question mark I apparently found reassuring at the time. The back of the house opened onto the 13th fairway. The entire wall of our home was windows, and the view was magnificent. It was aggressively green, the kind of green that suggests someone else was in charge of watering and consequences. Boxes inside, fairway outside, somehow both were true. I chose gray glass subway tiles for both kitchens, upstairs and downstairs, the kind that caught morning light and threw it back gently. We wrapped the fireplace in glistening stone and anchored it with a massive reclaimed barnwood mantle, rough and imperfect in ways that felt honest. I recessed the ceilings in the kitchen and main bedroom and installed wood above the new lighting so the rooms would feel held instead of hollow. Every cabinet pole and faucet wore a quiet gold finish against dark wood. The garage floor was sealed and epoxied until it gleamed. The two-story deck was stained a deep, warm neutral that glowed at sunset. Downstairs we built a wine bar and hung a custom light over the pool table. There was a game table, a dartboard, a ping pong table, and outside on the lower patio, a built-in fire pit while flames would eventually rise in clean contained circles, channeling my angst and competitive nature into relaxing respite space for younger me to find herself again. I picked every lighting fixture, every shelf, every finish. I had custom bookcases installed, and this time I didn't have to ask permission. I had spent decades earning rooms in other people's buildings, and this one finally was mine. I paid the invoices, I signed the approvals, I made the calls. Lance weighed in, and I listened, but the decisions were mine to make. That felt quietly radical. This wasn't the first house I had poured myself into. I had already sold one I thought would be forever. I had already learned how quickly stable can become negotiable. I knew what it felt like to build something beautiful and lose it. That knowledge hummed under the hardwoods. I wanted our house to feel warm and lived in, the opposite of the museum-like homes I grew up in, where nothing was out of place and everything felt slightly untouchable. This house was meant to be handled, to host, to spill wine in, to echo with laughter. Bright daylight poured in through our windows without apology. It was a modern farmhouse in all the ways Pinterest would approve of, but it was also something else. It was mine. And yet, that first Monday, even in a house I had designed down to the cabinet poles, I still felt slightly between rolls. Boxes leaned against carefully selected walls, drawer organizers sat empty and gleaming cabinets. My life had shifted into a space I had chosen, and I was still deciding how to inhabit it. My hair was in a messy bun piled on top of my head, no makeup, no high heels, no professional but sassy dress. I poured coffee into a heavy white mug I had chosen because it felt substantial in my hand. The steam curled upward in quiet spirals. I carried it to the deck and sat down. The air in the house carried that faint, sweet scent of fresh paint and newly stained wood. Even the floor sounded different, a cleaner echo under bare feet. Cabinets closed with a soft, confident click, the gold hardware caught gleaming sunbeams and small flashes as I moved through the kitchen. Outside, the deck boards were still cool from the night air. A thin sheen of dew softened the railing. The thirteenth hole stretched out in layered greens, bright near the tea box, darker toward the trees. The dew held the light in a way that made everything look newly washed. Somewhere down the fairway, a sprinkler head ticked rhythmically, as if the course itself kept a schedule I no longer belonged to. The house was finished enough to live in, and unfinished enough to remind me we had just arrived. Boxes sat dully juxtaposed on polished granite, reflecting the morning sun. It spread across the hardwoods, catching in the grain. For a few minutes I let myself walk from room to room without purpose. The pantry shelves stood bare and expectant. The barnwood mantle held nothing yet. Even the wine glasses downstairs felt like they were waiting for a first story. The house held stillness differently than any place I had lived before. Not tense stillness, not waiting for the phone to ring stillness, just air settling into corners. I allowed myself a second cup of coffee. For years coffee had been something I drank while standing, or driving, or answering email. I had learned to accept it lukewarm as a professional tax. That morning I took a sip. It was still hot. I didn't rush it. I had moved Drake more times than I ever meant to. For work, for proximity, for love, for things that made sense at the time and things that made less sense later. Drake had learned how to stack boxes before most kids learned long division. He knew which drawer the tape was in and how to fold towels so they don't take up too much space. He never complained, he just adjusted. This house was meant to be the last adjustment. This house was different. I didn't say it out loud, but when I signed the paperwork, I thought we're done moving. Until he chooses to leave, until he's ready. The huge windows flanking the south side of the house, upstairs and down, bore witness to the place itself had nothing to hide. Sunbeams moved through the room slowly, settling into corners that felt permanent. I wanted him to memorize this floor plan. At 8.02 a.m., my body remembered where I used to be. I knew exactly what was happening back in Columbia. The executive team would be filing into our weekly meeting, laptops open, someone joking about summer being quieter, someone else saying, Okay, let's get started. I had lived inside that rhythm for years. Mondays had belonged to that room. My body still kept that time. Even barefoot on the deck, sunlight warming my legs, something in me braced at eight o'clock. A quiet internal straightening, like I was about to be called on. The sprinklers clicked on near the tea box. A golf cart hummed somewhere down the fairway. The house behind me was full of boxes, and I wasn't in that room. I stretched my legs out and lifted my phone. For a second my thumb hovered. What exactly was I supposed to be doing at 8.04 a.m. if not solving something before lunch? I clicked on my calendar out of habit. Nothing was there. My email inbox was empty, no red notifications anywhere except Facebook. My jaw unclenched before I realized it had been tight. I clicked the camera icon and took a picture. Just my legs, the sunlight, the sweep of the 13th fairway. I cropped out the boxes. I adjusted the angle once, twice, then I sent it. Within seconds, unbelievable! Rude, must be nice, a string of laughing emojis. Enjoy it while it lasts. I smiled and hearted their replies. It wasn't gloating. It wasn't rebellion. It was a small experiment. The executive meeting would happen without me, the agenda would move forward, problems would be solved, and I would not be the one helping to solve them. The realization felt disconcerting and free range, both true. The group text quieted. The fairway brightened. Somewhere inside a cabinet door closed, a soft, unfamiliar echo in a house still learning our habits. Upstairs I heard footsteps, not urgent, not late, just morning. My body was exhausted. Six months of designing, six weeks of packing, three generations of belongings stacked in cardboard around us. I had carried books, dishes, memories, furniture, and expectations up and down staircases. My shoulders were sore, my hands were dry from tape and dust. The mug warmed my palms long after I expected it to cool. I took another sip. Still hot. The meeting would be in full swing by now. Someone would be presenting slides, someone would be pushing back, someone would be scanning the table to see who was aligned. The quiet didn't just feel peaceful. It felt untethered. Untethered sounds poetic until you're inside it. Inside it, it feels slightly lonely, slightly lazy, like you've stepped off a moving walkway and everyone else is still gliding forward without you. But at 8 09 a.m., with nowhere to rush, I felt unnecessary. That's different from rested. For decades, urgency had been my pulse. Now there was only sunlight and coffee and a faint hum of central air. I didn't know yet how to trust a morning that didn't require me to fix something before lunch. Untethered wasn't light. It was quiet enough I could hear myself. I watched a single golf cart move slowly along the edge of the rough. Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Drake wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later, hair doing whatever middle school summer hair does, blinking into the light like he wasn't sure what time it was. He squinted at me through the glass doors. Why are you outside? he asked. It wasn't accusation. It wasn't even confusion. It was habit. For all of his twelve years, mornings had meant motion, shoes on, keys found, calendar checked, something urgent before noon. Because I can be, I said. I meant it lightly, a wink in my voice, but I also meant it carefully, because I wanted him to hear something else under it. I'm not rushing anywhere. I'm not angling for the next thing. I'm not halfway into another district already. We're here. He studied me for a second, almost like he was measuring whether I believed myself. Then he shrugged. Cool. It was the most middle school response possible. But I could feel his shoulders drop half an inch. For the first time in his 12 summers, he didn't have to be in summer school in June and the day camps offered in July so that I could sit in meetings all day. High-level administration didn't come with slow mornings. It came with calendars and contingencies. I had spent years organizing my life around what might go wrong. This morning, I was organizing nothing. I was sitting in the sun in a house I had chosen with a son who was still learning what it meant for me to choose him back. I had told him I was done, that I wouldn't launch straight into another district or another role that required 80-hour work weeks and emotional triage before breakfast. After he wandered back inside, I stayed on the deck longer than necessary. The sun climbed, the air warmed. Now the only immediate problem was deciding which box to open first. Sigh. Instead, I sat there long enough to notice that my neck wasn't tight and my earlobes didn't feel like they could touch my shoulders. My phone wasn't buzzing, no one was waiting for me to help fix something. I was slightly unsure how to accept this feeling. Normally, this would have made me mildly twitchy. I'm super linear. I like systems, I like order, I like knowing where the scissors are at all times. I have been known to alphabetize spices for sport and my closet by color and sleeve hem length. Instead, I let the boxes sit there like cardboard witnesses to my life choices. That first Monday in July, nothing was collapsing. Lance was at work. Drake was wandering the house asking where we'd put his chargers as if I had personally unpacked and cataloged all technology overnight. The executive leadership team was meeting without me. The 13th Fairway was aggressively thriving. An occasional golf ball thudded in the backyard from someone's shitty slice off the tea box. My three huge muts ran to grab the ball like a prize. Inside the house was unpacked. The boxes were still there, between rooms, between roles, between identities. Ten years ago, that kind of in-between would have felt irresponsible. Now it felt accurate. That morning I wasn't bracing. Lightness crept in, and I did what I always do when something feels too good. I waited for the catch. Historically, lightness has been followed by a crisis, a meeting, or someone else's poor decision that somehow becomes my problem. But nothing happened. The boxes remained. The meeting continued without me. Drake wandered back to the porch door and asked what we were going to do that day. Unpacking, I said. Or maybe not. I'm trying something new called not preemptively fixing things. I smiled. He shrugged. Cool. Who knows if he understood what those words meant, but he knew it felt like freedom. I had spent years bracing for damage, managing it, absorbing it before it could spill. It had taken me a long time to realize that absorbing other people's chaos can look like strength. It also leaves bruises, not all of them visible. That morning for once, I wasn't scanning the horizon. I wasn't positioning myself as the stabilizer. I was sitting in the sun, in a house full of boxes, in a life that wasn't fully labeled yet, and no one was asking me to carry anything. When I finally stood to go inside, there was still coffee left in the mug. I finished it. All of it. I didn't miss the 10 p.m. emails. I didn't miss the board or community politics. I didn't miss the edge of my seat budget seasons. I missed the inside jokes. I missed the hallway debriefs. I missed the look across the table that said, You're seeing this too? I missed being part of a team that was trying to make something better. The boxes remained. Drake moved through the house like he trusted I would still be there at noon. The dogs shifted in their sleep inside. A golf ball thudded faintly against the fence line and rolled back toward the rough. Nothing was tipping. Nothing required triage. The morning expanded without asking anything of me. The sun kept warming my legs. As I stopped bracing, I also stopped explaining myself to people who preferred me chaotic. Ashley, the friend who could drink with me and love me and also help me disappear, and I, we didn't have a dramatic ending. There was no final fight, just distance. Fewer calls, fewer kitchen island nights. Drake asked me about her sometimes. I told him people grow differently. I am still waiting for an apology. I am no longer waiting for one to move forward. The first night we slept there, the house felt larger than it had during construction. Rooms held sound differently once beds were assembled and toothbrushes lined the counter. The hardwoods creaked in unfamiliar places. The refrigerator hummed steadily as if it had already settled in. After Drake went upstairs to sleep for the night, I walked through the house slowly, turning off lights one by one. The gold fixtures glowed softer at night. The barnwood mantle cast long shadows against the stone. Outside the fairway disappeared into a wide, quiet dark. I locked the back door, then the front, then checked the garage. Not urgently, just deliberately. I stood in the kitchen for a moment longer than necessary, hand resting against the cool granite I had chosen months earlier. Protective, proud, bone-tired. The house exhaled around us. We were inside. For the first time in years, exhaustion didn't feel like survival. It felt like arrival. But even as I sank into my bed, snuggled up to Lance, I realized I had built a life on being the one who held things upright. Even now in this quiet house, my body still listens for the next room that needs me.