A Phone Call on the Way Home

I called him because I had forty minutes in the car and I didn’t want to spend all of it listening to my own thoughts. I’d already done that for most of the day, and they weren’t especially useful thoughts. Just the same dull loop: the interview, the custody messages, the feeling that I was behind on everything even when I wasn’t sure what “everything” meant.

He picked up on the second ring and said, “Are you driving?”

I said, “Yeah. Hands-free. I’m not being reckless.”

He laughed, and that helped a little. Not a lot. Just enough to make the call feel like a real call instead of me quietly dropping a bag of problems into someone else’s lap.

The first thing we talked about was the interview. Lead applications engineer. Even saying the title out loud made it feel like I was wearing someone else’s jacket. I told him I had been reading the job description again and again, trying to decide if I was actually qualified or just good at recognizing enough of the words to fool myself.

“It’s a lead role,” I said. “So they’re going to ask about strategy and mentoring and probably some weird scenario where everything is on fire and I’m supposed to calmly align stakeholders.”

He said, “You’ve done all of that.”

“Not with the title.”

“That’s usually how people get the title.”

I hated that he was probably right. I also hated how much reassurance I wanted. I’m old enough and experienced enough that I feel like I should be past needing someone to say, yes, you can walk into the room. But I still needed it. I told him I’d made notes, then remade the notes because the first version sounded too stiff, then stopped because I could feel myself preparing for a performance instead of a conversation.

At some point I missed my turn. Not by much, but enough that the navigation voice had to start correcting me, and I got irritated like it was her fault. He heard it in my voice and said, “You good?”

I said, “Yeah, I’m just being dramatic about a right turn.”

Then we got into the co-parenting stuff, which is always where the air changes. I told him I’d started using an AI tool to summarize the messages and keep a record of patterns, dates, tone, who agreed to what, who changed what later. Not to be fancy. Not because I think a robot can solve a family problem. Mostly because I was tired of rereading long message threads and feeling my body react before my brain could even sort out what happened.

I said, “It’s weirdly helpful, but it also makes the whole thing feel colder.”

He asked what I meant.

I said, “Like, instead of being upset, I’m tagging incidents. Instead of saying, ‘This hurt,’ I’m uploading screenshots and asking for a timeline.”

There was a pause. Not awkward, exactly. More like he knew not to rush in with a solution.

The thing that didn’t work, and still doesn’t, is that documentation doesn’t make the conflict feel less personal. It helps me remember the facts. It helps me not get pulled into an argument about what was said two Tuesdays ago. But it doesn’t make it easier when a message comes in at 9:47 p.m. and I know before opening it that my stomach is going to drop.

I told him I felt stupid for being this affected by it. He said, “That doesn’t sound stupid.”

I said, “It feels stupid.”

Then I talked for too long. I could hear myself doing it. Circling the same details, explaining background he already knew, defending choices nobody on the call was attacking. He didn’t stop me, which was kind, but eventually I stopped myself and said, “Okay, I’m done making my case to the court of your Honda audio system.”

He laughed again.

The low mood part came out after that, not as a big confession, more like a leak. I said I’d been feeling flat. Not crisis-flat. Just everything taking more effort than it should. Dishes looking personal. Emails feeling like accusations. Waking up already tired and then feeling annoyed at myself for being tired.

He didn’t try to brighten it. That may have been the best part of the call. He didn’t tell me to go for a walk or drink more water or make a list, even though all of those things might have been reasonable. He just said, “Yeah. That sounds heavy.”

I was near home by then, sitting at a red light behind a truck with a dented bumper and one brake light out. I remember that because I was trying not to get emotional and I needed something dumb to look at. The call had not fixed anything. The interview was still coming. The co-parenting messages were still going to be there. My mood did not lift like a curtain.

But I felt a little less sealed off from the world.

When I pulled into the driveway, neither of us did the thing where we turned the conversation into a plan. No “send me your resume.” No “forward me the messages.” No “tomorrow you should…” We just said it was good to talk.

He said, “Let me know how the interview goes.”

I said I would.

Then I sat in the car for another minute after we hung up, because going inside felt like starting the next part of the day, and I wasn’t quite ready. The screen went dark. The car made that soft ticking sound it makes after a drive. Nothing had been solved, but the call had happened, and for that evening that was enough to count.