“MA’AM. GET BACK IN YOUR CAR.”
The officer flung open his door and stepped out, pointing at me.
“GET BACK IN THE CAR,” he repeated. “...MA’AM.”
I was in the Winnetka parking lot outside my office last Tuesday morning, and I was not doing anything alarming.
I was holding an insurance card.
A current, valid, entirely unremarkable insurance card that I had just excavated from my wallet while I sat there waiting for my tickets. And because I am a fundamentally helpful person, and because some corner of my brain genuinely believed this would improve my standing with him, I opened my door and got out to bring it over.
In hindsight, I understand that a woman advancing on a squad car holding a small rectangle of paper is not the reassuring gesture I had imagined it to be.
At the time, I thought I was being efficient.
He did not agree.
So let me back up, because there is a version of this where I sound like a person with a criminal record, and I would like to mount a defense first.
I live in Winnetka, and the honest truth is that I basically only go three places by myself.
My house.
The Workshoppe, two blocks away.
And the coffee shop across the street from the Workshoppe, where I dependably order a cold brew, black, nothing in it, except on the days I can tell early are going to be a day, in which case there is an espresso shot involved.
I walk all of it.
I do spend an inordinate amount of time on job sites and at properties, but I usually get a ride to those, which is one of the perks of being married to your business partner.
I have a perfect driving record. Immaculate.
And at this stage of my life I would not dream of jaywalking. I have three children under six, a design-build firm, a real estate team and a store, and somewhere along the way I became a person whose entire risk tolerance is expressed through paint colors.
So when I had a client meeting on Lake in Wilmette last week, it counted as travel.
Four miles. Eleven minutes.
Beautiful day, sun out, good mood, a meeting I was looking forward to at a house I already liked. And on my way home, hair in the breeze, I followed every traffic suggestion. I did not speed. I did not roll a stop sign. I did not do one interesting thing in those eleven minutes home.
I made it all the way to my destination and then, as I pulled into the parking lot, the lights went on behind me.
My first thought, genuinely, was that he needed to get past me.
He did not need to get past me.
He came to the window and asked if I knew why he was pulling me over, which I have since decided is an unfair question because there is no correct answer.
Say yes and you have confessed to something. Say no and you have announced that you do not know what is happening in your own vehicle.
I said no.
He told me my plates were expired, and I felt something like relief, because a sticker is an embarrassment and not a character flaw, and I have absolutely been the woman driving around on a dead sticker before.
I handed over my license and registration with the brisk cooperation of someone who intended to be back on schedule within four minutes. Then I watched him look at my license for slightly longer than a person needs to look at a license.
He turned it toward the light.
I have replayed that small motion many times since.
He asked for my insurance. I produced the card from my wallet, which was also expired, at which point my husband came very close to having a genuinely bad afternoon, because insurance is firmly and eternally his lane.
It turned out to be only the card. The policy was fine. (KC, you’re welcome. And please note how quickly I was prepared to hand you over.)
Then the officer asked whether there was a reason my license had expired…
Three years ago.
I want to tell you that I handled this with poise.
I have run meetings with contractors, architects, inspectors, sellers, buyers and my own mother. I have walked people calmly through decisions with six figures attached to them.
And in that parking lot, on that beautiful morning, I produced a series of sounds that I believe included the phrases “three kids under six,” “we move a lot,” and, I am fairly certain, “I mostly just walk to work.”
Which is true. And also the single least compelling legal defense ever mounted in the state of Illinois.
He listened to all of it. Then he gave me ‘the look’.
You know the look. The specific expression of a man whose morning did not need to contain this, and now contains this, and who understands that he is about to be the reason a stranger has a bad week.
“Ma’am,” he said, “you’re going to get some tickets today.”
And he walked back to his car.
When he returned, he explained that a license expired by more than a year is not a ticket at all. It is a Class B misdemeanor in the state of Illinois, and it comes with a court date.
A CLASS B MISDEMEANOR.
I nearly collapsed.
Friends, I have never so much as been sent to detention. With only a few exceptions. Mostly for talking too much.
Once for too many tardies.
But outside of that? Never once.
My life flashed before my eyes. Was I a criminal now? Was this how it happened? After all this?
I was somewhere in the process of leaving my body entirely, catastrophizing my future, and trying to determine how exactly I was going to break it to KC that I had a court date and had to appear before a judge and perhaps this was the beginning of a very different chapter for us, when the officer politely interrupted my spiral with the single most useful piece of advice I received all week:
Judges do not love it when you show up to court with the exact same problem you had on the day you got the ticket.
Fair enough.
So on Tuesday I am going to the DMV.
There is a sticker on its way in the mail.
And at some point in the near future I am going to stand in front of a judge and explain that I run a company, raise three children, manage approximately four hundred moving pieces at any given moment, and somehow did not manage to prioritize my own driver’s license for three years.
And in the days since, I have realized something slightly more uncomfortable.
I never decided to let my license expire.
There was no moment. Nobody ever put the question in front of me.
It renewed in my mind the way things renew in your mind when you are busy, which is to say it existed as a low background hum of something I would handle. Filed somewhere behind the third baby and the store opening and roughly four hundred things that were genuinely on fire that particular week.
And then that week became a month.
And the month became three years.
The whole time, I thought I was not deciding.
But I was.
Every single day.
The answer was no.
I just got to feel like I had not made a decision because the cost was deferred and invisible. Until last Tuesday, in a parking lot in Winnetka, when three years of not deciding arrived all at once.
I have watched this happen in houses for twenty years.
Somebody has known for three years that the kitchen does not work. They talk about it at every dinner party. They have saved four hundred photos. They have not decided anything, so nothing happens, and it feels like a neutral state.
Like waiting.
It is not waiting.
It is three more winters in a kitchen that does not work. It is the mudroom problem, every day, for another year. It is prices moving while you think about it.
Nobody pulls you over for that. There is no court date for a house you have not started, which is exactly why it can go on for so long.
And I would go one step further.
Yesterday I wrote about walking a client’s house here on the north shore and realizing that the question nobody had asked was not how to make their kitchen nicer:
It was whether the kitchen belonged in that room at all.
That is the other danger in waiting. You can spend years waiting to do the wrong project because nobody ever went back and questioned the assumptions the house handed you in the first place.
That story is here, if you want it.
I see the same thing happen in the middle of projects.
Nobody chooses the stone, so the cabinetry gets drawn without it.
Nobody answers the appliance question, so the elevation gets built around a guess.
Those are decisions too.
They are just decisions made by default, by whoever had to keep moving that day.
And sometimes you do not find out what they cost until eight months later, when the thing that got decided for you turns out to be wrong.
I am not writing this from a position of authority.
I am writing it from a position of empathy. As someone who has also not decided a thing or too on time.
Clearly.
So here is what I am actually asking, mostly of myself.
What have you filed under “I’ll handle that” that you have in fact been deciding against, quietly, every day, for a while now?
Not the obvious one.
The quiet one.
The one that has never been on a list because it has never once felt like a decision.
I would love to know. Hit reply.
I will be at the DMV. Where I’ll have plenty of time to ponder your replies. And let’s face it, I could use the company.
Because take it from me, waiting is not a strategy.
Until next Sunday,
Grace
P.S. I’ve been writing in between Sunday Strategy(ish) lately! If you enjoy my work and would like to read more, check it out.
P.P.S. Enrollment opens September 28 for The Design Office.