If Not Now, When?

What going to college in my 30s and sending my wife to Barcelona to ride around on garbage trucks taught me about waiting for "the perfect time."

A few years ago, my wife and I moved from Southern Colorado to Northern Colorado. We uprooted our 7-person family from a city where all our kids were born and where we were surrounded by friends and family and went to a new town halfway across the state where we didn’t know a soul.

Why? It’s complicated.

The timeline of the Stauffer family was, to be sure, unorthodox. We got married at age twenty, had five children in six years, and then decided we would both finish school in that order.

None of that timing makes any sense, I know. But when our oldest daughter hit her teenage years, we started wondering about whether going back to school would ever be worth doing at all.

We both had about one full year of community college under our belts when we got married but hadn’t finished. So, we knew it would take a very long time to complete school if we kept going to night and weekend classes in a part-time, piecemeal fashion.

It would take forever to finally finish, and we began to fear that our kids would grow up, move out, and go to college and finish before we did.

So, we did something completely crazy: we decided we’d both go back to school full-time and finish as soon as possible.

The timing was very bad. We had five young kids, and I worked full time, so we would basically have to live double lives in order to pull this off.

I’d need to keep working to make enough money to support the family on my income, as I always had, but now I also would have to add school, study, and homework on top of all that.

My wife would have to take care of the kids, shuttle them to and from school, make meals, handle all the other household duties, and add going to school to the mix.

This would be almost impossible, but we kept coming back to the same question.

“If not now, when?”

When would it ever be the perfect time?

When all the kids had moved out?

When I was done putting in a full career’s worth of work and close to retirement age?

When we were grandparents?

I wanted to go to school just to finally finish it and get that stupid piece of magical paper that potential employers were obsessed with and always insisted I needed, or they wouldn’t even consider hiring me. I wanted to take away their reason for treating me like a second-class citizen when I was a job seeker.

My wife wanted to go to school to finally get the dance degree she’d wanted her whole life. But her biological clock was ticking: after age 30, she was already pushing the upper age limits of what schools consider “eligible” to be in dance programs.

We would essentially both have to pull double shifts for a couple of years in order to make this happen. I didn’t know anybody who’d done anything like that before so I wasn’t sure if it was even possible.

After we moved, we did meet a few families at our new church, where either the husband or the wife was going back to school. But that was graduate school. Almost all of them were working part-time while going to school part-time and, often, getting paid or at least reimbursed for school by their employers. …and in every case, there was only one parent at a time in school.

But here we were, living in a new community with people we didn’t know, and all seven of us were going to school full-time.

“If not now, when?” We kept asking ourselves, with this rhetorical question itself also being the answer to the question.

Now was the time.

It was not ideal, not logical, and, I had to admit, not even reasonable. But if not now, when?

So we did it. It was very, very hard, but it worked. It took us three years to both finish.

About halfway through my wife’s dance program, she learned of an opportunity to go to a community art festival and summer school in Barcelona, Spain, with an organization based in Texas called Forklift Danceworks.

She came home one day and said, “What if you pay for me to fly to Barcelona for a week and a half so I can go?”

Before agreeing to this totally crazy idea, I wanted to learn more about it first. ICAF (the International Community Arts Festival Summer School) was an annual event that would be held in Spain this year. She said she would be going with people from the UK, The Netherlands, and Texas — none of whom she knew — in order to meet with sanitation workers and teach them about movement… and community… and art… or something like that.

Nothing about this made any sense. What did trash truck drivers in Barcelona have to do with her, a dance student living in Colorado? And what was all that about forklifts and Texas?

Aside from the absurdity of the trip’s purpose, it was a massive ask: the airplane ticket alone was over $1,000, and I would have to stay here in the USA and watch all the kids, and take them to and from school, and keep working.

I had just gotten back from a week-long school trip to Yosemite National Park and was still trying to catch up from being gone for that.

The timing was terrible. But, again, if not now, when? When else would she have a chance to go to Europe with friends she met through her college dance program?

Worse, it turned out she didn’t even have a passport. For some reason, she had never had a passport. We’d have to remedy that, which added several hundred dollars to the trip’s cost.

In the end, I said yes. We ended up doing it. I spent almost $4,000 in order to make this wild, hare-brained trip possible at the worst possible time.

If not now, when?

When it was time for her to leave, I drove my wife to the Denver airport. I helped her with her bags and stood on the sidewalk by the departure signs. I hugged her tight and said goodbye.

She started crying. She was scared. What if we were making a huge mistake?

Aside from driving to Mexico a few times, she had never left the country before. Never by flying, and certainly never alone. But here she was, about to get on a plane by herself and fly across an ocean to spend a week and a half by herself in a country that spoke a different language.

I told her I was excited for her.

I told her it was worth doing.

I told her she was brave.

If not now, when?

I drove back home, and later that night she flew from Denver, Colorado to Zurich, Switzerland, and then, after a long layover, arrived in Barcelona. She left the airport and braved the masses of cars and people in a new city where all the signs were in Spanish or Catalan.

Finally making it to her hotel, she checked in and took a deep sigh of relief. She was here now. Now, she could relax.

That’s when she noticed a giant neon sign lit up in the hotel lobby.

“If not now, when?” It asked.

She snapped this photo and sent it to me. It almost took my breath away. We felt like we had made the right choice.

She was in Spain, alone, getting up at 4:15 in the morning, climbing into waste collection trucks, watching Urbaser employees who didn’t speak English pick up heroin needles from the sidewalks, collect recycling, pressure wash the streets, and comb the beaches at Playa de la Barceloneta with giant sieves on tractors that rake the sand.

In the afternoons, she walked around the city, visiting landmarks like La Boqueria and Gaudi’s Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, and ate Jamón and Patatas Bravas for lunch with her classmates and sanitation workers.

In the evenings, they held community dinners outdoors at enormous tables while screening clips from videos they made of themselves teaching choreography to the street sweepers who keep the Ramblas clean and talking about community engagement and art.

I was in Colorado, getting up at 6:00 in the morning, making breakfast for the kids, driving them to school, then going to my coworking space to write papers for my journalism classes hoping to submit them before their deadlines, while trying to get some actual work done to the pay the bills between writing assignments.

In the afternoons, I went back to the school to pick up the kids and take them home, sometimes dropping off some kids at a trampoline park or a bowling alley for a birthday party or two.

In the evenings, I’d make dinner, help the kids with their homework, put them to bed, and try to get more work done before falling asleep.

To this day, anytime I think about big, ambitious things I want to do or that my wife or kids want to do, I look back on this season and ask myself the same question.

“If not now, when?”

If I can do all of that, I can do almost anything. And there’s no time like the present.