IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A PRETTY CUBICLE, ANYWAY

I forgot myself in the pursuit of the American Dream.

The words “financial stability”…”401K”…”benefits”…sweet to my ears, a ping in my heart.  I’ve never known any of that.

I am a willing learner, an eager employee, a dedicated and able-bodied member of every company I’ve ever been a part of.  I’ve loved my jobs, except for the Chinese restaurant.  I even liked the diner with the floods and the cockroaches, despite the floods and the cockroaches.  My resume, however, resembles that of a very, very creative middle-aged college student locked in time.

There’s nothing there that qualifies me for anything more than interesting dinner party talk.  Spin all you want.  I make pretty things for other people, sometimes on other people, sometimes for other people to eat.  All pretties.

Then came Obama, and a speech about dedicating a year to bettering society.  I signed up for nursing school and dedicated myself to getting As and letters of recommendation.  When clinicals and Life intersected badly, I moved my goal a little to the left and moved to a four-year university for a Sociology degree.  Sociology—> social work?—> all described to me by fellow students, and the general public as worth less than the paper upon which the degree would be printed.  It seemed like a means to an end of my goal, a necessary step to springboard into grad school.

No, instead, I switched to Employment Relations. HR.  In academic-speak, “Applied Sociology.”  A real job with a bachelor’s, which I would need to support my daughter alone, because alone we had become since nursing school began.

Paycheck.  Benefits.  Steady.  A cubicle, even!

And over the last few months, since adding that Employment Relations concentration to my degree, I’ve felt burned out and hopeless about my future.  I was being smart, crafting a resume that would get me a Real Job at the finish line, right?

It took very direct conversation with someone who loves me to wake me up.

“What is your dream job?”

I could not think of answer, and I started to cry.  I forgot my dream job.  I forgot my dream.

During the conversation, I jabbered about being burned out with my life, school, recent failures.  I jumped into an explanation of how I could most easily earn a living without this degree I’m pursuing, with some refresher training and basic equipment.

I spent the evening with my dear sweet handsome man, and I woke up in tears.  This time, simple sorrow at having lost my ability to have a dream.  Dream job, dream anything.  I forgot to dream at all.

I remember now.  Dreams resumed, to be tended properly.  Dreams die if they’re not fed and watered.

Thank you, darling, for reminding me that I don’t want that cubicle.

I LOVE ME SOME CRAZY

I love some bipolar folks.  They’re mostly all under the care of medical professionals now, to some degree.

They’ve all, for the most part, ridden out their personal hellish roller-coaster trips by self-doctoring with alcohol and off-the-books drugs; however, a solid diagnosis–and a little handful of helpful pills and therapy slow the ride to a pleasant go-round on the kiddie coaster. To see a beloved tortured soul become the glorious person I only glimpsed in the past, the core of what made them worth the price of admission to their personal Crazyland, to sit and have a conversation and realize that the brain running the business end of things really is still sparkly and beautiful but now running at a smoother  idle, is gratifying and priceless.  Some of them, I’ve lost to the world, and I hope they’re okay wherever they are.

Those people have stomped and railed at me and at the world in our histories.  They’ve dragged me though some nauseating loops and drops.   I still remember that one time, in between rages and triumphs, when things were perfect, and smiles weren’t painful work, and all was right in the world: easy coasting, to be relished. My father must have been bipolar.  He sparkled, then glowered, and the glimpses of the Real Dad in between were so rare.  I didn’t mourn his inevitable early death; to me, he was just an abstraction, a series of stories about “the old Jerry” and my own experiences with the Daddy of the present, a force of nature to be controlled with dire consequences to happen if I failed.

Still, I am part of that dangerous electric energy and it is part of me.  My daughter says that I am three quarters Quiet and one quarter Loud because I am a Hartlieb.  It’s in me, and she’s done the ratios, figured me out at age eight.  I tell her the best stories I know about her biological grandfather, and she feels bold and brave and beautiful to have had such a person for her mother’s father, a man who cheated death three times in his youth and who could see things that no one else could see and who drove backward all the way from one town to another just because.  She feels like a swashbuckling princess.

I love some depressed folks, too.

I’m sometimes one of them.  If not for my small people, I might have finished my degree years ago and have a career to call mine, but then again, maybe I wouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed for a long time.  A really, really long time.  When my Papa died, I only kept moving to be a good companion to Gram.  We had so much fun together.  She was my best friend, sometimes my only friend, my whole life. Without Gram, I didn’t move much for a few months.  Bed, kitchen (every few days), bathroom, library and store (every few weeks), garage (when the lawn needed to be mowed), and back to bed.  Books.  No internet then. Just one book after another, carefully chosen to induce as many tears as possible so I’d have an excuse to do that silent wail thing that happens in grief.  Everything hurt.  The grass grew too fucking fast.  The TV didn’t make any sense.  Clothes all itched or drooped on my frame. Driving was just another possible way to die when everyone and everything seemed close to the brink of death, so I stayed put or rode the bus.

But that’s at least one more quarter, the sadness, holding grief dear forever, wanting to wail it out when the smell of Thanksgiving hits and there’s no grandma sitting across the table to tell me how to cut the onions for the turkey dressing.  It was the hard way, by the way, with a tiny paring knife and no cutting board but a paper plate, all teary eyed while she decided whether the sage from 1975 was still good enough to use one last time, even though Emeril said to throw everything out once a year.  Gram taught me many things, but one lesson I wish I’d skipped was how to hold on to loss and keep it fresh.

With my small person, I share stories about Gram’s amazing cookies and how we ate big family dinners in shifts at one tiny kitchen, and how everyone wanted to stay at her house when they came to visit from Kentucky even though there was nowhere to put all of them, ever, so her grandma slept in the bathtub.  She glows with pride at her ancestor’s generosity and kindness and good cookies, and feels wealthy because she knows how to share even when she has little, like her great grandmother Betty Mae.

Now, here’s the point: we all carry an amazing cocktail of predispositions.  My sky-high manic father gave me the freedom to laugh, all valves thrown open, when life gets weird.  Nothing’s scary when you’re immortal, and getting lost just means finding new places to go next time.  My careful, doting grandmother gave me a sense of dearness for the people I love now, because some day, I’ll leave or they will.  No way to know the order of things.  She outlived one child, lost her father to suicide and her mother to fast and aggressive cancer.  She never stopped loving any of them.  She never forgot.

I try to be my best self for my own child.  She watches and learns just like I did.  I learned to become invisible when mania turned to rage and when contentment turned to sorrow.  I learned to respond to the people around me by ceasing to exist, slipping out the back door or just out of the line of sight and into my own imagination until the storm passed.  For my own child, I embrace the skill of deflecting lightning by telling her to dance to the thunder.  There’s nothing for her to fear.  I can take the strike, and we will dance like wild things in the rain.  She will never need to duck for cover near me; I know when things get too real, and I stand a little taller so she can splash away in the puddles below.

My genetic and environmental cocktail sometimes whirrs me into despair, sometimes into happy dancing over a certain smell in the air.  Most of the time, I ride very comfortably in between, grateful to have witnessed extremes but never to have lost myself to them forever.

OKAY, BUT WHAT WAS THE DISEASE?

Everything is different, again.

Different job.  I sold pie and decorated wedding cakes.  My workplace felt like an extension of my home for four years; everything and everyone was familiar, with a new addition or a loss now and then, like a date brought to Thanksgiving.  This might be long-term, I used to think, but maybe it’s just a temporary thing, this new person.  My presence felt permanent, and now I am gone.  I’ll pick up my last check this weekend, and see familiar faces that used to be family. Maybe they still are, maybe I’ll feel strange.  No way to know.

School and the need to write a very informed research paper on workplace interactions led me to a new home, but now I’m not even there, anymore.  I could go back, far as it is, but that bed is occupied by someone else now.  I’d be a visitor.

This week, a small bounce from other familiar work with beloved friends who again felt like family, real family of decades and decades and much history and love, to a new place full of new rules.  Different work, different pay and different expectations, and different limitations.  I go “home” on weekends, part time.

Tomorrow, a half day of new.  The rest will be spent proving to my university that I am not a dependent student under the age of twenty-three with no dependents of my own.  Random selection for financial aid audit by the federal government, just on the heels of a bankruptcy…but the paperwork will be filed, and maybe I’ll get to go back in the fall.  If not, then everything will be different in a new way again again again and again.

I dislike so much change.  My work comes third: family, education, work.  Earning money for my little family is important, so everything is all bound together right now, including education. A “career” HAS TO HAPPEN.  Am I really going to be that person with a life of “interesting” jobs that are fun to talk about but won’t let me retire, ever?  Will anyone get to retire?  Why do we do things from which we need to retire, as a reward?

What is THE THING that you would do forever, if you could make just enough money to pay the bills and have enough left over for the ice cream truck?

These changes make me stronger, and my little family’s willingness to ride out the bumps reminds me that I am loved not for my title, but for my Self.  I was afraid to announce the first change.  Once upon a time not too long ago, I would have been chastised for not sticking to a path.  I removed the chastiser, and stay on my winding road.

The only thing that we can expect is change.  I was taught this by Gram.  As usual, except for the rule about never sleeping naked because you’ll catch a disease, and never drying your hair with the same towel as your body because you’ll catch a disease, and never opening an umbrella in the house because you’ll invite storms into your life (still can’t get comfortable with the open umbrella in the house even though it’s not true), Gram was right.

 

RESOLUTION ONE

My less-skinny butt is hanging off the edge of my thirties. Some resolutions feel necessary.  I’ll travel more.  That’s one.

I will enjoy my forties as much or more than I enjoyed my thirties.  My thirties were pretty great.  Sure, I married and separated from someone, and that has been right shitty; however, looking past that shows me some exceptional moments, Life in the making.

I traveled more in my late twenties and early thirties than any other time in my life.

San Francisco and all parts in between here and there showed me that most of the west is…empty, but teeming with some undefinable and untamable energy.  I’ll take that trip again, more slowly next time.  We were on a tight schedule and arrived early, with no keys to the house because the bearer of the keys was at a music festival in the mountains, no cell reception.  We camped in the back yard of my friend’s new house with a tent I bought in Wyoming.  The tent was cheaper than a motel room, and it was a fine tent.  We were almost out of road money, so a reusable place to sleep seemed like a good use of my last forty-five dollars.  Our smattering of time sleeping in it was worth every penny.  Wyoming has even more coyotes than Temecula, California.  Imagine that, Nance!

Houston is ugly, but San Antonio is a gem.  I saw a river that I didn’t know existed, and heard a band I didn’t expect to be good, but I was too shy to dance.  The tequila there tastes better, too, and the Mexican food is real food, not just five ingredients rearranged on plates and called different things.  Pollo Ahumado under an umbrella on the Riverwalk, feeling released from prison, breathing real air for the first time in years…

New York felt strangely familiar.  Tourists asked for directions.  I gave them, probably wrong ones.  In one weekend, I saw the UN, the public libraray, Ellis Island, Wall Street, and accidentally Ground Zero just months after 9/11.  Rubble still lay in the holes, and a chain link fence on one side held so many flowers and notes in memoriam that the fence became a wall, the sidewalk impassable. I hadn’t wanted to see that, but later, after many tears, it was the good kind of accidental tourism.  Mike Tyson fought Lennox Lewis that June, and I watched the match at an Irish pub where I couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying.  Lennox won, after eight long rounds and after being almost comically head-butted by Mike early on.  A rumble, genuine disgust and anger, had replaced the drinking songs that lured me through the doors from the street, and if Tyson had won, I think I would have run.  Americans not loved at that place in that moment, but when the Brit knocked out the American idiot, all was happy again.  Strangers bought rounds for the whole place, and I walked out a little drunk and a lot thrilled to be walking down Houston Street on a Saturday night.

Reno smells like hot dogs and stale beer and cigarettes, but Virginia City is so beautiful and remote that I’d live there, if I lived alone.  The Sierra Nevadas are killers, snow in June, but the Truckee River never seems anything but almost-frozen.  The Donner Party were understandably fooled by the desert warmth below.

I nearly went insane crossing the Great Salt Lake.  Time stops on that whiteness.  I had to get out, pull over and stop, to touch it again and again.  It was real, and it really was just fishy smelling salt, fish so old that they shouldn’t smell any more, but no one talks about that.  Morton’s factory in the distance, with fish and acrid desert in my nose, made me want to never touch a navy blue canister of table salt again. I still get gaggy over the little girl holding the umbrella, and sniff every new container.  Fishy?  Never.  So weird.

Jamaica forced me to get a passport, finally.  That’s a story for another day. I need more time to pass to tell it well.

California changed me, three times.  First, the San Francisco chill and smog obliterated the California of my imagination.  Orange County never ends, but Santa Cruz and its boardwalk feel about my speed.  Second, a Los Angeles heat wave and a wedding to do made me realize that hotness works for me.  I can do hot.  Later, Temecula and San Diego after days in a hospital in Pasadena with my beloved friend reminded me that life goes on, and life ends, and there’s not enough love in the world to change that.  If there was, my friend would still be alive.  Being swept to peace, myself, after such grief…I’ll appreciate that forever.  Going to a ranch in the country and listening to coyotes outside the window and walking with my long-far-away dear friend might have saved my own life.  That friend and his family, also my dear friends, reminded me that peace at home is normal.  I didn’t have any of my own, in frozen Illinois.  We spent a day racing around L.A. seeing people, seeing things I’ve only seen in movies, but I can’t remember anything but the hug I got when I answered the door in my jammies.

Now, a new decade to poke through or race through or use up has been given to me.  I have a temporary companion in the world, my beautiful baby girl.  She has seen more of the world at eight than I had seen at twenty-eight, and I like that.  We will see more before she leaves me to be a Grownup.  She’s good on the road, my sparkly daughter.  It takes flexibility and curiosity and tolerance to travel, and she owns all in spades.  We’ll go places.

By the time fifty happens to me, should I be lucky enough to see it, she will be eighteen.  Did I realize that until right now?

Yes, we’ll go places.

LIST

1. Hang the shower curtain.
2. Wash the dishes.
3. Change the sheets.
4. Mow the grass.
5. Buy cat food.
6. Mop the floor.
7. Vacuum.
8. Clean the litter box.
9. Fold the towels.
10. Pay bills.
11. Find W-2.
12. Get body shop quote number two.
13. Grocery shop.
14. Remember eggs this time.
15. Drop that class.
16. Get another job.
17. Cook supper.
18. Fax things.
19. Mail things.
20. Sell things.

Today.

 

It was just Black Swan. Really.

I should not watch scary movies. Something terrible happens, and I grow stiff with fear.  I cry.  I freak out, in general.  Silently, doing a creepy internal sobbing thing, I sit transfixed on the thing that tortures me.

Also?  Fake blood makes me throw up.  I’m about to throw up.  Only the keyboard right here is keeping me from it. When I put it down, the system will shoot into reverse and all hell will break loose.  Maybe I can sit here long enough and talk my way out of it.

Real blood, no problem.  Gushing fake blood, instavomit.  I want my mommy.

Now, I’ll hit “publish” and put the laptop down, and hope for the best.  Juice would help, but I can’t seem to even consider pausing to open the fridge.  It’s that fear thing, the stiffness.  It’s a new bottle of juice, and my hands are shaking.

What blinds are open?  Black windows, no way.  Cannot be passed.  What if someone is standing, looking in?  I saw that once, in a scary movie.

Damn.

I WAS, BUT SHE IS NOT

I was a worried child.

The Cold War lived in my head.  We didn’t have a bomb shelter, but my grandpa did try to dig one before I was born.  It filled with water, because making a cistern into a bomb shelter seems like a good idea, but the rain still gets in even if the pump is plastered over.  I dreamed of the hole in the basement wall having a stocked pantry, bunks, and board games on the other side, with three feet of radiation-deflecting something-or-other surrounding it.  It stayed just a boarded-over hole until the house came down and then it was a good place for house-parts to land, a nice big void just waiting for something to collapse into it for so many years.

When I was eight, the planets aligned in a way that some projected would cause the solar system’s individual parts to crash into a mess of fiery gravity-accelerated rubble.  At 5:14 a.m., on the predicted day, I laid in my mother’s bed, waiting to die.  When the rumble began, she thought for a moment that I was right all along.  The noise turned out to be just an off-schedule train on the track behind our house.

The standoff ended and the Wall came down, and I rested more easily.  Before, just accidentally licking a vanilla ice cream cone into the shape of a nuclear reactor sent chills through me.  Age and changing political and economic circumstances eased my concern.  One day, I realized that I hadn’t considered nuclear apocalypse in a very long time.  I had stopped playing mental survivalist games, and planted flowers with my vegetables.

Now, I worry again.

I had stopped watching the news, stopped reading the papers and blogs. My news now comes from word of mouth, and it’s all so bad.  Government secrets, bank holidays, seizures of property, stockpiling weapons and metal and food, conspiracies, big bad government upon which we all depend to be benevolent.  I begin each evening by wondering how to hit the reset button after a day of prepper chat.

Sometimes, I feel profoundly alone and so very responsible for my daughter’s well-being.  What if?  What would we do?  Where would we go?

This fall-of-Rome talk reminds me that Rome may have fallen, but its people lived on.  Differently.

We live close to the edge of couch-surfing, like so many other mother-child duos and nuclear families and single guys with too much debt…like everyone.   A few paychecks gone, and the rent stays unpaid.  A few more, and off goes the power.  We all just pretend that the job will continue, and that the lights will glow when we flip the switch.

Since the last tornado, I’ve thought too much about the chaos and discomfort that a little wind caused.  No power, no phone, and no gas if I hadn’t just filled my tank.  A whole lot of fresh food had to be thrown out.  I wonder why money seems tight, and I remember the big bags I dragged to the curb; many dinners went moldy, and restocking stretched me just a little.  We’re okay, but…

I daydream about gardens, and solar panels, and sustainable housing that we could keep even if the paychecks ended for a while.

I remember having sureness, once, in having a forever home.  I had gardens.  I had a home, and I could have had solar panels, and sometimes the paychecks did end.  The only problem was that though a family and its many additions had lived there, it was comfortable only for one or two.  Cutting the cloak to fit the cloth, I removed the option of having children in order to live where I wanted to be, my home by default and then inheritance.

Now, I am part of a little family, a We.  We are my responsibility.

My child does not worry, or if she does, she smiles and dances through her worries.  I’m taking good care of that part of my We.  No worries there.

In defense of worry, I plan and prepare.  It’s how We get by for now.

HANGRY, BUT SHARP AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Three great cups of coffee, two pretty good sticks of string cheese, and one awful chocolate yogurt, the whipped kind.  That’s what I’ve eaten today.  Everything sounds gross.

My last meal was gross, and it’s put me off my food.  If someone nice was to hand me a plate of anything, I’d eat it and feel better, but seven-year-olds are dangerously experimental in the kitchen, I’ve observed.  The gross-food spell would be broken with a plate full of love.  Instead, I wait.  I’ll think about what’s in the cupboard and the fridge, and food will go into my face as a matter of necessity.  Hunger makes me very, very cranky and confused, which makes cooking very, very difficult.  I’m hungry and angry.

Adding to my difficulty is the WD-40 smell on my hands.  The pencil sharpener works for the first time since it was thrown out—third grade, and I stole it from the trash after a new one was installed—so that’s a happy thing.  Turns out, someone just tried to sharpen a pencil with those tiny plastic nibs for lead, and the janitor didn’t bother to take it apart to check things out before he tossed it.  This broken thing has been with me since I was eight.  I’ve been a gleaner my whole life, and fortunately for that pencil sharpener,  a fixer of unwanted things.  However, anything I think of eating tastes like WD-40 in my mind now.  Humph.

The daughter ate well, shrimp lo mein, her favorite food of the moment.  Lo mein sounds so gross, like WD-40-flavored noodles.

Now, I’ll go stare at the contents of the fridge again and pray for milk chocolate to appear.

BOMBSHELL

One month to forty.  Not too concerned, and here’s why: I chose to forget to be thirty-nine.

Age mattered when I was fifteen, and for some reason, twenty-four into twenty-five.  At fifteen, I ticked off the calendar days to Driving Day.  Turning twenty-five felt like Failure Day, because I was between identities and knee-deep into adulthood.

Notice that turning twenty-one is missing from the milestone list?  I didn’t even go out drinking.  I had to work the next morning, and work was SO EARLY.

I have some wishes for my fortieth birthday:

I want my lawn to be nicely mown when I wake up.

I will wake up with good hair—bombshell hair.

My closets will be clean, and my laundry will be done.

The litter box will be as clean as it ever is, which is never, because she has to pee every time I clean the box, but we all have our quirks.

I’ll have lunch plans, with anyone I love.  Maybe three or four of them, but I’ll be happy with one.

My baby girl will take a bike ride with me in the afternoon, if the weather is nice.

That’s pretty much it.  I want to feel pretty, “together”, and see smiles on faces of my people.  This is a simple formula for a good day, a good life.  Smiles are at the top of the list, and having my life in order comes second.

Bombshell hair, well, that’s just a bonus.