Photo by merlinmann, all rights reserved.
I was looking through my bookmarks just now to find something for work, and instead came across this post, which also reminded me of the above photo. I barely knew her but agree with the post author when he said that Leslie “made everyone who knew her better“. I’m so thankful to have people in my life like that – both past and present. So thank you, friends, for you.
I woke up last Sunday adorned with the previous night’s glow sticks and feeling like someone had dropped a load of bricks on my chest. Such is the weight and effect of running into one’s own unhappiness.
The last two months have been endlessly stressful: holidays, moving to Chicago, moving out of our apartment, moving into my Unnamed Hippie House (which I’ve decided is its name, by the way), my uncle’s death, drunk people drama, sickness, job hunting, job interviews, the beginning of the semester, winding down a job, and living apart. It’s all fucking hard! Hard, hard, hard.
I’m a person who thrives in chaos, so times like these usually see me rising to the occasion. Five years ago, we launched Moodle at the beginning of the semester while I was also a full time doctoral student and a new gyne instructor – so I was essentially working two very demanding full-time jobs while taking on an emotionally and physically challenging part-time job while also maintaining a relationship and starting to focus on losing weight after four months away from the gym (and my bike) with a broken arm. Literally the day before Shane moved to DC, I had unexpected minor surgery after receiving scary lab results from an abnormal Pap and also got an estimate of $2400 to make the necessary repairs to my car so that I could move to join him – while also gearing up for the beginning of the semester and actively job-hunting. I’m not alone in my experience of shit stacking up in impossible ways, or of being able to put my head down and knock through it all to come out on the other side smarter and stronger.
But in and around the stress and stressors of the last two months, I’ve had a lot of time to think. The time and space and distance have allowed issues to rise to the surface that I’ve been ignoring or just haven’t been brave enough to face. And one of those is my unhappiness, a thread of pain through so many aspects of my life.
It’s no secret that I’ve been profoundly unhappy in my career in the last few years. In job interviews, I’ve spun it as “a series of right turns” – from instructional technology support at Illinois to reference librarianship at GW to web development at UM. From a position of authority and trust to the bottom rung of a soul-deadening bureaucracy to manual labor, working in a call center, finding ways of stretching 5-8 hours of work to fill 40, and then ending up in a position where I’m challenged and respected, but which is still tangential to any of the goals I can loosely define for myself.
I’ve been tremendously lonely in my relationships. I’ve focused my energies on my marriage to the detriment of my relationships with others – perhaps appropriately so, but still a stark thing to realize. I’ve been trying to change this in the last few months, but I know I have a long way to go.
I’ve tried to direct this loneliness and frustration into positive channels: running, the garden, cooking, blogging, teaching, and connecting with friends online. What I haven’t realized until recently is the extent to which my loneliness and frustration has been self-reinforcing. I’m lonely, so I go running alone. I like running alone, so I opt to continue with this solitary activity, even though it could be a great opportunity to meet other people and build relationships around running. Shane is often busy with hobbies or friends, and I respond by soaking up the much-desired solo time, which then leads me to support (rather than complain about) more time dedicated to hobbies, which then leads to more time alone.
Which leads me to this place: waking up on a Sunday morning feeling crippled by sadness. Grinding away on the track to meet a training goal but also to focus my mind on something other than the intractability of my feelings. Struggling to remember happiness, or to picture what happiness might look like. Knowing that the easy answer is more meds, or changing the meds, but being unwilling to accept that as an answer YET AGAIN.
I want to be happy.
I don’t know how to be happy.
I don’t know what has to change in my life for me to be happy.
I’m afraid of my own unhappiness.
On Thursday, I drove to Iowa to bury my uncle. He passed away at home last week.
Unlike my grandpa, I don’t have photos of my uncle to post here. I don’t have affectionate stories about him from my childhood. I’m not traveling through the stages of mourning, as we didn’t really have a relationship to mourn. When I got the news last Thursday, I was – and remain – honestly more upset by my lack of reaction than by any feelings of loss.
I had the unpleasant task of contacting Rich’s Facebook friends to spread the news of his passing. I can think of few less appropriate ways to notify someone of this sort of thing, but we had no other way to reach these people, and no indication of others that he would have wanted us to contact. The responses I received described a man I never knew.
After the brief service on Thursday, the lot of us went out to lunch: my parents and grandma, my mom’s siblings, a cousin, and a few friends. My grandparents’ angel neighbor asked my mom and her siblings about their favorite memories of Rich, and it’s telling that most of them involved conflict, but that they could be told with affection and laughter.
So this is what I know of my uncle: he was wildly intelligent, and applied this intelligence to the things he was passionate about: astronomy, model trains, cameras, motorcycles, computers. He He hated the military, and gained weight to avoid having to serve in Vietnam. He had a friend who was poet laureate of some South American country, and when his friend received this award, they drank a station wagon full of beer. Until this fall, he held the family record for the half marathon – when I beat his time by several minutes, he reminded me that he had run the race in a storm with an injured plantar fascia. He was difficult and argumentative – as wildly intelligent people often are – resulting in polarized relationships with his family, but deep respect from his friends. He loved cats, and is buried with the ashes of some of his late feline friends. He smoked enough pot in the 70s that he developed an allergy to it. He was proud of me and my siblings, and told his friends that my sister and I were beautiful, though we never heard it from him.
He didn’t believe in God, and would have turned in his grave – or walked out – at the words of compassion and grace meted out by the pastor at the service. Regardless, I hope he’s at peace tonight, wherever he may be.
All of these effing wonderful people:
Rob & Erin (St. Louis), Laurie (Chicago), Jason & Sonya (Cambridge), Keem & Paul (not pictured, Chicago), Angie & Chris (Chicago)
There are a few things I want to tell you about, but for now, let me just share this:
My brother waiting for the arrival of his bride. My parents and grandmother in the late afternoon sun. I was crying when Shane took this photo, and I’m choked up now. I’m so thankful and fortunate.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t love my other family members, including those who have had birthdays in the last week, but every time we go home to Rockford, I come back wishing that I lived closer to my sister. We don’t have as much time to talk as we used to, but I love every minute I get to spend with her, and am so proud of the wife, mother, and all around great woman that she’s become.
Thanks, Jenn, for being awesome. You rock every bit as hard as you did in this photo from four years ago:
January 1984 – June/July 1996
We moved to Rockford in the winter of 1984, right around my 4th birthday. Mom was pregnant with Jenn, and I was the only one who was sure she’d be a girl (I was right). I can’t imagine moving to a new city in the dead of winter with two kids under 4 plus another one on the way – I know this move was hard for Mom, though I can’t really even begin to comprehend it. I know that the other stay-at-home moms in our neighborhood became her lifeline, and so we grew up with family friends that were like family – the Kensingers, the Ericsons, the Wilhelms – and that have remained close to this day.
It’s hard to talk briefly about the house where you grew up. I apologize.
From left: Jenn, Chelsea K., Sara K., Ditka, Mark, Bart K., me
Our house had two stories and a finished basement, all resplendent in early 80s style. The house was chocolate brown, with a cement front porch and a two car garage, where I would get the car stuck on my first attempt at backing out. When we moved in, there was no furniture in the front room, and I remember playing ‘store’ in the front window with the kitchen set that Grandpa built. Later this would be the living room, with nice furniture and the piano, where we grudgingly took lessons. The dining room was infrequently used, as often happens with rooms of this type. Mom would sew our Halloween costumes at the table, and I remember dusting as part of weekly chores and finding coins left on the wooden chair rail.
When we first moved in, the kitchen had brown wood paneling, brown wood cabinets, brown wood slat blinds, and brown linoleum. We would play in one of the tall cabinets, pretending to be Oscar the Grouch in his garbage can. In a later remodel, the external wall was replaced with doors to a sunroom, and all that brown went away. I learned to cook in that kitchen, though it’s probably more accurate to say that I learned to prepare food.
The family room, adjacent to the kitchen, had a fireplace and more wood paneling. One year we had racoons in the fireplace and had to have animal control come and take them out. Living (and playing) took place in this room: the stereo and tv were here, as was our first computer. When we got our first dog, we tried to keep her out of this room and off the new white carpet (bad idea!) by constructing a barrier between the rooms out of furniture and boxes. She immediately figured out how to climb over.
There was a small ‘mud room’ with backyard access; after a remodel, this became a home office, and the laundry and storage moved to a new room carved out of the garage. I spent many hours in here on AOL in high school, chatting with friends, doing homework, and listening to Sgt. Pepper. I don’t think that Mom ever got to use it as the home office she envisioned.
The ground floor half bath was absurdly gold and brown when we moved in. I think this was the first room to be updated.
The basement had hideous orange and brown carpet, a sort of bar that was mainly for storage, and a store room. My memories of the basement are mostly of it being in a state of chaos from three kids playing video games, listening to books-on-record, doing art projects, and generally making a terrific mess. In junior high, I carved out a little nook under the stairs as my private space, though why I sought this out, I’m not sure. A later remodel would turn the basement into a much more habitable guest space, adding on a half bath, built in cabinets, a space for watching TV, and a small office for Pop. I spent a lot of time down there in high school, exercising or watching tv and talking on the phone.
We each had our own bedroom on the second floor, though our play as kids spilled out into the hallway and down the stairs, where we would amass all of our beloved stuffed animals for impromptu camp outs. My bedroom was the first on the right, with a closet that bumped out over the stairwell. When I was small, this closet was ideal for playing the sort of games that involved climbing around the room without touching the floor, whether your flavor involved hot lava or a sea full of sharks. I could watch the mailbox from my window, and yell out to my friends amassed in the front yard. When I grew into an angsty adolescent, I had a lock – with a key – on my door to keep prying siblings out.
Tied closely to my memories of the house are my memories of the neighborhood. Those same families that provided support networks for my parents also provided friends for Mark and Jenn and I, and we ranged free with those friends until long after sundown. We went to school and carpooled with many of the neighborhood kids. When I was 15, Sarah and her family moved in next door, giving me the neighborhood best friend I’d long wanted. I babysat kids from the neighborhood. My homecoming and prom dates were guys from the neighborhood. All of which made leaving this house in 1996 even more difficult.
My grandpa isn’t doing well. He’s been declining for a while, but this morning his doctor – a long term family friend, best man (I think) in my parents’ wedding, and my brother’s namesake – called my dad at work to tell him how bad things have gotten.
My grandparents still live in the split-level house they built in the 50s, when my mom was a little girl. Most days Grandpa, age 91, doesn’t get down the stairs – and Grandma, age 93, brings food to him, helps him bathe, and changes his diapers. After six decades as a housewife, she is a nurse again.
For years we’ve tried to convince them to move out of this house that is really too much for them to manage. For years my parents have tried to convince them to hire a caretaker instead of relying on a (miraculous, wonderful) neighbor and a series of college-aged girls that help with the cleaning and yardwork. Mom is going over for the weekend to make another attempt at this argument.
Four years ago, when we were in the midst of our nation-wide job search, Grandpa took a fall. I remember locking myself in the studio and crying and wondering if I really wanted to move to, say, Boone, where getting home in case of emergency would require a full day of travel. We live 7 hours away, but we might as well be on the other side of the world for all the good I can do right now.
In this way, old age is cruel: there’s little more to do that sit and wait, knowing that he won’t be with us sooner rather than later, but knowing there’s nothing we can do to forestall this inevitability. There are interventions for injury and disease. There are no interventions for just being OAD, as Grandma puts it: Old And Decrepit.
I am so thankful for having my grandparents in my life for all of my life. My dad’s parents are barely a memory at this point – I met my grandma once when I was a small child, and my grandpa passed away when I was in high school – but my mom’s parents have always been there for holidays and birthdays and long visits in the summer time – and, of late, for rambling conversations about Detroit. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that they won’t always be there.
1980
2006
Investment:
Yield:
All told, a quite good investment, even if I did come home sick (again) and with no photos to show for it.