Tag: coalfields

Homesickness

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I’m currently wading through what I’m calling “a dark night of the soul.”

Maybe it’s the time change after we “fell back” earlier this month.Maybe it’s the starkness with which the seasons change up here in the mountains.

Maybe it’s the antiepileptic medication.
Maybe it’s the 55-gallon drum full of trauma that I’m dragging around while I try to dig to the bottom of it all, understand my feelings, and clear it all out.
Most probably, it’s a combination of all the above.
I spent my first year back here convinced that I would feel more at peace once we found a house. Okay, that’s not exactly true. I spent our first three months here thinking we had a house, then I spent the nine months after that trying to find a house. That was the prize that I kept my eye on. Just find a place to live, and everything else would sort itself out. Eventually (almost a year to the day after we moved), we closed on the house we’re living in now.
Then I was diagnosed with epilepsy, which means I can’t drive for at least a while.
Then Gomez and Elroy met a deer in the middle of the highway and almost rurnt my little car.And the hits just keep coming.

Seeing how happy Elroy was here and seeing Gomez flourish at his job were enough to sustain me through a solid year of the three of us living out of one bedroom, but I don’t know how much longer that sustenance will last.

I’m homesick, but my homesickness isn’t for one specific place.

I’m homesick for a pre-mined Yates Gap that doesn’t have a clear view to where my grandmother’s house used to sit and for a Fremont that doesn’t smell like the sulfuric pits of hell.

I’m homesick for our old house because that’s where I watched Elroy grow up.

I’m homesick for my life before I came back “home” – when distance was the reason I felt like we were always on our own because the truth is that absence is a choice, and the truth hurts so much.

I’m homesick for the option to shop from more than one grocery store, for a Wal-Mart that doesn’t take the better part of an hour to get to, for decent healthcare that doesn’t require taking a sick day and spending three and a half hours on the road to access.

I’m homesick for our barely-middle-class life, for a time when the idea of having to pay for braces for Elroy or a routine oil change or an annual property tax bill didn’t send me into a “how are we going to make it this month?” panic.

I’m homesick for the anonymity that living in a larger (relatively-speaking) area provides. That way, I could seize out in school in peace without having to assure my mother months later that I absolutely did not have a stroke despite what “everybody” says.

And despite all of my backward-looking sadness, I know that we have to make this work. We chose to move here, out of everywhere in the world, and we don’t have the option to change our minds now.

Sometimes Enough Still Isn’t Enough

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In 2011, Gomez experienced a health crisis. I’m not using hyperbole; he was an extremely sick man, and now he has what I teasingly call “the million-dollar pancreas.” At that time, I was working as an accountant for a regional coal business. Gomez was teaching. Elroy was a toddler. We were living two hours away from anyone who could help us out with childcare. I was working 10-12 hour days and sometimes working out of town for a week at a time because our company was in the midst of being acquired by Mean Green. For two solid weeks, I worked in the office and came home to help care for Elroy while I watched Gomez as he lost 30 pounds and turned a sick shade of deep yellow.

Thankfully, we were encouraged by The Best Healthcare Provider in the Entire World to drive to Charlottesville to seek answers at UVA. We drove Elroy across the mountain and dropped him off with my mom, unsure of when we would be returning to get him. I drove through the night as Gomez snoozed in the passenger seat (something a well Gomez would never do). I was worn out, worried about Gomez, and stretched so thinly that felt like I would shatter if someone looked at me wrong.

But I didn’t have to worry about how we would pay for Gomez’s medical care or our travel expenses. He had health insurance through his employer, and he also had secondary coverage through the plan that my employer offered. At that time, I earned the bigger salary, so we lived comfortably. We were six years into paying the mortgage on our house, so we had started making a bit of a dent in the principal balance. And let me be clear, even if I had been worried about how we would pay for his care, I would still have taken him to UVA. There is no amount of money that I wouldn’t have paid or debt I wouldn’t have gone into to have a healthy Gomez.

Now, the roles are reversed. I’m the one scaring Gomez with my health problems, and he is the one taking care of me. But somehow, our situation now is more tenuous than it was eight years ago. Now, we are one month into paying off a new mortgage on a new-to-us (but definitely not extravagant) home. Now, we are less than seven years away from Elroy going to college (if that’s the path he chooses). Now, we are paying off student loans for a second Master’s degree, in addition to two Bachelor’s degrees and a first Master’s. And we’re doing it all with much less cash flow coming in, since I left my accounting career for one in education, and we both took significant pay cuts to return to the Coalfields. So when I woke up in the (newly minted, healthcare-vacuum creating Ballad Health) hospital a couple of weeks ago, not only was I scared about my health and crying to see Elroy, but I was also worried about the bills that my special brain were racking up. Gomez would never admit it, but I know he was worried, too, because he’s much more fiscally-conscious than I am.

Following my seizure in February, I made Gomez promise to never call an ambulance again after I saw the bill for the ride to the ER. He didn’t have a choice this time, because I was in worse shape than I was last time. When I saw the neurologist last week, Gomez and I had to ask her for an alternative to the anti-epileptic medication she suggested I try, because the one she mentioned doesn’t offer a cheaper, generic option. People in the United States are making choices about their health based on what they can afford and not based on what’s best for them – and that only applies to the people who are fortunate enough to have access to healthcare in the first place.

Gomez stays working at least two jobs, on top of taking care of me and Elroy. There was a time last year when I had two part-time jobs in addition to my teaching job. I had to back off from the part-time work, though, because it turns out that waking up at 3AM on weekdays and pulling all-nighters on the weekend to teach English online to students on the other side of the globe can drastically lower one’s seizure threshold – and there are only a handful of part-time work options open to someone who lives in this area, consistently works around 60 hours a week at her full-time gig, and can’t drive. We each have a Bachelor’s degree, piles of additional continuing education training, and Gomez has not one, but two, Master’s degrees. We drive older cars. We live in a 54-year-old home that’s value is less than half of the national average. We only have one child. We’ve taken exactly one vacation in the past seven years.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be having such a tough time or that we deserve more than others because we are college-educated. I’m complaining because no human being should have to worry about how much it’s going to cost to stay alive. I’m complaining because no one should have to choose between a gallon of milk and a day’s worth of medication. I’m complaining because the years I spent studying business and accounting coupled with the time I worked as an accountant for a regional healthcare corporation allow me to see how dangerous the current iteration of our nation’s “healthcare” system is. I’m complaining because, while we might be able to figure out a way for me to afford to live, there are tens of millions of people in our country who can’t even afford to die because they make less money than Gomez and I do and live in areas where everything – from housing to groceries – costs more than it does here. I’m angry because the very people who created this gross, profit-driven, “bootstrap” mindset of American life are the same people who destroyed an entire middle class and made it impossible for anyone who makes less than a six-figure annual salary to make it under even the most modest lifestyle – AND they’re revered as pillars of the nation and oracles of business acumen. They’re creating policies that affect us all, and they aren’t even qualified to do so (I’m looking at you, Betsy DeVos). I’m thankful for all of the love and support that our community has given us over the past few weeks, and I’m thankful that what we are going through isn’t worse, but I’m angry because we are surrounded by people whose situations are worse, and it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m angry because our generation was sold a bill of goods that is rotten. Getting an education, being honest, and working hard are not enough to create a better life anymore; those virtues are only enough to barely eek by, if you’re lucky.

Backstory

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18 years ago, just a few weeks shy of my 21st birthday, I loaded what little furniture and few belongings I had into a moving truck and ran away from my hometown. I got married. I graduated from college. My husband and I bought a house and had a son. Last summer, we took the opportunity to move back to my hometown, a decision that kicked off a chain of highs and lows, warmth and isolation, contentedness and uncertainty.

This year has been, without a doubt, the most difficult year of my life. The highs have been mild, feeling like gentle knolls, while the lows feel like being at the bottom off a quicksand-filled canyon.

We have found ourselves (I’m in my late 30’s and my husband is in his early 40’s) completely starting over, except this time, we are starting over with an 11-year-old son. That raises the stakes quite a bit for us. Starting completely over was not part of our plan when we decided to move. I have spent most of our time here scared and ashamed while facing the realization that moving might turn out to be the worst mistake we have ever made.

We’ve spent the last year as a part of the nation’s “hidden homeless” population. We aren’t living in the street, but we don’t have secure housing of our own. This is due to myriad factors, but the current (read – nonexistent) real estate market in our little town has made it extremely difficult for us to find suitable housing that we can afford on teachers’ salaries. For me, almost all of the lows stem from not having a home to retreat to at the end of a difficult day at work. As an introvert, time alone is what resets my brain, but not having a home of our own means not having anywhere to be alone.

The highs are subtle, but somehow they’re enough to help me make it through the lows. The sunrises here can be breathtaking. The thunderstorms are spectacular if they don’t scare you into hiding in the basement. My husband and son are happily exploring the local fishing scene, and the fishing is good. The sense of community and the kindness of relative strangers have brought tears to my eyes more than once. Every now and then, I hear proof that a hint of my native, Appalachian accent has crept into my son’s own dialect.

And still, I feel lost and homesick for our old life in our old home.