Tag: middle age

Decade Challenge, AKA Still Homesick

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Yesterday, I found a picture of Gomez and me.

Someone took that picture a decade plus a few weeks ago at my boss’s Christmas party in 2009. We were smiling and hopeful. We were secure.

I was still an accountant.

It was a snapshot of life before.

Before Gomez’s immune system started to eat his joints, and before the million dollar pancreas incident; when we were able to afford whatever it would take to get him well because “medical care or groceries” wasn’t a choice we’d ever had to make.

Before Gomez got a second master’s degree; when Elroy still had a college fund.

Before one bad career decision made in good faith snowballed into 100 more bad decisions – each one with a worse outcome than the one before it.

Before my dad passed away.

Before we gave up the life and home we had made for ourselves because we trusted people when they gave us their word.

Before our spirits were bruised because we spent a year without a home of our own. When being “homeless” was an abstraction instead of something we had actually experienced.

Before I had ever experienced betrayal or carried around the leaden weight of grief; when I was able to tend to my mental health because I could afford to do it. When an appointment didn’t mean taking a half a day off work and trying to line up a driver for the hour-and-a-half trip because I was still able to drive and the therapist’s office was five minutes from my job.

When “back home” was a day trip destination instead of actually “home.”

Before epilepsy.

When “Everything will work out. It always does” was something I believed with all of my heart; when that phrase gave me enough hope to make it through the occasional rough day. Before it became a mantra that Gomez and I use daily when we discuss situations that we don’t have any real solutions for.

The 2010s simply broke me, but I keep scanning the horizon for brighter skies.

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.

My Wake-up Call

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The alarm clock has always been a point of contention between Gomez and me. He is a light sleeper, whereas if I hit the Snooze button fewer than three times each morning, I feel like I’ve neglected part of my morning routine. Early on in our marriage, Gomez made me move our alarm clock across the room from our bed to force me to get up and turn it off. He hoped that I would use my rationale to decide to just turn the alarm off and start my day since I was up anyway. He ended up having to hear the alarm and then deal with me getting out of bed and back in, then repeat the cycle every eight or nine minutes.

We haven’t owned an alarm clock in years. Thankfully, the smartphone era ushered in a whole new world for Gomez and me – a world where my alarm clock (slash Web browser slash Kindle slash calculator slash Walkman) is usually in the bed with me when I fall asleep at night. Normally, this works out fine. I try not to spend more than half an hour hitting the Snooze button each morning, and almost two decades of togetherness have dulled Gomez’s sensitivity to my wake-up routine.

But not this morning.

Gomez and I both work in the same profession. I won’t say directly what we do for a living, but I will say it’s one of the four careers mentioned in Randy Travis’s “Three Wooden Crosses,” — that really harsh song about a bus crash and salvation. IMO it’s probably my least favorite song of ol’ Randy’s, but I digress. We aren’t farmers, preachers, or hookers. We’re the fourth option. And it’s our first full week back at work, which means that I am operating at an energy level somewhere between exhausted and corpse.

When my alarm went off at 5:00 this morning, I successfully stole nine more minute’s sleep via the Snooze button. at 5:09, I had already slipped back into a phase of sleep that only Ambien can make happen, so when my alarm sounded again, I tried, and did not succeed, to Snooze again.

iPhone users, did you know that if you click the lock button on our phone rapidly, your phone will do you a solid and call 9-1-1? It totally will, but before your phone actually places a literal call for help, it will warn you it’s about to do so with a siren that I’m pretty sure sounds exactly like one at a bio-lab that alerts people there when someone attempts to steal some black death from a top-security area.

By this time, I had slept four and a half hours plus nine minutes. If you think the biohazard siren was enough to immediately wake me up, you’d be wrong. I must have slept through the first few seconds of it, but I thought I stopped the process in enough time to avoid activating Life Alert status, so I fell back asleep again.

Thought.

I was wrong.

A couple of minutes later, my phone rang. I was so relieved when I thought that I had stopped my phone from calling 9-1-1 that I had fallen asleep AGAIN (or maybe I’d never really woken up). Whatever.  I groggily answered the phone.

It was my friendly, local emergency services dispatcher asking me if I needed police, fire, or ambulance. I wanted to sound perky and apologetic, but I actually sounded nearly comatose. Even though the haze of exhaustion and sleep deprivation, I heard the incredulity in his voice when I told him I wasn’t having an emergency. I finally snapped fully awake when the very nice gentleman on the phone asked me for my age. Did I sound like a mamaw? Did I sound like a kid? Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that I sounded a mess. Then, he asked if I was sure that I didn’t need police, fire, or ambulance. Buddy, the only thing I need is more sleep. I didn’t tell him that, though. I told him that I was trying to silence my alarm and hit the wrong button one too many times. He was finally convinced enough to hang up.

Then, before reason fully set in, I decided it was time to get up and take the dog outside. Before dawn. With a flashlight. I finally woke up fully sometime around the end of our first lap around the yard.

So, I’m still wallering in gratitude. Today, I’m thankful that the dispatcher on the other end of the phone did not send someone to investigate the goings-on here, If he had, I would have surely gotten tackled in the yard.

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.