Tag: daughters

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Update

Non-retail RT

My BFF introduced me to estate sales and to the website https://www.estatesales.net/. I went to check one out on a Thursday and almost immediately and very nearly literally stumbled upon my next living room furniture purchase. Delivery of this powered recliner required several trips over the rest of that weekend, because I almost always do things the hard and often expensive way. These are not always my fault, and in this case the impediments were a combo of events both in and out of my control.

I had to rent a U-Haul van for just a few hours and to recruit and schedule the muscle of MM and her spouse Evil Genius (EG) to heft and move it. All the while, she continued to complain to me that I should have been able to just borrow a truck from Lowe’s or Home Depot for free because she thought she remembered they had told her they would let “customers” do that, even for purchases not made there. I disabused her of this potentially faulty memory with some humor given that it proved how much she is truly a Mini-Me in so many ways that I won’t go into each of them here!

One of those personality facets we share is perhaps a bit too much frugality. I say this with great affection based on the fact that her house is furnished almost entirely with second-hand stuff she has purchased over the years and moved with her all over the country before finally landing in their house here in Michigan. Her first furniture was often found on Craig’s list but she has more recently moved her searches to Facebook marketplace. I have followed her there but before I move on, I just want to give myself one more pat on the back by concluding with the extended estate sale pickup bonus I got after I had to go back there to get the power cord we had left behind in my hurry to get the kids and the van back on the day we moved the chair.

Savvy sellers more often than not mark down items they want to get rid of so they don’t have to store or move them after the sale is done. This of course is known as a clearance sale in retail and very much applies to estate/garage/moving sales. As a result, I picked up three badly needed table lamps for free. I could have also left that day with a table and chairs if I had had a vehicle to move them in. This could have been an example of the maxim “haste makes waste” but I was spared that personal beat down by another happy happenstance I will describe later.

The power recliner in its temporary spot + one of the free lamps in an even more temporary spot

I later found a set of good quality (read real wood vs pressboard) bookcases on FB marketplace. In between I’d also found a cheap i.e. fake wood but really plastic set of living room tables via the same source that I could have easily loaded into my own car by my own self. In this instance, though, it was a good excuse for me to buy some donuts and pastries for the hollow-legged EG at one of his favorite local sources for such fattening goodies, the Sweet Valley Donut Shop. We met the seller of these items in the parking lot of one of their two Kalamazoo locations. Score one for us! Yum.

FB Marketplace ad read Three-piece table set, two end tables and one coffee table. Wood and metal. The tops were really plastic which made them easy care for me and still worth the price.

Anyway, back to the bookcase saga. I went back and forth with the seller several times on different issues and there were gaps between communications. The net result was that the process took at least twice as long as I’d expected, based on my only previous FB Marketplace experience with the tables, which now I guess may have been unusually quick and easy, but maybe not.

First, I needed measurements. All four of them were the same width and depth 3’x1′. Each was a different height, max 5′. With these numbers in hand, I finally measured the spaces in my apartment where I thought I might put them. Then, based on the recliner estate sale experience, I had to go the extra step of measuring the interior cargo space of my car. The results of these exercises were generally good news. I had enough wall and floor space for all four bookcases and I could fit them in my car. The only bad news was that I would need to make two trips to move all of them because I only had enough room in the car for two at a time.

Since they were made of real wood, I also knew they would be heavy which meant I would need help to load and unload. I pre-arranged the supply of this assistance from Mini-Me, but had a lot of trouble, and way too much more back and forth with the seller, in trying to schedule this big moving day. MM often works from home which allows her to have a fairly flexible schedule thus enabling her to add in these small errands. Unfortunately, during this particular time period, she and her spouse were limited to one vehicle while hers was in the shop for repair after a fender bender. By this time, it had been there for way too long to suit their needs!

The only info I could give her up front was that the pickup location would be nearby and that the deed would have to be done before 3:30 in the afternoon. I was only able to ascertain the former by cyberstalking the named Marketplace seller after he’d advised that he was moving them from his workplace. After I repeatedly told him I would need help which would be most available in the afternoon during everyone else’s workweek, I was finally able to arrange to git ‘er done on the very last Friday afternoon he would have access to the office he was moving them from and that my daughter would be working from home.

The move was finally successfully made, in two trips as planned. They were so heavy that between the two of us we were only able to move them in fits and starts, and in some creative ways that my practiced moving daughter had learned by repeated use in her prior often solo moves. So, at last, there they sat, just inside the front door of my apartment, until I could figure out where I wanted to put them and how I would get them there. You’d think that the most difficult moves would be the longest i.e. from the office to the car and from the car to the door, but you’d be wrong!

Categories
Family Update

Retail restocking

As of mid-October, it seemed to me I had just about enough space to store and places to put everything I had and most of which I wanted to keep. The next required action was to figure out where I wanted to put what so everything would fit and at least be mainly unboxed. Up until that point, I had been using lack of space and place as an excuse to delay opening many more boxes. In the meantime, I had continued to indulge in some old practices and behaviors, though part of the requisite self-evaluation I have been forced/directed into by a recent turn of events includes making conscious choices about what I want to keep from my past and what new thoughts or behaviors I may want to introduce or at least to try on for size.

Where to start this new me/old me monologue? I guess I will start with the comfortably old but with the new twist of where and how and with whom. One of my go-to, usually solo activities, aptly and personally named by me, is a little thing I like to call “retail therapy (RT).”

Wikipedia opines the use of the term as “ironic and semifacetious,” and also comparable to comfort food, which is what I purchased most often recently in my pursuit of short term “relief from dysphoria” before I finally settled where I am now. Now my need to indulge in RT for any purpose, to deal with depression or stress, occurs much less frequently. That’s one thing about Mom (my historical and hysterical stress inducer) I definitely don’t miss and try not to emulate with my own now nearby adult daughters.

Food is my drug of choice (Excuses, Excuses)so I’d already started (re)filling the two most essential rooms in my three-room apartment first. After piecemealing kitchen purchases, I’d finally bit the bullet and settled on buying a set of real plates at my new favorite store, Meijer, and dining utensils at a store I mostly stay out of, Cost Plus. It almost physically hurt me to pay full price for a 12-piece setting for four of Corelle Geometrica pattern (no need for coffee cups or saucers anymore) and a 16-piece setting for four of dining utensils (no need for salad forks, either). The pain was only slightly mollified in that I think the latter was marked down to justify using it to supplement my minimalist starter set, purchased for $1.25/pair (fork, knife, teaspoon, tablespoon) from Dollar Tree. Is it odd that kitchen items I’d moved with me, including drawer organizers, have sentimental value?

I have continued my RT by acquiring and using “new” furniture. I have put that term in quotes because my shopping/retail therapy methodology has been extended, finally, to the use of 21st technology as it has been taught to me by my daughters. Like most millennials, and even a few advanced/daring/sane baby boomers, they prefer to make their purchases online. I feel like I have so far employed a fine mix of many of both the old and the new RT options available to me to find usable and easy to move furniture, aided and ably assisted by Mini-Me (MM).

She knows my taste more than she knows my needs. She also knows, and does not appreciate, my FOMO, though she does share, to some degree, my nearly extreme frugality. I spent several successive days while MM and her spouse were on vacation late last summer making limited forays into any and every brick-and-mortar local retail establishment that might carry what I hoped would be reasonably priced and sized furniture – a solo exercise that left this hobbled old lady exhausted and overwhelmed and worse, still unsatisfied with the results. I didn’t share all of these details with MM upon her return, though I still used them in my own mind as an excuse to continue to dither and therefore not commit to getting that critical first piece of furniture I needed: seating for the living room!

Lucky for me, she had heard that prices and availability were excellent at a local chain establishment I had not yet made my way to. We made that the last stop on my final living room furniture foray where we found two “chofas” that would work with my style and space. As usual, I had to extend the decision process and time by going back to the store to make my final choice. Even after that, I still ended up paying extra for an extended warranty that I may not need on top of the exorbitant delivery charge that I had expected. On the upside, if I move again and anything breaks in the process, they will fix or replace it!

Categories
divorce Family Places of My Life Update

Six weeks between homes

I lived in the first place while preparing to move into the second place.

My Little Corner of The Basement – Exercise Equipment Excluded!
Wonder why I didn’t spend much time here?
Could not last long with just this little counterspace!
Not enough shelf space either
MY LIVING SPACES IN MINI-ME’S BASEMENT
Best place (and way) to start my day
Most used place in the house (guess where)
Most communal space
THE FIRST FLOOR HAS THE MOST USED SPACES
Everyone’s favorite cozy spot
Modern washer came with the house
My laundry used so little of the extra-large capacity
THE ONLY PARTS OF THE SECOND FLOOR I REALLY USED
My private entrance
I’m on the lower level
Parking is convenient
ALL I COULD SEE OF MY NEW HOME BEFORE I GOT THE KEYS
Categories
Family Update

What I moved, and why

I had a lot of time to prepare for this move, so by the time it finally happened I’d already forgotten about some of the things that I’d packed a while ago.

There were a lot of things from Mom and Dad’s youth where I recognized their visages, thoughts, or milestones. There were a few things from even farther back in their family histories, where I recognized much less. There was also a lot of memorabilia, including many, many photos, from all the trips they took, mostly with their friends, after they were retired but still healthy enough to get around. I recognize many of the faces and a few of the places. I brought some of my parents’ old books and antiquated records (albums and singles), many of which I still personally consider to be classics. If and when I ever get to read or reread or listen to some of the works of Michener and Stone, and of Rogers and Hammerstein, among others, I imagine when I have done with them, they might go to a library or antique store or into someone else’s personal collection. Best and optimum use for pre-disposal or pre-dispersal purposes would be to share with and/or pass along to some of the younger, and hopefully/possibly related to me, generations. Mini-me has already followed in her mom’s and her grandpa’s footsteps as an aficionado of musical theater, though she has also taken up, with her spouse, her idiot father’s appreciation of sci-fi.

On top of all that, I still have all my photo albums, going back to middle school, that I assembled when I was single. I’m also moving once again my college year books, which are much heavier than high school, that my idiot ex put in the POD. These will go with single copies (out of the multiples that Mom still had) of memorabilia and programs from my days in Girl Scouts, Torrance Area Youth Band and USC Trojan Marching Band (the greatest marching band in the history of the universe!). These all recall the (mainly happy) times I hope I can share with a granddaughter, at least. A lot of them still make me smile. I brought back to my children all the photo albums I made in their childhoods, and all the extraneous photos and memorabilia I never got around to adding to them. Maybe it will make them smile, too, if we ever get to sit down together to reminisce about their births and birthday parties and holidays and trips and Girl Scouts, too.

Band and Girl Scout Jackets

Finally, I brought the new queen bed I’d bought when it became pretty clear that I would be staying with Mom in the house with her for a while, and maybe for the rest of my life, though of course that’s now how it turned out. It’s one of the newer ones with an extra thick mattress that required deep-pocketed bottom sheet corners and even then they don’t stay fitted as tight as I’d like. It’s like the one my idiot ex and I bought to sleep on (together – which was unusual and uncomfortable) when we bought our first house in Tennessee together. He sent the king size sheets I’d used for that one in the POD after I’d already bought myself a fresh new set. The old sheets were too big but had become an oversized cocoon for me, that I could tuck in nice and tight, keeping me warm and safe, bounded and protected, at night. He slept most of the daylight hours away on his old nasty leaking waterbed in his deep, dark and desolate mancave of a bedroom in the basement with two fans blowing directly on him.

Finally, already boxed up, in addition to my own precious books, are some sorts of antiques: a DVD player and discs of old beloved movies and some school events and last but not least though probably oldest, some family home movies and videotapes. I had already moved some to Tennessee with plans to get them digitized. They came back to Mom’s house again when I did and now are making the trek to our mutual new home, with younger family, in Michigan.

Categories
Family Places of My Life travel

A Road Trip I Would Love to Take

An old family friend (actually she’s more of Mom’s friend but that’s a whole other story) is kind of estranged from what’s left of her family (that’s a big part of the story) and because of that and other things in her past that were beyond her control doesn’t seem to have many friends or even a decent boyfriend.  One family member she does have and could/wants to visit runs an Airbnb called Happy’s Bus Stop in Kanab, Utah (UT). 

If I decided to accompany this person to that place, I have already suggested to my only remaining high school friend who now lives in Tucson, Arizona (AZ), that we could also visit her oldest daughter in nearby (to Happy’s) Northern AZ.  This daughter teaches school on the Native/Indian reservation that is close to where she lives in Page, AZ. 

I have been in the Kanab area before.  It is just over an hour away from St. George, UT.  St. George is the first city over the state line between Nevada (NV) and UT heading north on Interstate Highway 15 (I-15).  I have made the 28-hour round trip between Los Angeles and Malad, Idaho (ID), more times than I would care to count.  Malad is where my in-laws lived and we made at least one annual trek up there when the kids were growing up and we were still living in Southern California (CA).

The closest I ever got to Kanab, though, was on one of the few very enjoyable side trips we took when Malad was the family’s final destination. This was during the first year after we’d moved to Nashville when we rented a family van and drove there from the Southeast instead of the usual Southwest point of origin.  By that time, when the kids were in their teens, they were so tired of visiting national parks (Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks were two side trips we’d made more than once when “visiting Grandma in the desert”) that after driving through Zion National Park (between St George and Kanab), they protested that they were beginning to think all national parks looked the same!

On that once-in-a-lifetime family vacation, though, the idiot (my ex husband) got the biggest kick out of fishing for trout with our two girls on semi-frozen Panguitch Lake.  Neither he nor I had heard of this place till I found it as one of the stopover points that offered places to stay in the middle of winter!  Since Daughter #2 is more like her dad, we’d expected she’d take to fishing with as much gusto as he did.  Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that Daughter #1 was the one with the patience required to actually catch a fish.  In hindsight, this early father-daughter bonding with #1 may have been the initiating event of her rise in his eyes and affections.

Given that I-15 runs through Las Vegas, I have been there many, many times – before, during and after marriage and motherhood.  It is also a pretty central point on this potential upcoming road trip with interim end points of Tucson and possibly even as far north as Gunnison, UT, the ancestral home of my high school friend.  I heard so much about it during those years that if I get that close to it again, especially with my friend and her family’s fond memories and enduring presence there, I must finally make that pilgrimage!

Categories
divorce Family travel

OMG!! WILL 2021 NEVER END?

I started my holiday letter in 2020 the same way with this thought and went on to say “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think my life or really life in general will approach any kind of normalcy until 2022.” I guess I was right! I wish I was in a position to have even a really clear idea of “what I might do in ‘22”, but who does?

This is REALLY how my new life started in 2021

The year started as it had ended, and indeed as most of 2020 had progressed, if you could call it that. I got Mom through all her doctor’s appointments, tried to get her to eat what she should when she should vs. her normal preferences and habits, and did what I could to keep her spirits and her body up and moving.  We both knew her mind was going and, though she tried as best she could, in the end (though more accurately in early June when she took her final fall), there was little I could do to restore that or to ameliorate the decline in her physical capabilities which had never been a big priority of hers before anyway.

Meanwhile I had to keep plowing through the increasingly difficult and nit-picky details of my divorce. When the ex abruptly filed in June of 2020, he went to a pay-as-you-go type of lawyer with the expectation that I would go easily, as his previous two wives had done. He should have known better after thirty years of marriage to a woman he’d always acknowledged was smarter than him! I took me a while last year (as he pushed me) to get a lawyer (the stupid idiot didn’t expect me to). I got a smart lady lawyer who worked on a flat fee retainer and protected my interests throughout, even beyond things I’d already considered.

The lawyer-to-lawyer contact started last year when mine totally rejected the agreement his lawyer had submitted. He kept harassing me to “get it done” while at the same time continuing to bring up issues that were either nonexistent or in which his proposals were inequitable. By June I had reached the point where I refused to respond to his direct communications to me and forwarded them to my lawyer instead. He’d previously jumped on me when I’d asked Daughter #1 to help him pack my stuff to be moved out here (after I wouldn’t let him put it in the attic) but ironically, in her unwanted status as go-between, Mini-me finally got him to back off his unreasonable stance on at least one issue by telling him what I was going through with Mom and that it was not fair to expect me to have to deal with his shenanigans on top of that.

I guess I could be amazed now that I got through all that stuff that seemed to follow so quickly upon each other in probably no more than 90 days, approximately end of March through end of June. I had to persevere as Mom’s caretaker, which would be an ongoing battle as long as she still had the mental wherewithal to try to carry on being who she always was, while the ex continued to careen out of control at least as far as I was concerned. I really didn’t want him to know how bad off Mom was, and I still don’t. It’s none of his business, especially since his last visit to her home was all the way back in 2014, though he continued to say how much he loved her. That was most likely just another lie he’d been telling all of us, including himself, for many years.

I got through a challenging summer as I came to realize and accept my new (again) status. I guess I knew, deep down, that I would just have to keep stepping a little further down the land-mined road toward embracing, with as little drama as I could, that I would be starting to live again as an independent single woman in the (sub)urban metropolitan Los Angeles jungle. At the same time, I knew that Covid and other lingering responsibilities would limit my options in pursuit of more social outlets. Thank goodness that by fall, when Mom was well-settled and I had figured out how I would deal with the fact that she has lasted this long, many of the things I wanted to try were once again somewhat available.

I was free and fortunate to begin venturing out in the fall. First I took a “baby step” of a trip down south as far as Escondido. Then I took a longer trip to visit my BFF and “extended family” in Oregon. Both of her kids are getting married in the first half of 2022, so I already have two planned trips up there plus a bridal shower/bachelorette party/cleanup for the first wedding trip on the books next week.

The longest and best trip was my triumphant solo return to Michigan where I finally got to meet in person my newest grandcat, Maple. This trip was also a sort of “scouting expedition” of the area so I could see if it had any potential to become my permanent home when, someday down the road, Mom will be physically gone from this earth. In the short week before Thanksgiving that I spent there, I got to familiarize myself with the area and its amenities, on top of looking into my normal pursuits that should be available again post-Covid. Other than the cold, which all my loved ones and their loved ones tried to convince me should not be an impediment, I found a lot to like up there, besides them!

Since Omicron entered the picture, I have been doing even more reading as my “need/want to read” book list keeps growing. Like many others before me, I have lately joined the “binge-watchers club” (such a thing exists, right?) where I at last got to watch some old series that on my mentally compiled to be watched list. Last but not least, after many “false” starts, I think I may have finally begun to develop my long-desired writing habit.

This year, partially due to Covid-uncertainty and partially due to my uncertainty, I have spent most days in the house. A more or less standard day for me starts by browsing the web and email then moves to one or two of a few easy reader spots in different rooms before circling back to my laptop for a couple of hours of writing and always ends in front of a TV screen.  On my “wilder” days I may add just an infinitesimal amount of “retail therapy” which these days is almost exclusively limited to grocery stores.  Occasionally I’ll add in a stop or two at a discount or big box store. 

I also do a few “shoulds” like laundry and cleaning. The “should” that is getting harder for me to do is to go visit Mom.  The caregivers keep her clean and clipped and fed.  She can’t get out of bed so of course her body has pretty well shriveled up. I’m OK with that part but I just can’t deal with the fact that it is impossible for me to interact with her.  I had cut back my visits from twice to once per week but now, since she doesn’t know it’s me who’s there, I can’t see any reason to go any more than monthly to pay her bill and talk to her caregivers. More often wouldn’t do much good for her and would not be good for me!

Categories
divorce Family Update

My New Life started in 2021

My New Life (In Old Books) or Is It My Old Life in New Books?

I can hardly believe that I am now nearly three years into my second retirement. Finally, after all that time, close to eight years in total, I feel ready, comfortable secure enough to do what I imagine many other people do at this time of year:  look back at where I’ve been and what I’ve accomplished and also try to look ahead to what might enhance the value of this time, its quality and purpose, along with, best case, its joy and happiness or, at minimum, its feeling of satisfaction.

One of my more annoying and detrimental personal habits, which I have lately come to recognize in my early senior citizenship, is that I have often been a slow learner, perhaps more correctly, a late bloomer.  Maybe that’s a trait that comes from being a true Taurean.  As an old fart, looking back now, I might have advised my younger self to set goals, to have dreams and aspirations, or to at least have some type of design or plan for my life.  Alas, over most of the prior half century, I have been more often driven by the philosophy of the late, great John Lennon, who advised us all, just before his own untimely death, that “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”  Here and now though, with the luxury of having a lot of free time on my hands, I can start applying my hard-earned and slow in coming self-knowledge to a new and probably more achievable design for the remainder of my life.

Unpublished Draft Post written in 2017 or 2018

I wrote all of that way back in 2017 or 2018.  Back then much of what I was reading and trying to implement for myself, my life and my future had to do with goal-setting and plans and efforts of that ilk.  Given the turn of events in my life in general and in the world in particular it’s clear that anybody who thinks they can live their life on that basis is at least pretty delusional and possibly even insane!  About (Created May 2021, Updated September 2021)

When I started this new blog, which apparently and coincidentally seems to have really happened at the beginning of the year, I said on the very first post

Over the last few years I have written some vignettes for a series of memoir classes. Out of the process of figuring out what I want to leave behind for my daughters to learn about me, why I am the way I am today and why I raised them the way I did, I discovered that many of my memories are tied to the places in which they occurred, be they real or imagined.

While that is still true, I guess I could also add that, given the thoughts I started this post with, besides teaching my daughters all about me I may also need to teach me about me through my blogs more than through a memoir alone.  I want to belabor both these points at this time and in this post.

First, the bit about the past informing the present for both them and me.  Much as I have tried not to rehash my marriage and my divorce and everything that went before each of those events, I can honestly say (and my daughters and my friends will attest to this sad fact) that I have not been able to stop myself from doing that over the past year.  It is my hope, though, that whatever I have to say about that here will, best case, be the last time it is a subject of any posts this year or the main subject of my thoughts and feelings at any time going forward.

Again, looking back over the past couple of years and, yes, even farther back than that and indeed even wider than that in the present, I can see that I am not the first or only one to realize that it makes no sense to put the effort into developing goals or planning life around what one may expect or anticipate and continue to try to convince oneself that these goals are (1) achievable or (2) really what one would want to achieve if possible.

To get some perspective on this dreaded looking back exercise, I of course went to the written history of the thing.  As a sort of old school old fart correspondent, this consisted mainly of emails and texts written and received.  I had already reviewed a lot of what I had received but after finally getting back to doing this catch-up exercise on my sent emails I can see that the marriage probably entered its final death throes in 2019.  Reading between the lines of what I wrote, especially to my spouse, I think I see where our mutual resentment started to build as I got more and more involved in more and more activities outside the home that made me happy. 

At the same time, it looks like he was getting more and more morose and out of sorts.  I base this guess on what was a clear and mainly continuing pattern of his atypical, at least for an adult male who could be considered by some to be in the prime of his life, sleeping and active periods.  Like a stubborn baby or an average really old person, he slept during the day and worked on his hobby at night. 

Throughout that pre-pandemic year we became more and more like “ships passing in the night” with those passages most often occurring in the late morning or early evening.  In the evenings we at least both tried to indulge one of our fewer and fewer common interests by watching TV programs, sports and movies together.  But in the mornings when he came up from his mancave to my woman cave in our split-level home, he would usually find me in front of the computer, often just playing games.  This latter exercise had been going for some time before and when this part of our macabre marriage death dance started, I would get up, come around my desk, sit in my rocker-recliner and we would try to have a conversation, a check-in about how and what each other was doing.  I think we both noticed that I made this effort less and less, until his attempts to do this started declining, too.  Maybe the patterns and comforts of our lives had moved so far away from each other that they and we were beyond reconnecting.

Another probable point of resentment, I’m guessing, is that I did not participate as actively as he wanted or expected me to in his (unrealistic) dream of making a business out of his hobby. That was where his time and our money went while a lot of my time and our money went into reading and traveling and socializing.  I know I’d expected him to enjoy those last activities with me.  Over time, though, his enjoyment of and interest in doing either had ebbed so low that I had begun to know better than to even ask him to join me because I knew what his answer would be.

There were other stressors that year that in retrospect could have brought us closer together but in the end seem to have had the opposite effect.  That was the year that Daughter #1 got married and Daughter #2 started medical school.  Both of these momentous events turned into wedge issues that drove us farther apart from each other. 

Here I can add that another longtime festering wound in our relationship was how differently he treated our children.  Again, these differences and disparities became more and more glaring over the years, though I can’t really pinpoint how far back they began and of course I don’t really know the reasons why.  My guess is that he took for granted or accepted or expected #1 to be totally like me and therefore “perfect” while he presumed #2 would be totally like him, an imperfect and stubborn addict who would always be “less than” in the eyes of everyone that mattered, including himself and possibly, in his mind, even me.  I surely had reached that point by the end of that year. There is no better indicator of this disparity, and how it finally blew our marriage apart for good, than summarizing his participation in the life of Daughter #1 and his withdrawal from participation in the life of Daughter #2 over the last six months of 2019.

And just to be complete and to add to my disappointment, I’ll have to throw in the monkey wrench that entered our relationship at about the same time.  That was the necessity for someone to devote more time and effort to taking care of my mom.  I’d expected my husband, who’d said and even written over and over, over all the years, how much he loved and appreciated “Mom” to do just that.  He’d also warned me, based on the similar trajectory he’d endured with his mom, that I’d have to figure out what to do with her sooner rather than later by this time.  

It also just dawned on me that he’d handled most of that without the help of his one remaining brother just as I found myself in the same situation vis-à-vis my one and only sister.  Wouldn’t you think that shared experience would have made a better and possibly even average person more sympathetic and helpful to one’s most beloved spouse rather than drive said simpatico away? Oh wait, in fact and reality it seems to reinforce what he finally told me, after I told him I didn’t think I could continue to live this way. 

In a nutshell, that was that we should have separated fifteen years earlier, based on his presumption that I would not move two thousand miles away from home (and Mom) when his job relocated.  I did it because I didn’t want to break up OUR family.  I can see now, as I should have seen before, that he just didn’t care about that.  It also clarifies what he first told me and repeated in those six months.  “You are number one for me.  I am number five for you.”  That first part was a lie though possibly the last part had been true for quite a long time.  I’d always said he knew me better than I knew myself.

Categories
Family

The Road to Kalamazoo for Daughter #2

Daughter #2, the youngest at age 30 and previously most settled by virtue of how long it took her to get accepted to medical school, will start her potentially more winding road than her sister’s upon completion of her program in 2023.  While #1 was Mini-Me during her youth, #2 was The Devil Child and sometimes also The Velcro Child during the same period of her development. 

From the time of her birth at 2:13 AM her personality and behaviors were hard for me to deal with.  The child refused to fall asleep at night and didn’t even nap in the swing or the car like most other babies.  I distinctly remember the vacation from hell when we left the hotel at 2:30 AM because when she saw me in the same room she thought it was party time!  On another trip she finally fell asleep in the car five minutes before we reached our destination but at least there were other people in the car to keep her entertained. On the one occasion where she fell asleep in the swing we had to take a picture as proof that it had really happened!  Velcro incident, though probably not unique to us, was when she clung to me when I tried to leave her at school and later when I tried to leave her at home with a nanny so I could go to work.

I guess it was fortunate for all of us that when we moved across country it was to a lower cost state so I could afford to stay home and continue to entertain her there while being even more at her beck and call.  This included ferrying her to her favorite fast-food drive-thru restaurants, my mandatory presence watching her favorite reality TV shows and advising her daily on what to do with nearly every minute of her free time, including what to eat during her study breaks!  The ties finally began to loosen when she learned to drive.  I found an hourly part time job just to get out of the house and away from the Devil/Velcro Child.  Our relationship finally and mercifully and surprisingly improved during her college application process. We took short trips to check out schools.  She requested only minimal advice from me on her essays.

The Velcro bonds loosened a bit when she went back across country for college. I helped furnish her dorm room to her exquisitely limited though broadly vague specifications.  The main exercise of her long-distance diabolical cling remained in our circular discussions around a new set of decisions she wanted me to help her make. By the time she graduated I think she really knew what she was going to do most of the time but maybe Satan just wanted to show that he hadn’t released control of our relationship quite yet!

The official last straw came when in her devilish indecisiveness she tried to talk us into letting her stay in college a year longer than necessary because she couldn’t decide which subject she wanted to get her degree in and then tried to blame me for telling her to start with an undeclared major!  As it was, she got an additional semester and degrees in two subjects.  That’s how long she kept me confused!

Devil Child’s degrees in Psychology and Neuroscience basically were preparatory for med school, at least in her mind.  We told both our kids a couple of things re their educations: (1) We would only pay for Bachelor’s degrees and for anything beyond that they were on their own and (2) they should get a job when they completed those degrees before deciding if they wanted or needed additional schooling to continue in what they thought would be their chosen professions.  The latter advice grew out of our painful and unhappy experiences after finding ourselves stuck in the jobs we’d trained for but didn’t really like doing!

So, wishing I could fast forward from college graduation to medical school acceptance, here’s the way it slowly went down.  After finding herself for a very short time in a job where she wasn’t happy, #2 made a lot of progress towards deciding she might really want to be a doctor.  She worked for a dermatologist to many stars she couldn’t tell me about in an office on Rodeo Drive, studied a lot for the MCAT, made some new friends and submitted her first applications for med school.  The result of that last effort was a series of painful rejections but, bless her heart, she didn’t give up and went back to work (for a different dermatologist who treated some of her grandma’s – my mom’s – friends), made some better friends, got her first boyfriend and some coaching to improve her interview performance. 

She also decided that she didn’t really have to go to a top tier medical school, which is probably why the second round of applications was moderately more successful than the first.  She had more interviews but only one acceptance:  The Homer Stryker School of Medicine of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo!

  • She doesn’t look like the devil, does she?
  • My daughers really do like each other!

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Family

The Road to Kalamazoo for Daughter #1

Daughter #1, the eldest at age 31 is currently the most settled by virtue of (1) her pre-pandemic marriage to longtime boyfriend (though shorter time fiancé) in October 2019 and (2) their purchase this year of a home in Portage, a suburb and “bedroom community” on the south side of Kalamazoo.  Prior to this recent full attainment of adulthood, I (and some other family members) thought of her as a Mini-Me.  I guess our main commonalties were our shared love of and interest in (American) history, the close relationship enjoyed and/or endured with our mothers, and our general straight arrow Girl Scout based behaviors and attitudes displayed and developed over our formative adolescent years.

She met her hubby, whom I have affectionally referred to as The Evil Genius since about halfway into their relationship of approximately 10 years now.  They were both digging up stuff, in an archaeological manner, in St. Louis. His parents and her parents both were living in East Tennessee at the time – his in Chattanooga, hers in Oak Ridge. This was a fortuitous coincidence, especially in light of the many interim stops they had separately and together before their current happy incarnation as Michiganders. I bestowed the title of Evil Genius on my now son-in-law (SIL) based mostly and initially on his appearance. 

Mini-Me
The Happy Couple joined in the Smoky Mountains
Evil Genius

As the years passed after he met my wonderful daughter, SIL evolved into a bit of an evil genius intellectually, too.  To paraphrase part of his mom’s wedding toast, his parents wondered what he would do with his anthropology degree, which again was coincidentally the same degree Mini-Me obtained in nearly the same year.  (Another amazing coincidence between them was that both had been uprooted from their childhood homes as high school juniors.)

After their “meet cute” on a dirty dig site, their career interests started to diverge.  He got a second bachelor’s degree in Psychology from a private university in Peoria, IL, while she got her Master’s Degree in Archaeology from a public university near where they lived in Bloomington/Normal IL. Like her mom, Mini-Me settled on her career choice sooner rather than later.

After she got her second degree, he decided to pursue his third degree, this time in Human Factors (sounds to me like a good field of study for a budding Evil Genius) at a public research university in Dayton, OH.  Over the three years he was working on getting his Masters (which he got for free through acceptance in a PhD program, a degree level neither of them wanted to achieve), they put a lot of miles on their vehicles traveling back and forth between Dayton and Mini-Me’s professional though short-term and/or itinerant positions in Virginia and back again in St. Louis, among other places.

They finally ended up, together, in Kalamazoo in 2019. He had a summer internship there the year before that took longer than it should have to turn into a real permanent job.  Both families, and this was post-engagement, were overjoyed! Now the Evil Genius analyzes and evaluates competitor products, usability studies and anthropometric data to provide dimension guidelines to the cross-functional industrial design and studio engineering teams. Sounds evil to me!

Mini-Me, was happy, too, though it was tempered a bit since it then became incumbent upon her to find an equally good and equally permanent job there. That took a while though not too long a while, in the grand scheme of things and certainly not within the timeline of their relationship.  Just prior to the wedding, she was hired under contract to work in the archives and records department of Kellogg’s of Battle Creek. 

They told her at the time she’d been hired because she already had some management experience and that she also had the requisite education and experience to replace their company archivist when she retired.  The latter was really the carrot by which she was drawn in and the icing on the cake (do you love my food metaphors?) was that the archivist did actually retire!

This is how I learned the location

This came from my daughter. One of her duties is to digitize all of this historic moving media, even in foreign languages. I’m hoping she can help me do the same with my dad’s old home movies!

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Family

What’s in Michigan?

The answer is pretty simple and straightforward.  That’s where my kids are!

Not only are they in the same state but, by some weird wonderful kismet type of thing, they are both in the same city!  Details on how they each got there to follow.

Not only that, but they each individually came up with the same brilliant idea that I should move to where they both are, at least for the time being, in Kalamazoo.

How did my two very different adult daughters both end up in the same place at the same time just when I needed both of them the most?

By two very different and almost equally long and winding roads, of course!  I will spare you some of the nitty gritty details of all the stops and momentous events along the way and just hit the high points for each.