For Shirley, 16 Years Later.

I don’t remember what my grandmother looked like when she died. To be completely specific, I was not allowed to see what my grandmother looked like at the time. I know that I was in grade school when she started to forget things and get angry out of nowhere. She was always short-tempered and impetuous, the kind of woman who would heat up a Lean Cuisine and then get so caught up in an episode of St. Elsewhere that she’d end up feeding the whole thing to Junior, her horrible little black Chihuahua. Normally I rather liked Chihuahuas; they seemed a little more in control of themselves than the dopey, galloping mutts that were always in residence at my house. But Junior had a nervous sort of personality, and he smelled weird. Bubby had a blue shag carpet all through the house and around the time she started to forget things, she’d neglect to clean up the messes when Junior pooped or peed on the carpet, ostensibly because she had also forgotten to take him out for a walk. It was things like that, that stacked up, one on top of the other, to slowly and quietly form a distinct problem that none of us saw coming. 

In my memory it feels as though it happened very fast – one day I had a beautiful weird grandmother, the next day I was not permitted to see her and my mother cried constantly, and the day after that, I was told to pick out something black for her funeral. I don’t know how I feel about the fact that when I think about her, the end flashes before me like fuzzy snapshots and all I’m left with is the fact that she’s dead. I asked my mother about it and of course, she didn’t want my brother and I to see her like that. She wanted us to remember her happy and healthy, and she didn’t want us to know what it felt like to look into her familiar wrinkly face and realize that she had no idea, none in the world, of who we were. 

I can’t imagine how that must feel. Looking at the person who raised you, who taught you everything, who punished you and yelled at you and came to every single school play and hugged you when boys broke up with you only to have her look back at you like she would the unfriendly grocery store clerk or crossing guard. I know you’re a person but that’s it. You aren’t special to me, I have no allegiance to you, now please go away.  I think perhaps that might have hurt me worse than the black empty dent where the last years of her life should be in my head. I think not knowing might be less awful. But it doesn’t change the thing I hate most about all of it – I did not get to say goodbye to her. 

Even if I had when she was sick, it wouldn’t have meant anything. I think part of me wishes that someone had come to our house with a telegram, long before anything changed. I wish they would have come with a note that said, dear sir or madam, I’m sorry to inform you that your mother/grandmother/friend is going to start forgetting things, one by one, very soon, and in a couple of years you will mean nothing to her and she will be incontinent and unable to chew or swallow or even digest food. If there is anything you want to say to her before she is inevitably and very slowly taken away from you, I insist that you do it now.  You’ll be glad you said goodbye while it still means something to her, because very soon, even the mention of your name will do nothing to bring her back.

musings of an unemployed something-or-other.

As much as I don’t want to admit this, being unemployed has changed my life. I wanted to be one of those disaffected women that says with a sigh, “Well, now that I don’t have an oppressive 9 to 5 job, I can finally get started on my novel/wedding photography business/cupcake mail-order company/Montessori school/organic home garden.”  Wouldn’t it have been lovely if being asked to leave my awful job had resulted in that kind of earth-shaking revelation? Wouldn’t it have been lovely if I had realized it over a cup of chai tea, while staring calmly out the window of my local café?

This work, the work of being unemployed, of having to craft your own days, of trying to figure out if what you were doing was what you wanted to do, and if it wasn’t, what it is you actually want instead, is harder than any job I’ve had. It requires resilience and creativity and even though I believe I possess those two things, I don’t believe I have them in the quantity that this situation calls for. Some other things I have a little bit of, but not enough: Patience. Self-love. Forgiveness. Confidence, even.

I realize that this doesn’t have to be a rearranging period – that I could just focus on getting a job in the same vein as before and hope for the best, knowing that a steady paycheck and dependable schedule will be enough for me. But that’s just it.  I don’t know that those things are enough.  I’ve gotten used to them, I’ve become accustomed to them, and I’ve readjusted my life based on their existence. I spent years working a cockamamie schedule for peanuts, never knowing when I’d have a day off or whether or not I’d be able to pay all of the bills. And in retrospect, when I hold that part of my life up to my new 30-year old standards for happiness, it looks as though I wasn’t actually happy.  I had very few friends and I drank more than was advisable for a girl my age and I was making far less than I deserved for the work I was doing. But at the moment, way back then, I didn’t know I wasn’t happy. I’m sure I didn’t greet every day with a yawp of deranged joy, but I was good. I was making it work and surviving and doing my best to have a little fun.

Why am I suddenly under the impression that that’s not enough anymore? Why am I terrified to loosen my death grip on my creature comforts? I’ve come up with this theory that anything different than a new version of my 9 to 5 life will result in extreme, endless poverty. I will be unhappy all the time and I’ll never eat out at a restaurant or order Indian take-out ever, EVER AGAIN. Every time my friends ask me out for cocktails, I will whistle into my hollow bank account, ravaged by student loan payments and book costs, and shake my head solemnly. Sorry, ladies, I’ve committed myself to a life of navel-gazing and ramen-eating. No whisky sours for me.

This ugly habit of mine – making my fantasies as extreme and finite as possible – is not a new one.  When I fantasize about the future I will have with a boy I’ve been dating for only a few weeks, I suffer the same fate. The pictures I paste together are severe, painstakingly detailed, all of something or nothing at all. Every job I imagine accepting is the greatest job in the history of jobs. Each dress I buy on credit will result in an immediate improvement in my hairstyle, complexion, sex life, and IQ.

Perhaps my problem isn’t the unemployment, or the confidence/patience/etc. that I perceive to be lacking. It’s moderation. I need to moderate my imagination, allow myself to dream that perhaps, life will simply shake out as life will. That perhaps, some things will work out swimmingly, and other will simply work out, and others will fall flat on the floor with an audible thud. That perhaps, even with all of this messy gray area to deal with, I will make the best of this cobbled-together, sometimes-wonderful-sometimes-ordinary situation, because I actually am resilient, and creative, and all of those other things. And, not least of all, because I always do.