Dying, with an E

I have a little announcement to make…  No wait!  Close your mouth — I’m not pregnant.  In fact, I could make this announcement even more shocking than that if I followed the lead of a friend of mine who made my announcement in an email to her friends with the opening words, “Strawberry is dying!”

I’m not.  She’d misspelled it.

The thing is, you all know that ever since I left my job to become a stay-at-home mum, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do when I eventually go back to work.  Knowing I didn’t want to go back to what I did previously, I’ve spent several years casting about for what might be the right career to go into.   Well, this is not it, but it is an itty-bitty baby step toward doing something I love.  A tiny step, and a huge step all at the same time.  And I am immensely excited about it.

I have been dyeing lately, quite a lot — that’s dyeing with an ‘e’  — and at some friends’ very enthusiastic encouragement, I have opened a shop on Etsy, called SpaceCadet Creations, where I sell my hand-dyed yarns and fiber.  Take a look:

I can honestly say I haven’t been this excited in a long time.  Mixing the colours myself (from the three primaries and black), seeing the results come out of the dyepot, putting the yarns and fiber up on Etsy, getting the email to say that someone has bought my stuff…  It feels fantastic.  When I grow up, I want to do a job that I love doing, and this — opening this shop, taking one bold baby-step towards that goal — has made me feel that that might actually be possible, for the first time in a long time.

Come, have a look at my shop and dance a little excited-dance with me!  And if you know anyone — anyone at all — who knits, spins, felts, or crochets, please, please send them my way.

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Goose Eggs and Getting Old

When I heard the snap, I wondered if that was the sound of my bone breaking…  though I quickly realised it might have been the sound of the chair that I fell onto, or the door it slid into, or the stair-gate that took part of my fall.  The pain in my ankle was so intense that I just couldn’t tell, and sat there on the floor instead, unable to speak and taking in great gulps of air and letting them out in silent, open-mouthed, chest-wracking sobs until M finally realised that I’d really, really hurt myself and came rushing over.

He thought it was only a sprain, but he wasn’t sure either.  He pressed gently there… and then there… and I squealed, squirmed.  Eventually, I worked up the courage to try to move my toes: pain shot fresh up the leg, but the toes moved.

“It’s probably a sprain,” he announced, and then paused… and wavered.  “But perhaps we ought to go have it scanned, just in case…”

We’ve not really used our health insurance much, he and I.  We’ve used the girls’ insurance plenty of times in the past two years so I know how it works, but we’ve hardly touched ours and I’m not totally confident about what’s covered or how.  “I… don’t know what our copay would be for a hospital visit,” I said.  I looked at my ankle, considered wiggling the toes again…  “Grab your insurance card, would you?”   It listed the copay amounts for a doctor’s or specialist’s visit but, maddeningly, not for a trip to ER.  What it did point out, right at the top of the card, that we were covered for ER trips for “life-threatening and emergency” situations but would have to pay extra costs for anything else.  And I wondered, did a broken ankle count?  If it turned out to be a sprain, would the insurance company accept that there was a chance it might not have been?   Simply put, would they pay?  I wasn’t sure.

I handed the card back to him.  “Let’s wait awhile and… well, let’s just  see how it goes.”

Time seemed to confirm our decision.  A massive goose egg appeared and, eventually, I could put a bit of weight on it…  gingerly… gingerly… and make it as far as the loo — a good sign, though it left me exhausted and shaking.    We agreed that couldn’t have been done on a break or a fracture, and both felt a bit better about the decision to stay home.

M rang my mum and arranged for her to come round tomorrow and take care of the girls.  Thank goodness for my mum.  9am?  No, 8am, please — the girls do sleep late, but one or the other  always wakes early and asks for the loo and I can’t move at all.  How about 8.30?  No, 8… please.

When he got off the phone, he came and sat next to me, took my hands in his, looked a bit sheepish.  “I’m sorry I can’t take the day off tomorrow.  You know I would…”  I know, I told him.  But we can’t afford a day without pay.  Between the economy, all this bad weather, and his operation, we are on our ninth week of below-subsistence pay — we most definitely cannot afford a day without pay, and we both know it.  And then I thanked God it was my ankle swelling up and not his.

“If we were in Britain, I’d take the day off.  You know that, right?  I’d take a couple of days off!”   He felt really bad about this, I could see.

“I know.”  My injury, his injury, pain, illness, family emergency…  there is no room for error — no matter what, his job must go on.

He pulled a tight smile, rueful, and looked away over my shoulder.  “If we were home,” he continued, “we’d have gone to hospital, had you checked out…”

“I know.”   A medical decision based on cost, a chance for early treatment lost to financial constraint — it’s how it goes.

And the moral of the story?  The lesson to take away?  It could be about the system, but that’s all been said before. Today, the lesson is a personal one: do not climb up on your daughter’s rocking-balance toy to demonstrate how she can pretend to snowboard along with the Olympians on the telly.  Because you’re staring down the barrel of 40, my dear, and when you take a mis-step getting back down… well, your body just doesn’t bounce back the way it used to!

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Echoes, A Year On

On the news the other night, they did a live location report from a town that was on the way to the place M was working this time last year.  He doesn’t drive out that way much anymore, and so neither of us had seen that particular street in a long time.  As I looked at the telly, I felt a real tightening in my belly, noticed my jaw had clenched.  I looked quickly over at M and could see from the tension in his face that he felt the same.

This time last year was incredibly stressful for us and, though I knew that, we were so busy just powering through all the difficulties that I don’t think I ever consciously registered just how scary it was — not at the time, and not after.  We just kept going and never looked back.  It wasn’t until we saw that news report, and that road that used to carry M to his job, to all that stress and uncertainty, and we both had the same physical reaction that I realised quite how deeply we’d been affected.

This week is the anniversary of his layoff — that awful morning when he unexpectedly walked through the door at 8.30am and told me that, just three months after arriving in the country, there was no longer a job, no longer an income, no longer a health insurance policy.  This week hasn’t snuck up on me — I have been watching it on the calender, watching it get closer and closer, and just willing it to pass by quietly, uneventfully.  I wanted it behind us.  I wanted that awful time as far away from us as I can make it.

So I was actually quite pleased — chuffed, in fact — when M told me he was on call this past weekend and they had six jobs lined up for him on Saturday.   Yeah, he’d be away all day,  and, yeah, he’d be exhausted at the end of it, but the extra hours would be a serious boost to the paycheque and, more than that, would be just the thing to turn this week into a symbolic victory to crush our memories of the same week last year.

He clocked up eleven hours and… came home exhausted.  But we wrote the number on the calendar with glee, and looked forward to a bumpercrop week that our wallets — and psyches — have been aching for.

E1 woke me yesterday at 8am — too early for me — and asked for a glass of water.  Sensing that I could subdue her enough to go back to bed for an hour, I obliged and headed downstairs.  But as I crossed the living room, I stopped in my tracks, confused…  then frightened.  M’s truck was parked outside.  It was 8am… on this week… and M’s truck was parked outside.  I quickly gave E1 her drink and dashed back downstairs to phone M.

“Where are you?  Why is your truck outside?”

His answer stopped my heart — stopped it– because he inadvertently echoed his words from last year, “They’ve sent me home.”

I waited.

“There weren’t many jobs on today, and I have more hours than anyone else, so they’ve sent me home.”  Ah.  They’ve done that to him before.  It stinks — it means his Saturday hours no longer count as overtime; it means instead of getting the weekend off, he gets a disjointed Sunday-and-Tuesday off; it means that he completely loses all the headway he’d thought he’d gained, and the paycheque will be just ordinary instead of the windfall we’d been hoping for.

He got out of the truck and came into the house with a smile on his face and a spring in his step.  It was fake and — though I appreciated the attempt — it didn’t last long.  He soon deflated onto the couch and we spent the next two hours talking through the things that had been weighing unspoken on both our minds all week — fears, memories, disappointments…  We both know — and noted — that a being sent home for a day is fine, compared to being sent home for good.  Losing a day is a lot better than losing a job –and  something to be thankful for, especially in this economy.  But the way his hours keep fluctuating… all the uncertainty from one week to the next… from one day to the next…  It’s frightening, deeply unsettling.

M made the most of the day, of course: he went to the park with the girls, made a trip to the shop, and tidied up the basement.  But his spirit wasn’t in it and I could see that.  When we got the girls down to bed at last and sat down with our end-of-the-day cuppa tea, he sighed heavily.

“That really gave me knock today, you know…  That really did something to me, when they sent me home today…”

“I know.”  It had done something to me too.

M breathed out slowly.  “I want to go home.”

“I know.”

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After the Equinox, the Days will be Longer than the Nights

It feels like I haven’t seen my husband in weeks — it’s not true, but I haven’t seen much of him in a long time.  His work has been… crazy.  He had all of three days off in January, and February has followed course, which is exhausting for him — and, by extension, for me.  And you’d think the upside of that would be that we’d be banking some big paycheques but…  no.

The thing is, at the moment (at the moment? for months!), there’s just no predictability from day to day what his hours are going to be and, thus, no predictability what his weekly paycheque will be.  One day can be a bumpercrop 12 hours and the next day can be a barren two.  It’s literally that up and down, and we have no idea from day to the next how it will go.  Whenever I hear the truck pull into the driveway, I instinctively shoot an anxious glance at the clock — is it late enough?  Did he get enough hours today?  Everything is depending on what time that truck comes home.

And you might think there is some plus-side to those days when he only has to work a couple of hours — I mean, he gets downtime, right?  A day off,  doesn’t he? — but… no.  He stays at the shop waiting to see if a call comes in: there, but not paid.  And the whole time, I think he’s out there working and all is well, until he comes home (what time? Oh it’s 5 — thank goodness! All is well!) and tells me, no, it was only three hours today…  And my heart sinks.

But when he does get the hours — when the weather cooperates and sends frigid temperatures and ice and misery that has people running to the phones — he’s gone all hours, working to the point of utter collapse.  And then getting another call at 11pm, just as we are settling down to our end-of-the-day cuppa  — could he?, they ask — and he looks at me and shrugs.  It’s money…  it’s all money, and we have to take what blessings come however they come, so he sighs and drags himself off the couch and changes into his work clothes and heads out again.  And I go up to bed alone.

So when the hours are light, I am just terrified, but when they are long, we don’t see each other for days on end, and he is exhausted, and I am lonely and taking care of the kids on my own all the day and night.  And even when the hours are bang-smack on normal — when he comes home and answers my perpetual question with a smile and “eight!” — I worry that eight hours today will not be enough if the rest of the week doesn’t match.  Every day, we start each day as a complete unknown and it’s been this way for months.  And it’s incredibly stressful — incredibly stressful.

Just lately, everything’s been swirling about inside me — too much, too much — and I have felt so overwhelmed.  It seems we’ve had one health crisis after another since the new year, and each one knocks us out for nearly a week or more, and pushes the stress levels up higher.  And  E1 has just gone into a new phase of  “No!” that is stretching my patience past its limits.  And though I appreciate my mum’s help enormously  and she appreciates spending time with the girls, we have — just by necessity — ended up seeing each other nearly every day, and that is really too much for either of us.  And then there is the trying to stay in the red.  And those crazy hours.  And it’s time for me to tackle our bloody taxes again, and there’s almost nothing on earth that gets me more panicky and overwrought than trying to work out taxes.  And all this stress rouses my old friend Failure from his slumber — he’s really never far away — and he comes out cackling with fingers pointed and condemnations flying, to taunt me and poke at me and slap me and…  and…  what can I say to deflect it?  It’s all true.

I feel  so strung out, so tired, and this week it’s all just gotten on top of me.  I can’t stop crying.  I miss having friends nearby that I’ve known for years — the people you need round you when you’re feeling overwhelmed.  And though it sounds odd to say, I miss my privacy — just the simple pleasure of going where I go and doing things the way I do them without observation.   And, oh I miss my husband, I really just miss my husband — it feels like I haven’t seen him in weeks.

In the post yesterday, there was a tax bill from the county that I wasn’t expecting — it was startlingly huge and I didn’t know what was, didn’t even know what it was for. Fortunately, it turned out to be an error, but too late — I was over the edge, blindsided by a such a surprise from some entity I didn’t even know existed.  It ripped the last bit of bravado from me, and left me slumped on the floor and crying, hardly able to get control over myself for the rest of the day.

But this week was turning out to be different from the rest.  The hours started rolling in, like we’d never seen before.  M was on call over the weekend and the calls just kept coming — he racked up three days’ worth of normal hours before the week had really even begun.  And every day after followed suit — by Tuesday, he was already well over forty hours, and I was astonished to realise we were on track for a bumper paycheque that would start to make up for the difficulty of late.  And boy, do we need it!  The car insurance is due next month, and there’ll be another one of those panic-inducing gas bills…   Oh, yes, I’ve been watching those hours clock up with a growing feeling of excitement.  And poor M has been looking forward to nothing more than dragging his weary body into bed at the end of each day.

When I spoke to M last night before he headed off to night school — did I mention he fits night school in twice a week as well? — he could hear in my voice all the raw aftermath of that tax bill panic.  “Sounds like it would be a good idea for me to stay home with you tomorrow.” he said gently, “What do you think?”

“NO!!!!“  I panicked — had he done something?  Had he taken a day off?!?!?  We need him to keep going  and rack up as much overtime as possible before the end of the week.  We were on a roll and we need that money!

“Oh…”  He had been hoping for a different answer, I could tell, and so I panicked afresh.

“What??? WHAT?!?”

“Well, work’s slowed down, so they had a look at who had the most hours this week,”  Oh, I see. “…and that was me, so they told me they didn’t have anything for me tomorrow, so that the other guys can get their full hours.”  Yes…  yes…  that made sense.  And it was only right — if the situation were reversed, I know I’d be grateful.

And so we had a day together today — and it was really wonderful, it really was.  A quiet day together as a family — nothing particularly to do and no where to go — like we haven’t had in…  well, months really.  It was exactly what I needed, a balm for my anxiety that did no end of good.  A quiet family day, a day with my husband, on a… Thursday.

And it will still be a better-than-normal paycheque, and for that I am very grateful.  But it won’t be that bumpercrop now. 

Damn.

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All Good Things Come to an End

As much as I don’t want to think about this — and I don’t, I don’t, I don’t — it is time to look for a job.  Costs are rising, M’s hours are fluctuating, and the bills…  oh, the bills, they positively sneer at me.  I have done everything I know how to do to reduce outgoings, and yet…

I have cut down on water usage as much as I think I can — well, no, I do still take a shower every day and bathe my daughters…  perhaps that ought to be rethought.  I have taken to recording on the calendar every time we use the washer, dryer, dishwasher, and shower, just so I can can be more conscious of it.  And still, we have managed to use 100 gallons more than last month, and our bill is again five times the size of my parents’.  And I have ruthlessly slashed the weekly grocery budget …and then slashed it again.  It now sits in the mid double-digits — not so much to feed a family of four on, and harder still when allergies prevent us from buying most of the cheaper food options, and harder again when that figure covers all the non-food supplies as well.  We keep the thermostat set religiously to 65F and sit wrapped in blankets all the time — and I know the furnace needs replacing but…  but…  how could we have had a gas bill like our last one?  How? It was colossal, breathtaking, utterly devastating.  It was three-and-a-half times what my parents’ bill is — and they in a bigger house — and more on its own than I had budgeted for all our utilities for the month put together.  When it arrived, I sat in shock at the dining room table, holding it limply in my hand and waiting to cry but feeling too numb.

And so it is time to look for me to look for a job to fill this gap.  It will have to be an afternoon job, so that the girls are mostly napping at the time and less hassle for my mother to sit — and I am very, very grateful that she will take care of them for me.  It doesn’t have to pull in much, just a few hundred a month would ease the pain a bit.  The mark is set sufficiently low.  It should be no big deal.

And yet, I feel so sick at the thought.  Paralysed.  And I think no one will understand why.  Anyone in this position would know what to do — to pull up their bootstraps and get out there.  Anyone who’d balk at that is…  just plain lazy, maybe self-pitying to boot.

So I am simultaneously trying to put this into words and kicking myself in the backside.  The plain truth is that I don’t want to go out and find a job because I do believe I have a job — a critically important job — and I don’t want to give up on that (or perhaps…  I don’t want that to end).  The second plain truth is that we moved here partly so that I could continue to stay home and do that job, and that’s a hell of  a lot of effort to have all come to nothing in the end.  And the third truth is that…  I am afraid.

And that’s it — I am just afraid.  After four years out of the work force, I don’t know what work to do.  There is no logical or obvious next step.  I never ended up working in the area I got my degree in and it’s been so long since I graduated, I’d not be qualified anymore.  And though I forged a career of sorts, it was never a good fit for me nor I for it — we are neither of us clamoring to come back together again.  But most of all — most of all — my confidence is shot.  I ran screaming from my last job, overjoyed to rid of it, hiring a solicitor to fight for my right to redundancy when the project (and my role) ended while I was maternity leave and HR tried to force me into a job two levels lower.  That last role had made all my insufficiencies shine and my abilities fade to black, and I worked for a micro-managing director who ruled by intimidation and humiliation, and then threw in a good dose of sexism just for fun.  Every morning, I dreaded the day ahead and every evening I dreamed of the day I would drive away for good.  By the time I did, my professional confidence was ripped to shreds, and I’ve never sat down since and stitched it back up.  I have buried my head (and my heart) into motherhood and ignored the fact that this safe world would, inevitably, come to an end.

And so, here it is — the time has come for it to end.  And here I am, needing to find a job, but hating it — and so, so afraid.  I don’t want to look for a ‘career’ job because I don’t want this to be permanent — career jobs call for enthusiasm and commitment, and I don’t know where I’d pull that from.   And I don’t want to just go out and get a job a Starbucks because…  well, I ought to be thinking about my career, shouldn’t I?  I’ve got a degree!  I’ve got all this bloody potential!

And all I want to do is crawl into bed.  No…  under the bed.  I feel paralysed.  But those bills… still they sneer.  And they don’t relent.  This world that I wanted for my girls while they were small (or was it for me?) has come to an end.  As much as I hate the thought — and I do hate it — it’s time to bite the bullet.

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It’s Cold Outside, and Dark, and I Am Frightened

I don’t want to say any more than this: my lovely husband, who is paid hourly, and normally leaves the house before 7am and often doesn’t get home until 6.30 or 7.30 or 8.30 or even later, has been getting home nearer to 3.30 or 4 for the past week and a half.  Yesterday, he clocked up not even 5 hours.  Work is slow, he tells me.  People aren’t spending money.  All the guys are getting home early.  And then he adds, but this is normally a busy season.  His on-call days are usually as filled up as his normal days, but last weekend he had only two quick calls.

He hasn’t yet got that all-important local license — he has to wait for the next exam date, which won’t be until spring — and, because of that, he is the least qualified of all the guys at work.  And he was the last in.

I am very frightened.

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Cubicle-Hell as Far as the Mind Can See

M is mad at the world tonight.  He’s been in a foul mood all night and managed to break out of it only with great effort and only a couple of times, before sinking back into a scowl and a quick temper.  Everyone has their off-days, I know, but it bothered me particularly tonight because I had tried so hard.  I should have gone to my first meeting of that new mothers’ group I joined and so had everything set and ready for him when he got home in anticipation of making a quick exit, but he didn’t make it home in time, and I missed my meeting.  It wasn’t his fault and I didn’t complain.  The girls were fed and nearly ready for bed, there was a sausage-and-veg casserole finishing off in the oven and fresh bread cooling on the countertop, the dishes were done and the kitchen wiped clean.  I thought he’d be pleased to find the homestead so organised and welcoming, but all he did was scowl.

He wants me to go back to work — I can feel it.  He likes the company he works for, but he doesn’t really like his work and, now more than ever, he feels the pressure of being the sole breadwinner.  His job exhausts him daily and he’s afraid his body will wear out.  He wants the relief of knowing there is money coming in from another source.

But here’s something really honest: if I went back to work, I don’t know what work I could do.  The obvious answer is what I did last, but I honestly wasn’t that good at it, because the job (and the industry) just wasn’t a good fit for me.  Actually, I hated that job — really hated it — so trying to get back into that same line of work after being away for nearly three and a half years doesn’t make much sense.  There were other jobs before that which were much better, but that’s reaching back in time nearly eight years…  I just don’t know if anyone would be interested in hiring someone for a role they haven’t done in so long.

But I am presentable and have a head on my shoulders — I know I could get a job of some sort.  Some office somewhere would have me, to sort out billing or organise databases or build spreadsheets, and that brings me to the real thing that’s freaking me out tonight: I don’t want to go back to work for a job like that.  There it is, in all its selfish glory: I don’t want a job like that.

In all my career, I have never had a job I actually liked or was interested in.  When I was in high school and then at university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I didn’t want an awful job in a dreary beige office where I pushed paper around all day (or pixels, as the case may be) and made phone calls and was bored out of my mind.  But by never deciding what I really wanted to do, that’s exactly what I got, beige cubicle and all.  And every job afterward followed suit.  Don’t get me wrong — I’ve worked with some great people and for some good companies — but the jobs themselves never meant a thing to me.  They were beige, in every possible sense.

And now that I’ve spent three years in the dayglo-coloured world of stay-at-home mothering — and enjoyed this role like I have enjoyed nothing else in my life — the thought of going back to some meaningless job in cubicle-hell just fills me with a dread I find absolutely paralysing.  I was hoping that during this time at home, I could fashion some new career direction filled with meaning so that I could burst back onto the work-scene in a blaze of enthusiasm.  …But, just like in high school and college, nothing has come to me.  I have a ton of interests and — I say this as a self-observation, not as bragging — I am talented at quite a lot of what I try, but I do not seem to have a talent for turning any of that into a career option.  Like my husband, I am not a natural entrepreneur — on my own, I don’t really know how to convert this collection of skills into something that will bring in money.  Fear builds the task up into something insurmountable and talks me out of taking such a risk.  Perhaps it would be easier with a business partner — someone to share goals and ideas, fears and frustrations with — but, like finding new friends, making contact with potential business partners in a brand-new area takes time.  And in the meantime, just like M, I retreat to the safety of normal employment, a familiar job…  another beige cubicle like all the ones before.

And so M goes off to work, each day a bit wearier, and I bury my head in the toybox and pretend he doesn’t really need me to start working again.  But his exhaustion is plain to see, and his resentment grows, and the tension hangs heavy in the air.  It might be that my time at home with my daughters –  in this wonderful bubble we’ve created — is begining to draw to a close…  And I will have to come up with something sooner rather than later.

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Oh! Was I Meant to be the Designated Driver?

M got an emergency call-out yesterday and had to spend 5 hours of his Sunday dragging unwieldy supplies and heavy equipment up the three flights of stairs to the customer’s front door. He had a dolly to take it all from the truck to the bottom the stairs but, from that point on, it was all him, going up each tread backwards and hoisting his gear up one step at a time. He came home absolutely drenched in sweat, completely knackered, and in an unsettled mood.

I hate it when he’s in these kinds of moods — the air around him goes dark and stagnant He’s best left alone but it can be difficult to do when the love of your life — who also happens to be everyone’s only breadwinner — comes home from work looking like the sky is about to fall. I did my best but, eventually, I could stand it no longer and prodded: what was the matter? “It’s the same as it always is,” he said, then added, “I’ve told you all this this before!” He began to growl a bit. “I’m too old for this. I’m not far off fifty and these other guys [that he works with] are in their 20s. Their bodies can take it but mine can’t. Things ache and it’s just not going to last!” Yes, he has said this before, and I know it’s true. He’s an older guy doing a young man’s job. When the young men reach his age, they are supposed to have a wealth of experience that either ensures their jobs despite their increasing limitations or helps them to move onto less physical roles. But he retrained into this field when he was made redundant only 6 years ago (and discovering, sadly too late into his training, that he didn’t much care for the work), which means he doesn’t have the benefit of all that experience behind him and so has to do the work as if he were 20 years younger. He struggles with it — physically and mentally — and I know that very well.

It’s not easy being the non-breadwinner under any circumstances, but particularly not under these. When you depend on another person’s income, there’s a real feeling of helplessness that can be incredibly unnerving, in the same way that some people find being a passenger in a car unbearable because they feel out of control if they’re not driving. The non-breadwinner is a financial passenger, entirely reliant on another person’s career achievements… or failures. When M has a good day — or a string of them — and is happy in his work, I can push aside that lingering uncomfortableness that being financially dependent gives me. I bask in his contented glow and tell myself everything is fine. But when he has a bad day — or a string of them — and his mood turns dark, I feel my own panic rise. I handle problems by doing things, working towards solutions — even if I can’t actually fix the problem, the doing something will alone help assuage my fears — but in this situation, there’s nothing the non-breadwinner can do. My only choice is to watch it all unfold and hope it turns out well. And the watching is all the more painful because the way M handles these sorts of problems is the polar opposite to me: he doesn’t act — he resigns himself to the ‘inevitable’, a self-fulfilling prophesy in the making if ever I saw one. And my panic goes sky-high.

So I spent tonight trying to think how I was going to fix this. M’s work doesn’t suit him. The work he did before won’t pay enough to support us all. I will have to go back to work, and perhaps he should stay home with the girls. It makes sense — of the two of us, I have always been (by mutual agreement) the one more likely to go further, I have the better job prospects, I am the more… the more…. I don’t know, but whatever it is, I am it. I sat on the bed in E2′s darkened room, trying to feed her down to sleep, and feeling the pressure rise. I need to get M out of this job, I need to get our family out of a dead-end… But I don’t know what to do. I haven’t worked in 3 years and, despite my ‘better prospects’, this will be a formidable barrier. And, though I am not afraid of hard work by any stretch of the imagination, I dread the thought of going back to kind of work I used to do, which I found so uninspiring that I wanted to push pencils into my eyes all day.

As I went over it again and again in my mind, I realised that I hate that I feel like it is down to me to solve these problems. The truth is, I don’t want the burden of that much responsibility. For a moment, I really envied my mum, married to a man who is incredibly focused and driven, a man who solves problems the way George slayed dragons — I doubt that she has ever once felt that she had to step in and take over. But envy doesn’t solve things, action does. As much as the burden of it wearies me, it’s best to just get on with it.

When at last I got E2 down to sleep and went back into the living room, I found M with his head in one hand. I put my arms around him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “that you’re in a job that you struggle with like this. We chose badly.”

“It is what it is.” He sounded dejected. “I’ll just have to keep going …for as long as I can.”

“We could find you something else, something better suited. And I’ll go back to work as soon as the girls are in school. Or,…” I paused, not really wanting to say it out loud, “or maybe sooner if need be.” I spotted the paper out of the corner of my eye — last night’s lottery results would be in it. “Hey, maybe we’ve won the lottery! Wouldn’t that change everything?” I said brightly.

“People like me aren’t meant to win the lottery. It will never happen.” He buys a ticket every week, but honestly believes he’s fated never to win. And there’s a part of me that believes I will never win the lottery either, because I’ve been given a plethora of talents and opportunities in lieu of that one colossal stroke of luck.

“Nor people like me,” I replied.

“No,” he agreed. And then added, “You were supposed to make something of yourself.”

The accusation of it touched a nerve, and I pulled away from him, and looked at his face for a moment. Then I turned and walked into the kitchen, and made myself a cup of tea. I don’t need him to push the heavy burden of responsibility onto me like that. I’m there already .

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The Truck that went Crunch on the Road to Freedom

“I’ll just go out and pull the truck up onto the driveway,” was what M said this afternoon, as light and breezy as anything. He was feeling much better now that he had his van. When he rang me from work yesterday, his voice was decidedly shaky — part uncertainty, part irritation, part plain old fear. Up to now, he’s not worked on his own in this country — he is learning the ropes of the new systems here and so has always been partnered with a more senior tradesman — but he’d just been informed that the guy who was on call for the weekend would not be available Saturday night and they had no one else on the normal rota who could cover it, so M would have to. From 5pm Saturday to 6am Sunday, any emergencies would be up to him to figure out and solve — and that unnerved him mightily.

But he was also fretting about the logistics. So far, he’s not been issued with his own van — he’s just taken our car to work and then gone out with whomever he was working with that day — but he’d need one for any call-outs he might get. Because they hadn’t told him ahead of time that he’d be on call, he’d taken the car to work — I could hear his mind racing and his thoughts beginning to jumble, the way they always do when he gets something unexpected sprung on him, and his words came faster and faster — and now he had to drive a van home, but he couldn’t leave the car there, so if he took the car home, he’d have to drive to work to pick up the van in the middle of the night if he got a call, which would add an hour onto the job…

The answer was simple and I gently pointed out the wood he was missing for the trees: he would drive the car home and, in the morning, we would all take him up to work so he could drive the van home, ready the his night on call. He stopped jabbering — “Oh yeah!” — and his calm returned.

In the end, my father offered to run him up to work, to save me the trouble of having to get the girls up and out of the house. M returned an hour later, triumphant, and driving an absolute monster of a truck. And with wonderful news — this is his truck to keep. Finally he has a truck — a real feather in his cap for him and, at long last, the joyous freedom of having a car for me!

The girls were beside themselves with excitement. “Mummy, look! Look! Daddy has a truck!” E1 yelled, as if I could possibly miss the thing. It is as big and boxy as an ambulance — maybe bigger — and, when he parked it on the street outside the house, I wondered if the cars would be able to get past it. It’s so big that it will block the driveway completely, so we left it on the street when we went out in the car. This town has an ordinance making it illegal to leave vehicles on the street overnight, but it’d be fine parked there during the day. We ran our errands and then stopped for a coffee and, on the way, discovered two new houses for sale that looked rather promising. The mood was happy, relaxed, and hopeful by the time we got home. I went to look up the houses on the computer and M went to move the truck onto the driveway.

A few minutes later, E1 came running in to me, excited. “Mummy! Daddy goes back and forth,” she said in sing-song as she made the motion with her hand. “Ba-ack and fo-orth!” I went to the window. The driveway for this house is angled particularly steeply and it’s easy to scrape the bottom of a car as you move from the pitch of the driveway onto the flat of the road. M was indeed going back and forth, trying to reverse onto the drive, only to have the back the truck grind into the pavement before the rear wheels had even met the start of the driveway. He pulled forward and tried another angle — no joy, and that awful sound of metal against concrete — and then another and another. I went onto the porch and yelled over the roaring engine for him to try going in forward. He did and, as soon as the front wheels lifted up onto the driveway, the back bumper scraped loudly into the road. After about 5 more minutes of this, we both realised the truth: this truck was not going up on that driveway.

What was he going to do? I could see his mind begin to race again: he couldn’t leave it on the street — he’d get tickets! And not just him, it would be the firm getting the tickets — his new firm, his second chance, the one he can’t mess up… And it wouldn’t just be the tickets, it would be the neighbours… they’d be ringing up to complain… ringing up the council or perhaps even the firm itself… His calm disappeared and all his fear and uncertainty rushed back in.

I rang my dad for ideas, but he had none we hadn’t tried. I looked up the road and then down it, at the neighbours’ driveways all so much flatter and more agreeable — would any of them let him park on their drives? — before realising the utter folly of it. We know none of them. Who is going to let M park his huge, rusting, working-man’s truck on their pristine drive outside their lovely house day after day? Oh, it was useless! What were we going to do with this truck? Whatever would M tell his boss? How ridiculous would this make him look, to not even be able to park his truck after all this time of asking for it?

But looking at the neighbours’ drives sparked a thought in my mind: our landlady’s church is at the top of the road and is only a five minute (brisk) walk away. Perhaps they’d agree to let him leave the truck in their parking lot overnight? He rang the church office and spoke to a lady who sounded helpful but… dubious. She’d have to ask someone in charge and have them ring him back. We waited ninety nervous minutes before M tried again. This time he got through to the Parish Director. I heard him explain the situation… then explain again that it was only overnight… assure the man that he would move early every morning and return it only late each night…

And then he turned to me with a huge smile of relief. The man had agreed — was happy to help, in fact — as long as M sticks to the times he said. I could see poor M visibly relax at the realisation, the tension releasing from his shoulders. Oh, oh, what a weight off his mind!

And so the truck is parked in the church lot, safely off the road during its curfew hours. M is sleeping soundly and in the hopes that he won’t get called out in the small hours of the night. And I… I can hardly believe — hardly believe — that I have my freedom at last. I can put these girls in our car and GO PLACES!

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Gratitude 15

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that it came as a real shock when M got home tonight grumpy, tired, depressed and defeated. I suddenly became aware of how much he has not been like that — not been that person I know so well — these past two weeks, and I gained a new appreciation of the real effort he’s been making since he started this new job.
2. My much-needed mid-afternoon nap, as the good night that E2 had the other night turned out to be a one-off fluke.
3. How grown-up E1 was in a craft shop filled with hundreds of colourful temptations. She squealed with delight as she picked things up (“Look at this, Mummy!”) but then listened when I told her to put them back and carefully placed each one exactly where she got it from. Shopping with her today was a real pleasure, and that’s not something that’s often said about just-turned-3-year-olds!

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