Happy New Year everyone!
I haven't updated my blog in over a year and that is good news. It means
life is humming along.
In my last post, I was recoveri...
5 years ago
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where there are other things to love. I had a tiny epiphany the other night, when I was asked, once again, how I was adjusting to life in Western Kansas. I have never known quite how to answer that- I miss Colorado, and I miss who I was there. But I am a different person here. It's the only way I can survive the change, by changing myself. It is so hard to explain in a one-line sentence, when all the asker wants to hear is that I love or hate it, and either answer sounds insincere and does not explain how I feel. But I heard myself saying, enthusiastically, that I love it- I love different things about my life here than I loved in Colorado. Then I realized how true that is- and how simple of an answer. I don't hate it here. I am me here, just as I was me there, because the older I get, the more I come to realize that the true me is not defined by what I do, but the enthusiasm with which I do it.
Hiker, mountain biker, runner, skier, snowboarder, friend, wife- these are not who I am, but what I do. Who I am is a soul who loves beautiful things created by forces larger than myself, is connected to other beings, human and animal, through bonds made stronger by a unique ability to understand minute gestures, is driven by a strong urge to prove myself and therefore invites challenge, who loves change but hates uncertainty, who hates waiting and loves surprises. I have a personality that enjoys role-playing, and the physical ability to indulge it- I have pretended to be a mountain bike racer, a ski bum, a park rat, a career woman, a sports-industry insider, a super-wife, a gardener, a farmhand, an artist, a writer, a yogi, a heavy equipment operator, a welder, a health-care professional, an activist. Some of these things I have done well, some not so much. But all of them, I have done pretending that they defined me, if only for as long as I did them. Does that mean that those things are not me? No. They are me, because they are what me delights in doing. However, leaving those outdoorsy, adventurous people that I was in Summit County behind does not mean that I am not remaining true to myself, or that I must now hate living in a place where I cannot indulge my fantasies of being those people. It simply makes room to be other people. The mixing of many people, constant growing and experimenting and discovering is what truly makes me, me.
Do I sound psychotic and unstable? I am suddenly a bit fearful that I do. I have come to realize lately that perhaps other's minds don't work the way mine does. Many of the things I have always been hard on myself for, such as my complete inability to remember what I am doing for long enough to finish it, I have fought for years as a lack of discipline. But my memory has been jogged lately, the memory of me in school, how even back then I simply could not focus on any one thing for longer than a few minutes. How it drove my teachers nuts that I could not work on my math until I was finished, then move onto English, then to spelling, and so on. I had five books on my desk at once, changing subjects at ten minute intervals. If the slightest distraction was happening, someone tapping a pencil, rattling a desk, I simply could not focus on the task at hand. When my teachers reached their wit's end and sent me to the library to study, as a punishment for my lack of self-discipline, I was relieved- in the absence of distraction, I could focus on finishing my studies. My SAT scores indicated that my language skills were at a high-school graduate's level in third and fourth grade, while my math skills lagged behind where they should be for my age and education level. This alerted my parents and the therapists they hired to analyze me to the fact that I was a special-needs student. In the end, they put me on Ritalin during the school year, which left me pleasantly zoned and studious, able to block distractions and focus on finishing my work, which was suddenly flowing from my fingers at an amazing pace, long pages of penmanship, worksheets filled with algebraic diagrams. For the first time since I could remember, I was not taking home piles of homework, not fighting all evening with the distractions at home while I forced myself to finish it, not spending more time coming up with creative ways to not finish than simply finishing it. The margins of my worksheets were no longer filled with doodles, geometric shapes, curlicues, leaves and flowers and kites and faces of Victorian-era beauties with high hairdos and ruffles and cleavage. On the days that I seemed especially distracted, my teachers often asked me, in the middle of class, if I had taken my pills. It's probably a testament to the character of my classmates that I had any friends at all.
All of that background is to illustrate this- adult ADD is a scary and terrible and wonderful thing. It means chaos and spontaneity and fun and chagrin and frusteration and guilt. It means waking up in the morning, washing dishes and putting away groceries from the night before, and suddenly finding oneself elbows-deep in a batch of homemade ricotta cheese by 9 in the morning with no plan of how said cheese is going to be used before it spoils- it just needed to be made because several half-gallons of milk were tasting a little too sour to drink and were needing to be taken out of the fridge to make room for groceries bought last night. It means going online to look up ways to use ricotta cheese, and finding oneself blogging instead while a beautiful ball of creamy ricotta sits on the stove waiting to be stuffed into homemade pasta that I have suddenly lost interest in making. It means that in the meantime, I have batted a tennis ball across the yard for Andy to chase, soaked chia seeds in a glass of soymilk (my daily source of Omega 3's), juiced a grapefruit and made an over-easy egg and two slices of toast for Bobby, packed Bobby's lunch and contorted myself into strange shapes to fit through the crawlspace window to turn off the water to the house so Bobby can fix a plumbing issue. It means that I sit here in my yoga clothes, which is as close as I got to doing yoga this morning. For Bobby, it means that he comes home to the house being rearranged on a regular basis, which infuriates him but makes it feel all shiny and new and exciting to me. Sometimes his clothes are neatly folded, and sometimes they are dumped into his dresser drawers. Sometimes I feed him lavish meals, and sometimes I can barely manage a thrown-together taco. He says he still loves me, but he had no idea I was this crazy when he married me. Back then, all he saw was constant entertainment, fun and spontaneity, and now he never knows what to expect, which stresses him out. It puzzles him that I can manage to mix myriad colors into one cohesive picture, bring the illusion of nature's beautiful chaos and crash of color out of five tubes of paint- red, blue, yellow, black and white, but I cannot spread one gallon of premixed paint on a wall without getting stressed out and in a hurry and ending up with it in my hair, on the floor, and everywhere it should not be. I have been banned from painting walls.
To say that there has never been a small amount of experimentation with herbal self-medication to help with this problem would be a lie. I have lived for almost a decade in a small hippie mountain town that has led the way in promoting natural medication over synthetic prescription drugs. I have many friends who chose to treat chronic pain, insomnia, and other maladies with small amounts of organic, all-natural, home-grown THC over drugs mixed and touted by pharmaceutical companies. I have also just paid the bill for the one time my health-care provider thought I needed prescrition drugs- a $250 anti-nausea pill because the pain of a miscarriage had me thinking I might vomit- a perfectly normal reaction to pain. In hindsight, knowing what that little cherry-flavored bit of pill would cost, I would have chosen to vomit for free. That little experience has lessened my trust of for-profit healthcare a bit.
My observations on the results of such experiments are mixed- when I have desperately needed to get something done, say, an entire house cleaned in a short amount of time, a very small amount has worked like absolute magic. I zone in on what I should be doing just as I did when I was a kid on ritalin. Suddenly, making order out of chaos is soothing for the soul. But if I overdo it just the slightest bit, I become manic. My attention span is shortened even more than normal, and I spin from one thing to the next. My personal theory on mind-altering substances, any mind-altering substances, whether created in a lab and called something like percocet, created in a distillery and called something like rum, created in a field and called something like coffee, tobacco, or weed, or created in our brains and called something like endorphins or a runner's high, these are all things that can be beneficial in certain applications, but not as a permanent fix. Recent research shows that MDMA, or ecstacy, when taken by someone with autism, can help him feel empathy and relate to the people around him. Nobody is suggesting that someone with autism be high on ecstacy all the time. It is decidedly bad for the body. However, those who have tried it say that the memory of that feeling helps them fake it and bring their behavior in line with those around them, making them more approachable, more socially functioning, which made it worth doing once. Do I approve of taking drugs, legal or illegal? Not particularly. But realistically, we all accept on certain levels that our brain chemistry is whacky enough to need chemical, medicinal help, whether it is help waking up in the morning, help scrambling pain signals from our bodies, help seeing the positive side of circumstances. Even the food we eat affects our brain chemistry, simple carbs and sugars lighting up the pleasure-sensors in our brains. We do not know why we like certain foods, but our brains know-they are drugs.
I am thinking about this, and therefore it is what comes out of my fingers while blogging, because I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about how our minds work, and how everyone tends to judge those around them based on their own experience of life. If someone who, above all, values order, someone who hates change, someone who can focus on one task in the middle of loud chaos were to live with me, we would judge each other harshly. I call those people obsessive compulsive, rigid, boring. They call me undisciplined, flighty, manic. But it seems that if we could all just accept each other's unmedicated selves, learn to adapt and make changes to accomodate everyone's strange hang-ups, we would be a much more loving and open-minded society.
And now, I have a messy kitchen, a bowl full of fresh soft cheese sitting on my stove waiting to be used, and various other projects. I do love it out here in the country- it is as quiet as the grave in this house. It is a beautiful, windstill day outside, perfect for a run with Andy later, and I have all day to fail, then fix. With nobody watching my process, I can spend hours down the rabbit hole that is the internet, becoming distracted by everything from cheese-making to youtube, and still have time to have the house looking as though super-wife lives here by the time B gets home. We took yesterday off, in the howling wind, and stayed in the house recharging our internal batteries before braving the weather and venturing to Garden City for groceries, so today B is having to work a bit to make up for it.
Until later, my faithful few. Thank you for staying faithful during my entire month's absense from the blogosphere.
Hiker, mountain biker, runner, skier, snowboarder, friend, wife- these are not who I am, but what I do. Who I am is a soul who loves beautiful things created by forces larger than myself, is connected to other beings, human and animal, through bonds made stronger by a unique ability to understand minute gestures, is driven by a strong urge to prove myself and therefore invites challenge, who loves change but hates uncertainty, who hates waiting and loves surprises. I have a personality that enjoys role-playing, and the physical ability to indulge it- I have pretended to be a mountain bike racer, a ski bum, a park rat, a career woman, a sports-industry insider, a super-wife, a gardener, a farmhand, an artist, a writer, a yogi, a heavy equipment operator, a welder, a health-care professional, an activist. Some of these things I have done well, some not so much. But all of them, I have done pretending that they defined me, if only for as long as I did them. Does that mean that those things are not me? No. They are me, because they are what me delights in doing. However, leaving those outdoorsy, adventurous people that I was in Summit County behind does not mean that I am not remaining true to myself, or that I must now hate living in a place where I cannot indulge my fantasies of being those people. It simply makes room to be other people. The mixing of many people, constant growing and experimenting and discovering is what truly makes me, me.
Do I sound psychotic and unstable? I am suddenly a bit fearful that I do. I have come to realize lately that perhaps other's minds don't work the way mine does. Many of the things I have always been hard on myself for, such as my complete inability to remember what I am doing for long enough to finish it, I have fought for years as a lack of discipline. But my memory has been jogged lately, the memory of me in school, how even back then I simply could not focus on any one thing for longer than a few minutes. How it drove my teachers nuts that I could not work on my math until I was finished, then move onto English, then to spelling, and so on. I had five books on my desk at once, changing subjects at ten minute intervals. If the slightest distraction was happening, someone tapping a pencil, rattling a desk, I simply could not focus on the task at hand. When my teachers reached their wit's end and sent me to the library to study, as a punishment for my lack of self-discipline, I was relieved- in the absence of distraction, I could focus on finishing my studies. My SAT scores indicated that my language skills were at a high-school graduate's level in third and fourth grade, while my math skills lagged behind where they should be for my age and education level. This alerted my parents and the therapists they hired to analyze me to the fact that I was a special-needs student. In the end, they put me on Ritalin during the school year, which left me pleasantly zoned and studious, able to block distractions and focus on finishing my work, which was suddenly flowing from my fingers at an amazing pace, long pages of penmanship, worksheets filled with algebraic diagrams. For the first time since I could remember, I was not taking home piles of homework, not fighting all evening with the distractions at home while I forced myself to finish it, not spending more time coming up with creative ways to not finish than simply finishing it. The margins of my worksheets were no longer filled with doodles, geometric shapes, curlicues, leaves and flowers and kites and faces of Victorian-era beauties with high hairdos and ruffles and cleavage. On the days that I seemed especially distracted, my teachers often asked me, in the middle of class, if I had taken my pills. It's probably a testament to the character of my classmates that I had any friends at all.
All of that background is to illustrate this- adult ADD is a scary and terrible and wonderful thing. It means chaos and spontaneity and fun and chagrin and frusteration and guilt. It means waking up in the morning, washing dishes and putting away groceries from the night before, and suddenly finding oneself elbows-deep in a batch of homemade ricotta cheese by 9 in the morning with no plan of how said cheese is going to be used before it spoils- it just needed to be made because several half-gallons of milk were tasting a little too sour to drink and were needing to be taken out of the fridge to make room for groceries bought last night. It means going online to look up ways to use ricotta cheese, and finding oneself blogging instead while a beautiful ball of creamy ricotta sits on the stove waiting to be stuffed into homemade pasta that I have suddenly lost interest in making. It means that in the meantime, I have batted a tennis ball across the yard for Andy to chase, soaked chia seeds in a glass of soymilk (my daily source of Omega 3's), juiced a grapefruit and made an over-easy egg and two slices of toast for Bobby, packed Bobby's lunch and contorted myself into strange shapes to fit through the crawlspace window to turn off the water to the house so Bobby can fix a plumbing issue. It means that I sit here in my yoga clothes, which is as close as I got to doing yoga this morning. For Bobby, it means that he comes home to the house being rearranged on a regular basis, which infuriates him but makes it feel all shiny and new and exciting to me. Sometimes his clothes are neatly folded, and sometimes they are dumped into his dresser drawers. Sometimes I feed him lavish meals, and sometimes I can barely manage a thrown-together taco. He says he still loves me, but he had no idea I was this crazy when he married me. Back then, all he saw was constant entertainment, fun and spontaneity, and now he never knows what to expect, which stresses him out. It puzzles him that I can manage to mix myriad colors into one cohesive picture, bring the illusion of nature's beautiful chaos and crash of color out of five tubes of paint- red, blue, yellow, black and white, but I cannot spread one gallon of premixed paint on a wall without getting stressed out and in a hurry and ending up with it in my hair, on the floor, and everywhere it should not be. I have been banned from painting walls.
To say that there has never been a small amount of experimentation with herbal self-medication to help with this problem would be a lie. I have lived for almost a decade in a small hippie mountain town that has led the way in promoting natural medication over synthetic prescription drugs. I have many friends who chose to treat chronic pain, insomnia, and other maladies with small amounts of organic, all-natural, home-grown THC over drugs mixed and touted by pharmaceutical companies. I have also just paid the bill for the one time my health-care provider thought I needed prescrition drugs- a $250 anti-nausea pill because the pain of a miscarriage had me thinking I might vomit- a perfectly normal reaction to pain. In hindsight, knowing what that little cherry-flavored bit of pill would cost, I would have chosen to vomit for free. That little experience has lessened my trust of for-profit healthcare a bit.
My observations on the results of such experiments are mixed- when I have desperately needed to get something done, say, an entire house cleaned in a short amount of time, a very small amount has worked like absolute magic. I zone in on what I should be doing just as I did when I was a kid on ritalin. Suddenly, making order out of chaos is soothing for the soul. But if I overdo it just the slightest bit, I become manic. My attention span is shortened even more than normal, and I spin from one thing to the next. My personal theory on mind-altering substances, any mind-altering substances, whether created in a lab and called something like percocet, created in a distillery and called something like rum, created in a field and called something like coffee, tobacco, or weed, or created in our brains and called something like endorphins or a runner's high, these are all things that can be beneficial in certain applications, but not as a permanent fix. Recent research shows that MDMA, or ecstacy, when taken by someone with autism, can help him feel empathy and relate to the people around him. Nobody is suggesting that someone with autism be high on ecstacy all the time. It is decidedly bad for the body. However, those who have tried it say that the memory of that feeling helps them fake it and bring their behavior in line with those around them, making them more approachable, more socially functioning, which made it worth doing once. Do I approve of taking drugs, legal or illegal? Not particularly. But realistically, we all accept on certain levels that our brain chemistry is whacky enough to need chemical, medicinal help, whether it is help waking up in the morning, help scrambling pain signals from our bodies, help seeing the positive side of circumstances. Even the food we eat affects our brain chemistry, simple carbs and sugars lighting up the pleasure-sensors in our brains. We do not know why we like certain foods, but our brains know-they are drugs.
I am thinking about this, and therefore it is what comes out of my fingers while blogging, because I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about how our minds work, and how everyone tends to judge those around them based on their own experience of life. If someone who, above all, values order, someone who hates change, someone who can focus on one task in the middle of loud chaos were to live with me, we would judge each other harshly. I call those people obsessive compulsive, rigid, boring. They call me undisciplined, flighty, manic. But it seems that if we could all just accept each other's unmedicated selves, learn to adapt and make changes to accomodate everyone's strange hang-ups, we would be a much more loving and open-minded society.
And now, I have a messy kitchen, a bowl full of fresh soft cheese sitting on my stove waiting to be used, and various other projects. I do love it out here in the country- it is as quiet as the grave in this house. It is a beautiful, windstill day outside, perfect for a run with Andy later, and I have all day to fail, then fix. With nobody watching my process, I can spend hours down the rabbit hole that is the internet, becoming distracted by everything from cheese-making to youtube, and still have time to have the house looking as though super-wife lives here by the time B gets home. We took yesterday off, in the howling wind, and stayed in the house recharging our internal batteries before braving the weather and venturing to Garden City for groceries, so today B is having to work a bit to make up for it.
Until later, my faithful few. Thank you for staying faithful during my entire month's absense from the blogosphere.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the level of anxiety is high, but we are not sure why. It's all the unknown. It's not having a job. It's that feeling of panic at not knowing where you are headed and if you are making the right decisions.
I quit my job at the lodging company, for reallsies, the other day. The woman who takes reservations and acts as go-between for the owner of the company had some misinformation given her by a new hire that cast me in a less than favorable light, and she called and yelled at me for fifteen minutes before taking enough of a breath to allow me to defend myself. She calmed down after getting the facts, but I suddenly had enough. I wasn't getting much work anymore, and I wasn't getting the benefit of the doubt after having proven for eight years that I have nothing but the best interest of this company in mind. Sudden anger swelled up and spilled over and I told her that she had helped me see that the time had come for me to move on. Which I did. I have not been back since. I feel a little guilty, yes, since I have never quit a job for any reason other than necessity, never told a boss that I am quitting because I am not happy with the job. However, I have also always been on excellent terms with my bosses and never felt taken advantage of, nor have I ever felt as though I have been treated unfairly. It was a new experience for me, and one I was not prepared for. The triumph of exercising my right to refuse my services put me on a bit of a power high and I walked away shaky but giddy. Bobby and I had a long talk, during which he assured me I had done the right thing, and we decided that if we have to cut our losses with this house, fire-sale it, that is okay. It's not worth placing stress on our marriage by living in two separate states all winter. Sure, I could work at the ski shop, but is staying up here worth the wages they pay? Not really. So he made the executive decision that I should go to Kansas. No sooner did I get down there than it rained six inches in two days, and the entire area is a bottomless mud pit. There will be no spreading until the fields dry out. So we packed up the dog and a suitcase and drove back to Colorado for an appointment with the tax accountant.
The first thing we did when we got here was check the mail, and sure enough, a bill from my emergency room visit. $4,000. And neither of us working at the moment. And cold weather, so nothing to do but sit and mull over our lives. I have never needed a bike ride so badly, but the trails are wet. We had hoped we could make a trip to Fruita for a few days, and we still hope to, but it costs money to drive out there. Aint life grand?
Not whining. I know this is the stuff life is made of, and as such, it's a beautiful life. I have love, if no money. I have the promise that everything will get better. In six months, we can move into a beautiful house in the bottom of a peaceful valley, a house with room for friends. So there's no jobs out there that are an option for me, but there is the chance that maybe I will be pregnant, then have a kid, so I can justify not working to my overdeveloped sense of responsibility. B tells me to live in the present, and normally, I would agree, but I'm not really loving the present right now. It's an excellent way to get to the future, and I'm okay with that. But at the same time, I am trying to remember that I am not promised the future, so I need to enjoy the things that are good right now- Bobby and Andy and a really psychotic cat named Marvin with serious abandonment issues who occasionally comes around begging for food and human touch, a warm house and a sense of humor and irony- one of the few things, along with a really ugly couch and a chair that eats things, that we brought with us when we moved. Not complaining. Just wondering at which point it would be justified for me to start. I have to conclude it would need to be pretty bad before I could complain without guilt- we have food and love and shelter and health. To some, we are a little underachieving but to so many millions more, we are wealthy beyond imagination. Life IS grand.
I quit my job at the lodging company, for reallsies, the other day. The woman who takes reservations and acts as go-between for the owner of the company had some misinformation given her by a new hire that cast me in a less than favorable light, and she called and yelled at me for fifteen minutes before taking enough of a breath to allow me to defend myself. She calmed down after getting the facts, but I suddenly had enough. I wasn't getting much work anymore, and I wasn't getting the benefit of the doubt after having proven for eight years that I have nothing but the best interest of this company in mind. Sudden anger swelled up and spilled over and I told her that she had helped me see that the time had come for me to move on. Which I did. I have not been back since. I feel a little guilty, yes, since I have never quit a job for any reason other than necessity, never told a boss that I am quitting because I am not happy with the job. However, I have also always been on excellent terms with my bosses and never felt taken advantage of, nor have I ever felt as though I have been treated unfairly. It was a new experience for me, and one I was not prepared for. The triumph of exercising my right to refuse my services put me on a bit of a power high and I walked away shaky but giddy. Bobby and I had a long talk, during which he assured me I had done the right thing, and we decided that if we have to cut our losses with this house, fire-sale it, that is okay. It's not worth placing stress on our marriage by living in two separate states all winter. Sure, I could work at the ski shop, but is staying up here worth the wages they pay? Not really. So he made the executive decision that I should go to Kansas. No sooner did I get down there than it rained six inches in two days, and the entire area is a bottomless mud pit. There will be no spreading until the fields dry out. So we packed up the dog and a suitcase and drove back to Colorado for an appointment with the tax accountant.
The first thing we did when we got here was check the mail, and sure enough, a bill from my emergency room visit. $4,000. And neither of us working at the moment. And cold weather, so nothing to do but sit and mull over our lives. I have never needed a bike ride so badly, but the trails are wet. We had hoped we could make a trip to Fruita for a few days, and we still hope to, but it costs money to drive out there. Aint life grand?
Not whining. I know this is the stuff life is made of, and as such, it's a beautiful life. I have love, if no money. I have the promise that everything will get better. In six months, we can move into a beautiful house in the bottom of a peaceful valley, a house with room for friends. So there's no jobs out there that are an option for me, but there is the chance that maybe I will be pregnant, then have a kid, so I can justify not working to my overdeveloped sense of responsibility. B tells me to live in the present, and normally, I would agree, but I'm not really loving the present right now. It's an excellent way to get to the future, and I'm okay with that. But at the same time, I am trying to remember that I am not promised the future, so I need to enjoy the things that are good right now- Bobby and Andy and a really psychotic cat named Marvin with serious abandonment issues who occasionally comes around begging for food and human touch, a warm house and a sense of humor and irony- one of the few things, along with a really ugly couch and a chair that eats things, that we brought with us when we moved. Not complaining. Just wondering at which point it would be justified for me to start. I have to conclude it would need to be pretty bad before I could complain without guilt- we have food and love and shelter and health. To some, we are a little underachieving but to so many millions more, we are wealthy beyond imagination. Life IS grand.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the altitude is certainly not a problem. That is because at 3,400 feet, which is what our elevation is out here in the high plains, the air is thick, although not as thick as that air soup at sea level that makes a mountain dweller's lungs feel as though they will burst through one's ribs and forces shallow breaths.
So much has happened in the last week. After I posted that last post, I packed my bags, swished a token rag about my house, scooped all of the odds and ends from the top of the dresser, desk, etc into my underwear drawer so the house at least looked clean should our realtor get motivated and decide to actually maybe, I don't know, list it? Show it? She seems to have decided to not do a thing with it in the month since we signed the papers agreeing to give her 6 percent of the selling price. I packed the car full, put our road bikes on the roof, loaded up Andy, and hit the road. After a few stops in Denver, I drove out into the endless prairie with the sunset in my rear view mirror. At midnight, I was in a different world, that flat place where churches tower and kids reign and the air reeks of feedlot and rotting corn and freshly applied chemical blows off of fields and ditches and leaves it's oily taste in the back on one's throat. I pulled up to the tiny wheeled box that housed my husband, and let the dog out. Their reunion was joyous and exuberant. We cuddled up together on the couch that folds down into a sort-of bed, me curled around him curled around Andy. It felt so good to melt into a pile of blankets and warm bodies and not be alone, it was worth the five hours in the car through flat darkness, straining my eyes for deer and trying not to speed as the mile markers flashed past.
For two days, I rode with B in his truck. He was hauling manure out of a small private feedlot to a field several miles away, so we spent the day talking in bursts punctuated by his pulling into a pen, jumping from truck to loader, and loading the truck with tons upon tons of caked, rock-hard poop.
It has been years since I have had the chance to observe cows. They amaze and amuse me. B thinks I am nuts, that cows are the dumbest creatures on earth. I beg to differ. They are excellent examples of social hierarchy, habit, and creative ways to cope with a mind-numbing life. Cows live their short, cruel lives with nobody looking out for them, at least not unless someone's dollar is threatened. Nobody cares about a cow's emotional well-being. They stand all day in their own poop, and they eat corn that comes from the back of a feedtruck twice a day. When they arrive in a feedlot from whichever ranch they were born in and lived and romped, they are hearded, terrified, into a squeeze chute and hurt by humans armed with electric prods, their ears are ripped open and tags punched into them. If they thrash, a boot to their jaw. Huge and occasionally dull needles into flanks. They learn that a human one-sixth their size is a terrifying, predatory creature, and they learn that machinery, loaders and feedtrucks, will never run them over, will always stop for them, and their dinner comes from these enormous, noisy, stinking, smoking creatures. And they are bored. A pile of poop and a moving loader provides hours of entertainment in the time that they should spend grazing instead of being forced to stand around in their own poop without a blade of grass in sight. I was explaining this to B after he came back to the truck sputtering about stupid cows and how they cut down on his productivity by standing on top of the pile he was trying to load, following the loader, not moving with any amount of bucket-shaking and engine revving. The next load, I hopped out of the truck and stood on top of the pile myself while he loaded, making eye contact with the bravest cows, the ones who crowded closest. They trotted to safer corners and B loaded his truck in record time. But he said that as helpful as it was to have a scary woman out there scaring the cows away from the pile, it was a little embarrassing. He was pretty sure the cowboys would laugh at him. No normal wife would volunteer to go stand on a pile of poop and frighten cows for her husband, so they would probably assume he had made me do it, which would cause them to question his manliness and all manner of other things. Oh, dear.
After three days of spreading, it rained. We were sleep deprived. It is one thing to cuddle on a bed too narrow for two people and too short to stretch out for one night, but by the third night, we were beginning to snap at each other and fight for our sleeping rights. We decided that we absolutely had to find a house to live in.
Now, we plan on moving into Grandpa and Grandma's farm house in March, when the tenants who are in it now move out. I am so excited I can hardly stand it. A garden plot, pasture to bike in and run a small herd of happy cows, room for Andy to run, space for a chicken house, a barn for goats and cattle, a house empty and begging for sticky fingers and tiny feet. I have all manner of crazy notions running through my mind about building structures on the place, finally experimenting with straw bale construction and eco-sustainable utilities. There can be composting and planting trees and guinea hens. I can be barefoot and pregnant and my hair can get frizzy and my nails dirty and my arms tan. We can live close to the earth, of the earth, our food can come from our own hands and our own soil instead of being processed, poisonous, unrecognizable rubbery lumps of questionable meats and faux vegetables that are wax and miracles of geneticism and chemistry that have travelled thousands of miles from a questionable source to find their way into our bodies, to be called nourishment and to convince us that tomatoes are supposed to be pink and cucumbers are supposed to be shiny.
But before all that can happen, we need to be able to sleep this winter. We need to not get hypothermia spending a winter in a drafty camper heated with a propane bottle. I need to be able to cook so we can live on as real of food as I can manage, not Pop Tarts and Shells&Cheese.
B has spent the last six weeks inquiring, exhausting every channel, exploring every option looking for a house for us. Houses in Western KS are not easy to find. Every little farmhouse has a little farm family in it, a little farm husband providing the money for the little farm wife to buy pretty little curtains and new carpet. Things have changed since we left. Farmers have money now. Rent is still cheap, but not as cheap as it was, and home prices have risen. And the things that are available for rent are not what one might call liveable. I mean, for a meth lab, they work just fine. Mold on the walls and holes in the carpets and linoleum, centipede infestation and mouse poop, a history of murder-suicide, that's just fine if you're junkie who's cookin'. It might even be fine for us, as an alternative to our camper. The problem out here is not that the houses aren't there, it's a booming farm ecomomy and a mindset that only low-class people and transient workers rent, while functioning members of society own homes. The farmers do not need the extra money that would come from renting the old homesteads they aquire in farmland purchases, nor do they want the headache of upkeep, or to have to repair the damage that 15 transient workers can cause to a little farmhouse. With depleted aquifers, many of the wells have dried up. Little farm houses that once held little farm families and cradled little farm babies now crumble from neglect, sad windows watching the weeds grow around them. If it's a really nice place, (I.e. brick construction) a farmer might keep it for his little farm sons to move into, which they do as soon as they are married, and live in it until they can afford to build their own large, nice homes for their little farm brides on their yards surrounded by established trees, at which point they bulldoze the old house. At any rate, it is extrememly difficult to convince a farmer who just purchased another big, shiny green tractor that your rent money is valuable to him, and if you do convince him, one mention of your exuberant Golden Retriever and the deal is off. No inside pets allowed. Western Kansas farmers do not like pets. As a result, pets in Kansas are not the adored, well-behaved, easily forgiven members of society that they are in Colorado. And oddly, as trashy and unloved as the sad little farm houses that have escaped the bulldozer are out here, a slobbering, grinning, shedding house dog is a thing of abject horror to their owners.
At last, however, we heard of a recently vacated house 29 miles from town. In a twist of fate that I am not sure how to feel about yet, it is the same house in which I spent the first 15 years of my life. It is a solid little house, stucco over cinderblock, a tall house because an upstairs was added to a basement house 80 years ago. It stands sturdy agains battering winds. Not a single light apart from a blinking red tower is visible to the north, in spite of the fact that the house sits on a ridge, and only a few hardy souls live in the Smoky Hill River breaks to the north. It survived the dust storms of the 30's. It survived years of farmers battling with a terrible farm economy. A family lived in it, raised children, saw them get married and move away, saw them die. They left letters, postcards, photographs, books and clothes in the crawlspace, which I discovered when I was about 8 and spent days living in the 1930's. They left hay in the hayloft, which I spent a significant part of my childhood in, and in which dozens of kittens were born. I climbed over stanchions and imagined I was anywhere but there. The front porch of the house was the bow of my ship, the undulating waves of wheat surrounging the house my ocean. The grainery out back was my castle and playhouse, as was the much older homestead a mile down the road that I walked to, used the leaning outhouse oblivious to what might be living below the cracked seat, played Pioneer, pretending to draw water out of the frozen pump handle, lazily floating in the stock tank under the windmill, not really sure if the lumps on the bottom were dead birds or bits of sunken tumbleweed. It's really no wonder I had to be dewormed on the same schedule as the animals. My companions, a long line-up of short-lived Chows, Border Collies, Australian Shepherds, Great Pyrenees, and Chihuahuas, watched out for me, barked at rattlesnakes to warn me away, chased jackrabbits, dug goatheads from between their pads with their teeth. I lived outside, barefoot, my feet splaying out until no shoes would fit, the bottoms as hard as a dog's. I carried eggs in my skirt from the far corners of the yards as I found nests hens had hidden. I found bleached deer and cow bones in the pasture and brought them back, as well. I rescued a baby cottontail, a baby barnswallow, baby garter snakes, but all had to eventually be turned loose. I was a busy child, perfectly happy with being alone most of the time. And in hindsight, I know why. While the yard, the neighbor's yard, and the surrounding 3,000 acres of grassland and dry river breaks was the scene of the best parts of my childhood, the house was the scene of the worst. It was here I learned to be who I am, all the good and bad, the beautiful and terrible. All the laughter and tears of my adult life pull strings attached at the other end to this place and the things that happened here. The ghosts that haunt this house are not the usual kind. They are me. They are the things that I have tried to rise above and forget and deny. They are the pain that I have chosen not to feel, begging to be let back in so it can grow. They are the forgiveness that I have chosen to give, to myself and to parents and to friends, thoughtlessly cruel because nobody knew what really happened out there in the white house on the north edge of civilisation. It is the anger at certain adults in my life who punished me beyond my crimes, heaped punishment on top of the punishment I gave myself, because of their lack of understanding. Because they somehow thought they needed to be harder on me because of my parents. Because I was different and an only child. Because I didn't always wear a dress. Because I had seen more ugly life than their kids and it colored how I responded to situations around me, made me less like them and made them like me less.
In the 13 years since I moved away, I have become someone my 15 year old self would envy. I have salvaged all the best parts of her, and have scrubbed away most of the hurt, self-hatred, and insecurity that made her such a target. I have embraced her wild hair and her love of nature and her adventuresome spirit, while banishing most of her painful awkwardness with a constant stream of affirmation. I am thankful to whatever common sense she possessed that in spite of her self-destructive tendancies, she found a boy to share her life with who would let her know that she was his world, that he loved her just the way she was, while helping her try to rid herself of her anger and her depression and her self-hatred. I watched her rip her relationship with him to shreds before she realized what she was doing. I watched it circle the drain. I watched as it dawned on her that her low opinion of herself had caused her to mess things up so badly, he would never look at her in the same way again. Then I let her sob long nights away, wallowing in self-pity, and laughed as one day, she found herself laughing and wondering where the pain was. I watched as they laughed together, him and her, in their new reality and she felt, for the first time, something like self-respect. Something like unconditional love, washing over her as she discovered she could never mess up so badly as to make him stop loving her. Something like a dawning understanding of what the love of God must feel like, and something like joy and reverent gratefulness at the sort of love that would create someone like her and then still find it beautiful. I smiled as she looked at herself in the mirror and was glad for life, her own life, and promised her wild-haired, sad-eyed reflection that she would become more like me.
She's the ghost that eases out of the closet in the middle of the night and walks the hallway. She's the icy breath on the back of my neck as I stand at the kitchen sink and wash dishes the same way my mom did for 15 years. She's the reason I put the tupperware in the utensil drawer, the napkins in the silverware drawer, the silverware in the knife drawer. Every time I open the drawer next to the sink to get a fork, as I did for 15 years, I see napkins instead and I remember that it wasn't yesterday, it was a decade and a half ago, and she isn't me. Then I walk outside and I go for a ramble in the pasture, because that was where she had the least power all those years ago, and she still has less say out there. But still, every corner of this place causes an old emotion to come alive and walk the earth, creeping along in my shadow, ghostly fingers plucking at my heels.
But at the same time, I could move into this house and it was instantly home. No need to feel as though I don't belong, as though I have no roots. I know what every pop, every creak in this sturdy old house means. We speak each other's language. The sunrise through the dead tree branches to the east is the same one I saw every morning as I prepared for school, my steps across the yard trace the ones I took as I fed the calves, chickens, sheep, goats, horses, cats, and dogs, carried water and feed, chopped ice, buried my face in fragrant, hay-scented fur, brushed manes and tails, patted silky noses, stumbled over purring cats twisting around my ankles and greeted doggy kisses with belly rubs. So I think it's a good thing. Maybe it's okay that I revisit those old memories, too. Maybe I can finally put them to rest. Maybe being here will force me to move past my old self for once and for all, and plant the notion deep in my brain that Western Kansas does not have to turn me into anyone I don't want to be.
As soon as we got ourselves moved in, it was time to leave again. Heather, my cousin, snowboarding pal, our occasional winter help in Colorado, has finally found a man. Heather thinks there are those who believe those words deserve lights and a banner, or at least caps and italics, but Heather, bless her, has danced to her own tune and traveled the world and has been an incredible, independant, strong woman while waiting to meet a soulmate, one in several billion, who actually deserved her. And he does treat her like a queen. We love seeing her so very happy and cared for. The wedding was at her home church in Michigan, where she has lived, and I have never been there. We drove for two days to get there, through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, a corner of Illinios, and the bottom half of Michigan. There were more cornfields than I care to remember. Bobby stayed home, but the car was full- my mom, my friend Laci, and sister-in-law Marci. We slept in Davenport, IA on the way up, and made a quick detour off a random interstate exit which took us through the little town of Sagintauk and ended on the shore of Lake Michigan, so just in case I never get back, I can say I have seen a great lake. We walked down to the water, took off our shoes and dug our toes in the sugar sand, and got back on the road. After arriving on Thursday evening, we met all of Heather's "girls", the group of friends she has collected over the years, all having heard of each other, only a few having met. I found an instant kinship with several, that strange feeling that you most certainly must have known each other well in the past and merely forgotten. The weekend was a long series of fun and giggles, conversations of a nature too intimate to merit having just met. A little Too Much Information a time or two, a few deafening moments as everyone tried to talk over everyone else, an uproar here, a moment of hilarity there, and visuals that may stay with onlookers, in spite of them really wishing they wouldn't. (It seemed all such moments inevitably involved underwear- whether it was a cringe-worthy first impression and introduction made indelible by my own underwear, Superman briefs worn over jeans and dress slacks, striped underwear worn over yoga pants- although that one was definitely more cute-wrong than painful-wrong, an underwear moment that should never leave the cabin, because you just had to be there to appreciate it, or a moment involving a boomerang, cat tails and a green pond, me the damsel in distress- or should I say dis dress?- the pantsless husband of a friend coming to my rescue, and a whole lot of mud.) Uncle Warren and Aunt Silver (a.k.a. Sylvia) fed us well, and took care of us and were beyond hospitable. Heather provided a cabin out on Crystal Lake in the quaint and Dirty-Dancing-ish summer town of Crystal for the overflow, since all of her girls would have been far too many for the house. It was quiet there, being fall, and the mornings were crisp. Once the sun came out, fog hovered over the water. Some of the best parts of the trip happened in the cabin, like the long afternoon Marci, Laci and I spent relaxing in the screened-in back porch, saying whatever came to mind, cracking up over the odd things we delight in finding in common. Swans glided past the end of the long wooden dock that stretched into the water outside, water lapped at the shore, the old woman reading her book on the back porch of the house next door may have wondered if we had lost our minds. We ate an inordinate amount of chocolate and had girltalk like we haven't really had since we married boys.
The Friday night dinner and wedding saturday morning were beautiful affairs, and in spite of all the people attending, the couple kept the tone intimate and relaxed. It proved difficult getting them to leave the church after the wedding, with so many good friends around, and when they did, their car keys had accidentally gone home with the groom's father, who, along with all but maybe 20 people, had grown tired of waiting for the bride and groom to make their grand exit and had left. So the grand exit was made in the back seat of a friend's car, which seems highly appropriate and summarizes the spirit of the entire weekend- the focus on friends and the need for all involved to be flexible and plan on the unplanned.
Although there were those very sad to see Heather leave Michigan, they will be living for the foreseeable future in Brian's house in Copeland, Kansas. Copeland is south and a little east of Scott City. There are definitely those of us excited that they will be in Kansas.
After the bride and groom left, it was late, too late to consider starting home yet that night. We decided instead to get up early and make what turned out to be a 17 hour, 1,100 mile trip the next day. Besides, everyone left who was of a kindred spirit decided to trek out into the woods and build a campfire. Which we did, and it was a wonderful way to unwind after a weekend of activity- leaping flames and dancing shadows on the faces of new friends. We instructed my mom to sleep and prepare to be the driver on the first shift the next day, so we could stay out late. We returned to the cabin about 1:30, were sleeping by 2:00, and our alarm rang at 5. We were on the road by 6, watched a Michigan sunrise, a Nebraska sunset, ate wedding sandwiches and wedding candy out of a soft-sided cooler, stopped for gas four times and a potty break five and a half times (the half-time was a guard rail in the Illinios rain) and home by 10:00 that night, a time zone earlier.
And now I am back in the Land of Odd- I mean Oz. I still experience shock every time I lift my head from my computer and look out the window at the russet heads of milo around my house, at the sky that extra atmosphere and dust have turned a paler shade of blue than I am accustomed to, at the silence I remember from my childhood- the sound of such silence is the faint roar of bloodflow in my ears, my breath whispering in and out, in and out, a meadowlark outside. This house is quiet. The wind can howl and not a sound is heard in here. It feels strange, no barking dogs, no kids playing in the street, no backing garbage trucks or distant hammering, no sounds that one accepts as silence when one lives in a populated area. Just the occasional thwack of a loose piece of tin on the barn roof, a cricket, a meadowlark, a gust of wind rattling a windowpane, then back to loud, loud silence. It's wonderful and terrifying.
So much has happened in the last week. After I posted that last post, I packed my bags, swished a token rag about my house, scooped all of the odds and ends from the top of the dresser, desk, etc into my underwear drawer so the house at least looked clean should our realtor get motivated and decide to actually maybe, I don't know, list it? Show it? She seems to have decided to not do a thing with it in the month since we signed the papers agreeing to give her 6 percent of the selling price. I packed the car full, put our road bikes on the roof, loaded up Andy, and hit the road. After a few stops in Denver, I drove out into the endless prairie with the sunset in my rear view mirror. At midnight, I was in a different world, that flat place where churches tower and kids reign and the air reeks of feedlot and rotting corn and freshly applied chemical blows off of fields and ditches and leaves it's oily taste in the back on one's throat. I pulled up to the tiny wheeled box that housed my husband, and let the dog out. Their reunion was joyous and exuberant. We cuddled up together on the couch that folds down into a sort-of bed, me curled around him curled around Andy. It felt so good to melt into a pile of blankets and warm bodies and not be alone, it was worth the five hours in the car through flat darkness, straining my eyes for deer and trying not to speed as the mile markers flashed past.
For two days, I rode with B in his truck. He was hauling manure out of a small private feedlot to a field several miles away, so we spent the day talking in bursts punctuated by his pulling into a pen, jumping from truck to loader, and loading the truck with tons upon tons of caked, rock-hard poop.
It has been years since I have had the chance to observe cows. They amaze and amuse me. B thinks I am nuts, that cows are the dumbest creatures on earth. I beg to differ. They are excellent examples of social hierarchy, habit, and creative ways to cope with a mind-numbing life. Cows live their short, cruel lives with nobody looking out for them, at least not unless someone's dollar is threatened. Nobody cares about a cow's emotional well-being. They stand all day in their own poop, and they eat corn that comes from the back of a feedtruck twice a day. When they arrive in a feedlot from whichever ranch they were born in and lived and romped, they are hearded, terrified, into a squeeze chute and hurt by humans armed with electric prods, their ears are ripped open and tags punched into them. If they thrash, a boot to their jaw. Huge and occasionally dull needles into flanks. They learn that a human one-sixth their size is a terrifying, predatory creature, and they learn that machinery, loaders and feedtrucks, will never run them over, will always stop for them, and their dinner comes from these enormous, noisy, stinking, smoking creatures. And they are bored. A pile of poop and a moving loader provides hours of entertainment in the time that they should spend grazing instead of being forced to stand around in their own poop without a blade of grass in sight. I was explaining this to B after he came back to the truck sputtering about stupid cows and how they cut down on his productivity by standing on top of the pile he was trying to load, following the loader, not moving with any amount of bucket-shaking and engine revving. The next load, I hopped out of the truck and stood on top of the pile myself while he loaded, making eye contact with the bravest cows, the ones who crowded closest. They trotted to safer corners and B loaded his truck in record time. But he said that as helpful as it was to have a scary woman out there scaring the cows away from the pile, it was a little embarrassing. He was pretty sure the cowboys would laugh at him. No normal wife would volunteer to go stand on a pile of poop and frighten cows for her husband, so they would probably assume he had made me do it, which would cause them to question his manliness and all manner of other things. Oh, dear.
After three days of spreading, it rained. We were sleep deprived. It is one thing to cuddle on a bed too narrow for two people and too short to stretch out for one night, but by the third night, we were beginning to snap at each other and fight for our sleeping rights. We decided that we absolutely had to find a house to live in.
Now, we plan on moving into Grandpa and Grandma's farm house in March, when the tenants who are in it now move out. I am so excited I can hardly stand it. A garden plot, pasture to bike in and run a small herd of happy cows, room for Andy to run, space for a chicken house, a barn for goats and cattle, a house empty and begging for sticky fingers and tiny feet. I have all manner of crazy notions running through my mind about building structures on the place, finally experimenting with straw bale construction and eco-sustainable utilities. There can be composting and planting trees and guinea hens. I can be barefoot and pregnant and my hair can get frizzy and my nails dirty and my arms tan. We can live close to the earth, of the earth, our food can come from our own hands and our own soil instead of being processed, poisonous, unrecognizable rubbery lumps of questionable meats and faux vegetables that are wax and miracles of geneticism and chemistry that have travelled thousands of miles from a questionable source to find their way into our bodies, to be called nourishment and to convince us that tomatoes are supposed to be pink and cucumbers are supposed to be shiny.
But before all that can happen, we need to be able to sleep this winter. We need to not get hypothermia spending a winter in a drafty camper heated with a propane bottle. I need to be able to cook so we can live on as real of food as I can manage, not Pop Tarts and Shells&Cheese.
B has spent the last six weeks inquiring, exhausting every channel, exploring every option looking for a house for us. Houses in Western KS are not easy to find. Every little farmhouse has a little farm family in it, a little farm husband providing the money for the little farm wife to buy pretty little curtains and new carpet. Things have changed since we left. Farmers have money now. Rent is still cheap, but not as cheap as it was, and home prices have risen. And the things that are available for rent are not what one might call liveable. I mean, for a meth lab, they work just fine. Mold on the walls and holes in the carpets and linoleum, centipede infestation and mouse poop, a history of murder-suicide, that's just fine if you're junkie who's cookin'. It might even be fine for us, as an alternative to our camper. The problem out here is not that the houses aren't there, it's a booming farm ecomomy and a mindset that only low-class people and transient workers rent, while functioning members of society own homes. The farmers do not need the extra money that would come from renting the old homesteads they aquire in farmland purchases, nor do they want the headache of upkeep, or to have to repair the damage that 15 transient workers can cause to a little farmhouse. With depleted aquifers, many of the wells have dried up. Little farm houses that once held little farm families and cradled little farm babies now crumble from neglect, sad windows watching the weeds grow around them. If it's a really nice place, (I.e. brick construction) a farmer might keep it for his little farm sons to move into, which they do as soon as they are married, and live in it until they can afford to build their own large, nice homes for their little farm brides on their yards surrounded by established trees, at which point they bulldoze the old house. At any rate, it is extrememly difficult to convince a farmer who just purchased another big, shiny green tractor that your rent money is valuable to him, and if you do convince him, one mention of your exuberant Golden Retriever and the deal is off. No inside pets allowed. Western Kansas farmers do not like pets. As a result, pets in Kansas are not the adored, well-behaved, easily forgiven members of society that they are in Colorado. And oddly, as trashy and unloved as the sad little farm houses that have escaped the bulldozer are out here, a slobbering, grinning, shedding house dog is a thing of abject horror to their owners.
At last, however, we heard of a recently vacated house 29 miles from town. In a twist of fate that I am not sure how to feel about yet, it is the same house in which I spent the first 15 years of my life. It is a solid little house, stucco over cinderblock, a tall house because an upstairs was added to a basement house 80 years ago. It stands sturdy agains battering winds. Not a single light apart from a blinking red tower is visible to the north, in spite of the fact that the house sits on a ridge, and only a few hardy souls live in the Smoky Hill River breaks to the north. It survived the dust storms of the 30's. It survived years of farmers battling with a terrible farm economy. A family lived in it, raised children, saw them get married and move away, saw them die. They left letters, postcards, photographs, books and clothes in the crawlspace, which I discovered when I was about 8 and spent days living in the 1930's. They left hay in the hayloft, which I spent a significant part of my childhood in, and in which dozens of kittens were born. I climbed over stanchions and imagined I was anywhere but there. The front porch of the house was the bow of my ship, the undulating waves of wheat surrounging the house my ocean. The grainery out back was my castle and playhouse, as was the much older homestead a mile down the road that I walked to, used the leaning outhouse oblivious to what might be living below the cracked seat, played Pioneer, pretending to draw water out of the frozen pump handle, lazily floating in the stock tank under the windmill, not really sure if the lumps on the bottom were dead birds or bits of sunken tumbleweed. It's really no wonder I had to be dewormed on the same schedule as the animals. My companions, a long line-up of short-lived Chows, Border Collies, Australian Shepherds, Great Pyrenees, and Chihuahuas, watched out for me, barked at rattlesnakes to warn me away, chased jackrabbits, dug goatheads from between their pads with their teeth. I lived outside, barefoot, my feet splaying out until no shoes would fit, the bottoms as hard as a dog's. I carried eggs in my skirt from the far corners of the yards as I found nests hens had hidden. I found bleached deer and cow bones in the pasture and brought them back, as well. I rescued a baby cottontail, a baby barnswallow, baby garter snakes, but all had to eventually be turned loose. I was a busy child, perfectly happy with being alone most of the time. And in hindsight, I know why. While the yard, the neighbor's yard, and the surrounding 3,000 acres of grassland and dry river breaks was the scene of the best parts of my childhood, the house was the scene of the worst. It was here I learned to be who I am, all the good and bad, the beautiful and terrible. All the laughter and tears of my adult life pull strings attached at the other end to this place and the things that happened here. The ghosts that haunt this house are not the usual kind. They are me. They are the things that I have tried to rise above and forget and deny. They are the pain that I have chosen not to feel, begging to be let back in so it can grow. They are the forgiveness that I have chosen to give, to myself and to parents and to friends, thoughtlessly cruel because nobody knew what really happened out there in the white house on the north edge of civilisation. It is the anger at certain adults in my life who punished me beyond my crimes, heaped punishment on top of the punishment I gave myself, because of their lack of understanding. Because they somehow thought they needed to be harder on me because of my parents. Because I was different and an only child. Because I didn't always wear a dress. Because I had seen more ugly life than their kids and it colored how I responded to situations around me, made me less like them and made them like me less.
In the 13 years since I moved away, I have become someone my 15 year old self would envy. I have salvaged all the best parts of her, and have scrubbed away most of the hurt, self-hatred, and insecurity that made her such a target. I have embraced her wild hair and her love of nature and her adventuresome spirit, while banishing most of her painful awkwardness with a constant stream of affirmation. I am thankful to whatever common sense she possessed that in spite of her self-destructive tendancies, she found a boy to share her life with who would let her know that she was his world, that he loved her just the way she was, while helping her try to rid herself of her anger and her depression and her self-hatred. I watched her rip her relationship with him to shreds before she realized what she was doing. I watched it circle the drain. I watched as it dawned on her that her low opinion of herself had caused her to mess things up so badly, he would never look at her in the same way again. Then I let her sob long nights away, wallowing in self-pity, and laughed as one day, she found herself laughing and wondering where the pain was. I watched as they laughed together, him and her, in their new reality and she felt, for the first time, something like self-respect. Something like unconditional love, washing over her as she discovered she could never mess up so badly as to make him stop loving her. Something like a dawning understanding of what the love of God must feel like, and something like joy and reverent gratefulness at the sort of love that would create someone like her and then still find it beautiful. I smiled as she looked at herself in the mirror and was glad for life, her own life, and promised her wild-haired, sad-eyed reflection that she would become more like me.
She's the ghost that eases out of the closet in the middle of the night and walks the hallway. She's the icy breath on the back of my neck as I stand at the kitchen sink and wash dishes the same way my mom did for 15 years. She's the reason I put the tupperware in the utensil drawer, the napkins in the silverware drawer, the silverware in the knife drawer. Every time I open the drawer next to the sink to get a fork, as I did for 15 years, I see napkins instead and I remember that it wasn't yesterday, it was a decade and a half ago, and she isn't me. Then I walk outside and I go for a ramble in the pasture, because that was where she had the least power all those years ago, and she still has less say out there. But still, every corner of this place causes an old emotion to come alive and walk the earth, creeping along in my shadow, ghostly fingers plucking at my heels.
But at the same time, I could move into this house and it was instantly home. No need to feel as though I don't belong, as though I have no roots. I know what every pop, every creak in this sturdy old house means. We speak each other's language. The sunrise through the dead tree branches to the east is the same one I saw every morning as I prepared for school, my steps across the yard trace the ones I took as I fed the calves, chickens, sheep, goats, horses, cats, and dogs, carried water and feed, chopped ice, buried my face in fragrant, hay-scented fur, brushed manes and tails, patted silky noses, stumbled over purring cats twisting around my ankles and greeted doggy kisses with belly rubs. So I think it's a good thing. Maybe it's okay that I revisit those old memories, too. Maybe I can finally put them to rest. Maybe being here will force me to move past my old self for once and for all, and plant the notion deep in my brain that Western Kansas does not have to turn me into anyone I don't want to be.
As soon as we got ourselves moved in, it was time to leave again. Heather, my cousin, snowboarding pal, our occasional winter help in Colorado, has finally found a man. Heather thinks there are those who believe those words deserve lights and a banner, or at least caps and italics, but Heather, bless her, has danced to her own tune and traveled the world and has been an incredible, independant, strong woman while waiting to meet a soulmate, one in several billion, who actually deserved her. And he does treat her like a queen. We love seeing her so very happy and cared for. The wedding was at her home church in Michigan, where she has lived, and I have never been there. We drove for two days to get there, through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, a corner of Illinios, and the bottom half of Michigan. There were more cornfields than I care to remember. Bobby stayed home, but the car was full- my mom, my friend Laci, and sister-in-law Marci. We slept in Davenport, IA on the way up, and made a quick detour off a random interstate exit which took us through the little town of Sagintauk and ended on the shore of Lake Michigan, so just in case I never get back, I can say I have seen a great lake. We walked down to the water, took off our shoes and dug our toes in the sugar sand, and got back on the road. After arriving on Thursday evening, we met all of Heather's "girls", the group of friends she has collected over the years, all having heard of each other, only a few having met. I found an instant kinship with several, that strange feeling that you most certainly must have known each other well in the past and merely forgotten. The weekend was a long series of fun and giggles, conversations of a nature too intimate to merit having just met. A little Too Much Information a time or two, a few deafening moments as everyone tried to talk over everyone else, an uproar here, a moment of hilarity there, and visuals that may stay with onlookers, in spite of them really wishing they wouldn't. (It seemed all such moments inevitably involved underwear- whether it was a cringe-worthy first impression and introduction made indelible by my own underwear, Superman briefs worn over jeans and dress slacks, striped underwear worn over yoga pants- although that one was definitely more cute-wrong than painful-wrong, an underwear moment that should never leave the cabin, because you just had to be there to appreciate it, or a moment involving a boomerang, cat tails and a green pond, me the damsel in distress- or should I say dis dress?- the pantsless husband of a friend coming to my rescue, and a whole lot of mud.) Uncle Warren and Aunt Silver (a.k.a. Sylvia) fed us well, and took care of us and were beyond hospitable. Heather provided a cabin out on Crystal Lake in the quaint and Dirty-Dancing-ish summer town of Crystal for the overflow, since all of her girls would have been far too many for the house. It was quiet there, being fall, and the mornings were crisp. Once the sun came out, fog hovered over the water. Some of the best parts of the trip happened in the cabin, like the long afternoon Marci, Laci and I spent relaxing in the screened-in back porch, saying whatever came to mind, cracking up over the odd things we delight in finding in common. Swans glided past the end of the long wooden dock that stretched into the water outside, water lapped at the shore, the old woman reading her book on the back porch of the house next door may have wondered if we had lost our minds. We ate an inordinate amount of chocolate and had girltalk like we haven't really had since we married boys.
The Friday night dinner and wedding saturday morning were beautiful affairs, and in spite of all the people attending, the couple kept the tone intimate and relaxed. It proved difficult getting them to leave the church after the wedding, with so many good friends around, and when they did, their car keys had accidentally gone home with the groom's father, who, along with all but maybe 20 people, had grown tired of waiting for the bride and groom to make their grand exit and had left. So the grand exit was made in the back seat of a friend's car, which seems highly appropriate and summarizes the spirit of the entire weekend- the focus on friends and the need for all involved to be flexible and plan on the unplanned.
Although there were those very sad to see Heather leave Michigan, they will be living for the foreseeable future in Brian's house in Copeland, Kansas. Copeland is south and a little east of Scott City. There are definitely those of us excited that they will be in Kansas.
After the bride and groom left, it was late, too late to consider starting home yet that night. We decided instead to get up early and make what turned out to be a 17 hour, 1,100 mile trip the next day. Besides, everyone left who was of a kindred spirit decided to trek out into the woods and build a campfire. Which we did, and it was a wonderful way to unwind after a weekend of activity- leaping flames and dancing shadows on the faces of new friends. We instructed my mom to sleep and prepare to be the driver on the first shift the next day, so we could stay out late. We returned to the cabin about 1:30, were sleeping by 2:00, and our alarm rang at 5. We were on the road by 6, watched a Michigan sunrise, a Nebraska sunset, ate wedding sandwiches and wedding candy out of a soft-sided cooler, stopped for gas four times and a potty break five and a half times (the half-time was a guard rail in the Illinios rain) and home by 10:00 that night, a time zone earlier.
And now I am back in the Land of Odd- I mean Oz. I still experience shock every time I lift my head from my computer and look out the window at the russet heads of milo around my house, at the sky that extra atmosphere and dust have turned a paler shade of blue than I am accustomed to, at the silence I remember from my childhood- the sound of such silence is the faint roar of bloodflow in my ears, my breath whispering in and out, in and out, a meadowlark outside. This house is quiet. The wind can howl and not a sound is heard in here. It feels strange, no barking dogs, no kids playing in the street, no backing garbage trucks or distant hammering, no sounds that one accepts as silence when one lives in a populated area. Just the occasional thwack of a loose piece of tin on the barn roof, a cricket, a meadowlark, a gust of wind rattling a windowpane, then back to loud, loud silence. It's wonderful and terrifying.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where life goes on. The chill of fall has arrived, and it won't be long before gold tinges the aspens, which are already losing their deep summer green and looking a little pale. Nights produce heavy frost, afternoons often produce a gray, thick layer of clouds reminiscent of the milk-white winter sky. Drizzling days keep the trails soggy, although the last few have been sunny enough to dry them out again, making it perfect biking weather- a cool nip in the breeze, but warm sun to take off the edge. Only when the sun hides behind a cloud does one realize how close winter is.
This won't be a long post, just a brief update on the lives of me and mine. At least I don't intend for it to be, but we know how these things go.
I had to wait four long, agonizing days to find out if I was still pregnant, but the result was that on Tuesday night (after they fixed the lab- they couldn't get my results to me sooner because the machine they needed to test my blood was broken) my doctor called me to tell me that my HcG levels had dropped, so I had indeed miscarried.
I know the way most people perceive me- as not being very interested in being a mother. There is more I could have said on the subject to persuade them otherwise, but to say more would have made me far more vulnerable than I have already made myself. Although I suppose if one wants to not be vulnerable, one is better off not keeping a blog that talks frankly about the normal joys and sorrows that comprise life, the feelings one assumes others experience as well and do not talk about. Except I don't believe in keeping one's struggles or happiness a secret. I believe that painful honesty shows those around us that they are not alone. I believe that if all of us were painfully honest, we would all be able to connect on a deeper level, and maybe we wouldn't all have to bear so much pain alone. Maybe we would learn from each other's mistakes instead if having to make them ourselves. Maybe we wouldn't misunderstand each other and add rejection to the pain we are already feeling. Maybe we wouldn't just be lone organisms in the same tank. Maybe I should have been more honest all along.
It is hard to articulate the reason tears silently rolled down my cheeks as I went about my business for the next day and a half. The fact is, I have spent years knowing that I want a child, but simultaneously knowing beyond a doubt that it was not a good time.
I should clarify- I still believe that there is no difference between a child one adopts and one that comes from one's own body. The soul is what matters, not the DNA. I know I would love a child that someone else had given up as much as one that was biologically mine (and to say it is yours seems a bit presumptious when you think about it. Do you control what happens to it? It's gender? How he looks? How she feels? The choices he makes? How she chooses to live, and how she dies? You can, and should, try to influence it toward good choices. But while you are responsible for it, it is it's own person, and while it is inextricably linked to you, it does not belong to you. You were merely honored to be trusted with it's well-being and given the right to love it more than anyone else possibly could.) And I still feel it is a bit of a waste making my own when there are kids out there who already exist who need a good home. But adoption is expensive and honestly, more beaurocracy than we can handle at the moment. And B really wants to see his own DNA recreated in a new person. It must be a boy thing. And for me, that dam has broken, and there is no holding back the flood of love and hope. I have waited and agonized for years, already loving that future child of mine so much that I was willing to wait until a time in our lives when we could give it everything it deserved- the full attention of both it's parents, the most formative time in it's life not dictated by it's parent's stress and frusteration and anger at circumstances we could not control and a job that dictated every second of our lives in an industry we don't feel fulfilled in. But in the meantime, as one by one my friends had kids, nobody but Bobby saw me cry, and even he did not understand why I could not just be happy for them.
I was born into a disfunctional situation. My entire adult life has been spent realizing the implications of this. Too late, I have discovered that my deep insecurities have affected every major decision I have made, have made me believe that I did not deserve to be happy. I say this knowing that my parents will read it, and it is nothing that hasn't been addressed before. It isn't their fault. They were overwhelmed and they sacrificed their own well-being many times to see that I did not suffer for them. They told me again and again that what they were going through was not my fault. Their issues got back-burnered and taking care of me became their priority. I have often wondered what they might have been able to resolve, the understanding they might have been able to cultivate for each other had I not been in the picture until after the worst had passed for them. Only now, after I have been out of their house, have they been able to grow together as a couple. I have the opinion that many couples have kids too early, and have to get to know their life's mates through childcare, and every couple knows and is known, and grows together through a series of errors. Many of these are errors that an innocent, sweet, unmarred child should not have to bear the consequences of.
I have lived an adventuresome life while I have waited to be the person I need to be, with the life I need to have in order to completely give myself to a child. When I have that child, it will be my "thing". I won't have the time or inclination for my "own thing". I must be ready for that, and know that I won't resent the temporary loss of my "thing" while I am in the middle of diapers and temper tantrums and sticky fingers. I tried to explain this one day to a young mother who seemed particularly judgemental of my decision to wait to have kids, and obviously failed to make myself understood, because she kept telling me I couldn't just lose my own identity. No, I don't plan to. I plan on my identity shifting from badass mountain biker and skier and tough girl to mother. People who made the desision to have a child simply because it seemed like the thing to do after a few years of marriage, who never agonized over the implications of bringing a new soul into the world, who never wondered if their own shortcomings would affect the future well being and psychological health of their child, seem completely flummoxed over why I would want a child so much and still not have one. In the meantime, I have felt a surge of anger at every comment made by others about how I am so selfish, not wanting kids. How I need to grow up. How I am loving my life too much to want to share it and need to realize what is really important. I bite my tongue to keep from saying the same thing to them. I know I make it look like my reasons are shallow to keep from exposing the dark side of myself that doesn't believe I am a good person, so it is my fault. It seems easier than articulating the deeper, darker emotions behind our waiting for so long. Every time I had reason to believe I was pregnant in the past, I let myself believe that it was fate, that higher powers believed in me, trusted me to not screw this up, so I believed in myself. But then it turned out to be a false alarm, and just like that, the switch flipped and I was back to thinking of myself in the singular, and back to knowing I couldn't handle the amount of responsibility of caring for another human, one who would be totally dependant on me, when I could barely manage to care for myself most days. And back to my heart breaking every time I thought of it and what could have been. And back to tears every time another friend got pregnant and suddenly thought that every other woman should want this, too, and seemed to judge me for not wanting to be just like her.
Which is why, for four days while they kept telling me there most likely hadn't been enough bleeding, that bleeding like this happens in the first trimester, that I was probably still pregnant, I tried so hard to not start to believe it, but I couldn't help it. Getting the news that I had miscarried after all was what it took to rip that fragile hope back out of my hands. I had this brief moment of fierce love and fierce protectiveness over that thing inside me that at that point, still resembled a sea monkey more than a human. I saw it as it would be in seven and a half months and I loved it so much it hurt. And then I spent four days trying to un-love it because it was most likely dead. The day after they told me it hadn't survived, my body varified it by offloading massive amounts of whatever was in there. Disgusting, I know. But common. Sorry, boys. You're in a girl's world now. If it makes you uncomfortable, feel free to not read herein.
That was almost a week ago. I haven't shed any more tears. It seems pointless. It took those days of tears to start to think of myself as a lone organism again. I am especially lone with Bobby back in Kansas. Sure, I share a house with another human, I'm never completely alone, but I am singular. I am no longer we. I feel like me again, not this person I don't know, but like. I am sad that I have to wait to try again, annoyed that we were finally there, I finally decided to trust myself to be the person I needed to be, we finally decided we were in a good enough place to be able to bring someone into the world and provide them with happiness and security, instead of the same insecurities we both deal with. Annoyed that the higher powers didn't see fit to let us just have that dream easily. Annoyed that we have to try and agonize and wait and see. Annoyed that it seems so easy for some others, but nothing can ever be easy for us.
...moving on. I really wanted to skip the last race of the season yesterday morning, but went anyway. I planned on not riding hard. But I pulled away from the pack within a mile of the start, and two girls from Boulder stayed with me, and we battled it out over 16 miles and about 2,900 vertical feet, from Breck to almost treeline up Boreas Pass, and back down. At the top of the climb, I had no hope of catching the girls from Boulder, but it was a descent I have raced down before, so I was prepared. My bike fishtailed under me, but we stayed upright over the washed out trail, babyheads roling under my tires, we caught air over water bars and splashed down a shallow stream that decided to share the trail for a ways, navigated the tight switchbacks that caused me so much time last race, passed the Boulder girls halfway down and crossed the finish line in first place. I probably would not have done so well, but the girl who beats me almost every race did not show up to this one, and "that girl Marlee" decided to move up to Expert. I was tied for second place overall going into the race, so I knew I had gotten second overall. I was a little sad I wold never have another season to try for first overall, never have that pretty plaque with my picture to hang on my wall and remember my glory days, but at least I would get a medal as a consolation prize. I finally got to stand on the tallest podium, and I got a new pair of bike gloves as a prize. After all the awards were handed out for that day's race, they started on the overall awards. I was expecting second, but the race organizer started in on this explanation before he announced my name. "And there was a tie for first place overall. We break the tie by who has the highest score in this race, and since one of the girls was not at this race, the tie goes to..." And suddenly my teammates were cheering and jostling me, and I realized I had won first overall. That was unexpected. I felt bad for the girl I have been neck-and-neck with all season, because she actually did consistantly better than me, I was down one race, up the next, but their rule of taking the best six out of seven scores meant she had to drop more points than I did. I have my getting lost on that second race of the season to thank for my high overall score, as bizarre as that seems. If I had had to drop a higher score, my overall score would have been lower and I would not have been tied for first, but second.
It was a good feeling knowing that while I won't be racing again, at least not for the forseeable future, I did accomplish more than I had hoped to with this season. I could have had more podiums, but I still helped my team win the series, I won the overall championship, and I had fun and didn't miss a race. I was also extremely lucky- not a flat tire, not a broken chain all race season.
The last happening in the lives of me and mine is that my mom has decided to go back in for another surgery. Her last one was a single mastectomy with a lumpectomy on the other side, and at the time, it was important to her to keep as much of her body as she could. She has since become less attached to her girls, and has decided to have the other side removed, as well. Less careful monitoring, more peace of mind knowing that she won't be getting breast cancer again if there are no breasts left to get cancer. It was hard, agonizing, to know that she was losing one of them, but after one has been gone for six months, the other has finally become more of a priority. Her appointment is set for September 30. I hate to see her have to go through that again-the surgery, the pain, the rehab. But I do agree with her decision- I'd like to think if it was me, I would do the same thing.
The month ahead looks like a long series of trips between here and Kansas, with several other trips thrown in, like the one to Michigan for Heather's wedding. It looks like the little Focus will be carrying four girls- Marci, me, Laci, and my mom on a 14 hour road trip Northeast. It's not really a comfy car for traveling, but it does get good gas mileage. In the meantime, I am trying to not think about the future, since we still don't have a house in Kansas, still don't know when I will be moving, don't know if I want to move or not. Out there, I will get to be with Bobby, but there I might lose my mind with boredom, while here, I can at least bike, and after the resort opens this fall, I can still ski. But alone. That just isn't as much fun. When I am out there, I will be spending 16 hour days waiting for Bobby to get home from work so I can see him for a few hours a day, while up here, I can fill my days up with work and play, as long as I don't mind being apart from him. There's really no good solution.
Until later, faithful few. Here's hoping honesty doesn't make you squirm.
This won't be a long post, just a brief update on the lives of me and mine. At least I don't intend for it to be, but we know how these things go.
I had to wait four long, agonizing days to find out if I was still pregnant, but the result was that on Tuesday night (after they fixed the lab- they couldn't get my results to me sooner because the machine they needed to test my blood was broken) my doctor called me to tell me that my HcG levels had dropped, so I had indeed miscarried.
I know the way most people perceive me- as not being very interested in being a mother. There is more I could have said on the subject to persuade them otherwise, but to say more would have made me far more vulnerable than I have already made myself. Although I suppose if one wants to not be vulnerable, one is better off not keeping a blog that talks frankly about the normal joys and sorrows that comprise life, the feelings one assumes others experience as well and do not talk about. Except I don't believe in keeping one's struggles or happiness a secret. I believe that painful honesty shows those around us that they are not alone. I believe that if all of us were painfully honest, we would all be able to connect on a deeper level, and maybe we wouldn't all have to bear so much pain alone. Maybe we would learn from each other's mistakes instead if having to make them ourselves. Maybe we wouldn't misunderstand each other and add rejection to the pain we are already feeling. Maybe we wouldn't just be lone organisms in the same tank. Maybe I should have been more honest all along.
It is hard to articulate the reason tears silently rolled down my cheeks as I went about my business for the next day and a half. The fact is, I have spent years knowing that I want a child, but simultaneously knowing beyond a doubt that it was not a good time.
I should clarify- I still believe that there is no difference between a child one adopts and one that comes from one's own body. The soul is what matters, not the DNA. I know I would love a child that someone else had given up as much as one that was biologically mine (and to say it is yours seems a bit presumptious when you think about it. Do you control what happens to it? It's gender? How he looks? How she feels? The choices he makes? How she chooses to live, and how she dies? You can, and should, try to influence it toward good choices. But while you are responsible for it, it is it's own person, and while it is inextricably linked to you, it does not belong to you. You were merely honored to be trusted with it's well-being and given the right to love it more than anyone else possibly could.) And I still feel it is a bit of a waste making my own when there are kids out there who already exist who need a good home. But adoption is expensive and honestly, more beaurocracy than we can handle at the moment. And B really wants to see his own DNA recreated in a new person. It must be a boy thing. And for me, that dam has broken, and there is no holding back the flood of love and hope. I have waited and agonized for years, already loving that future child of mine so much that I was willing to wait until a time in our lives when we could give it everything it deserved- the full attention of both it's parents, the most formative time in it's life not dictated by it's parent's stress and frusteration and anger at circumstances we could not control and a job that dictated every second of our lives in an industry we don't feel fulfilled in. But in the meantime, as one by one my friends had kids, nobody but Bobby saw me cry, and even he did not understand why I could not just be happy for them.
I was born into a disfunctional situation. My entire adult life has been spent realizing the implications of this. Too late, I have discovered that my deep insecurities have affected every major decision I have made, have made me believe that I did not deserve to be happy. I say this knowing that my parents will read it, and it is nothing that hasn't been addressed before. It isn't their fault. They were overwhelmed and they sacrificed their own well-being many times to see that I did not suffer for them. They told me again and again that what they were going through was not my fault. Their issues got back-burnered and taking care of me became their priority. I have often wondered what they might have been able to resolve, the understanding they might have been able to cultivate for each other had I not been in the picture until after the worst had passed for them. Only now, after I have been out of their house, have they been able to grow together as a couple. I have the opinion that many couples have kids too early, and have to get to know their life's mates through childcare, and every couple knows and is known, and grows together through a series of errors. Many of these are errors that an innocent, sweet, unmarred child should not have to bear the consequences of.
I have lived an adventuresome life while I have waited to be the person I need to be, with the life I need to have in order to completely give myself to a child. When I have that child, it will be my "thing". I won't have the time or inclination for my "own thing". I must be ready for that, and know that I won't resent the temporary loss of my "thing" while I am in the middle of diapers and temper tantrums and sticky fingers. I tried to explain this one day to a young mother who seemed particularly judgemental of my decision to wait to have kids, and obviously failed to make myself understood, because she kept telling me I couldn't just lose my own identity. No, I don't plan to. I plan on my identity shifting from badass mountain biker and skier and tough girl to mother. People who made the desision to have a child simply because it seemed like the thing to do after a few years of marriage, who never agonized over the implications of bringing a new soul into the world, who never wondered if their own shortcomings would affect the future well being and psychological health of their child, seem completely flummoxed over why I would want a child so much and still not have one. In the meantime, I have felt a surge of anger at every comment made by others about how I am so selfish, not wanting kids. How I need to grow up. How I am loving my life too much to want to share it and need to realize what is really important. I bite my tongue to keep from saying the same thing to them. I know I make it look like my reasons are shallow to keep from exposing the dark side of myself that doesn't believe I am a good person, so it is my fault. It seems easier than articulating the deeper, darker emotions behind our waiting for so long. Every time I had reason to believe I was pregnant in the past, I let myself believe that it was fate, that higher powers believed in me, trusted me to not screw this up, so I believed in myself. But then it turned out to be a false alarm, and just like that, the switch flipped and I was back to thinking of myself in the singular, and back to knowing I couldn't handle the amount of responsibility of caring for another human, one who would be totally dependant on me, when I could barely manage to care for myself most days. And back to my heart breaking every time I thought of it and what could have been. And back to tears every time another friend got pregnant and suddenly thought that every other woman should want this, too, and seemed to judge me for not wanting to be just like her.
Which is why, for four days while they kept telling me there most likely hadn't been enough bleeding, that bleeding like this happens in the first trimester, that I was probably still pregnant, I tried so hard to not start to believe it, but I couldn't help it. Getting the news that I had miscarried after all was what it took to rip that fragile hope back out of my hands. I had this brief moment of fierce love and fierce protectiveness over that thing inside me that at that point, still resembled a sea monkey more than a human. I saw it as it would be in seven and a half months and I loved it so much it hurt. And then I spent four days trying to un-love it because it was most likely dead. The day after they told me it hadn't survived, my body varified it by offloading massive amounts of whatever was in there. Disgusting, I know. But common. Sorry, boys. You're in a girl's world now. If it makes you uncomfortable, feel free to not read herein.
That was almost a week ago. I haven't shed any more tears. It seems pointless. It took those days of tears to start to think of myself as a lone organism again. I am especially lone with Bobby back in Kansas. Sure, I share a house with another human, I'm never completely alone, but I am singular. I am no longer we. I feel like me again, not this person I don't know, but like. I am sad that I have to wait to try again, annoyed that we were finally there, I finally decided to trust myself to be the person I needed to be, we finally decided we were in a good enough place to be able to bring someone into the world and provide them with happiness and security, instead of the same insecurities we both deal with. Annoyed that the higher powers didn't see fit to let us just have that dream easily. Annoyed that we have to try and agonize and wait and see. Annoyed that it seems so easy for some others, but nothing can ever be easy for us.
...moving on. I really wanted to skip the last race of the season yesterday morning, but went anyway. I planned on not riding hard. But I pulled away from the pack within a mile of the start, and two girls from Boulder stayed with me, and we battled it out over 16 miles and about 2,900 vertical feet, from Breck to almost treeline up Boreas Pass, and back down. At the top of the climb, I had no hope of catching the girls from Boulder, but it was a descent I have raced down before, so I was prepared. My bike fishtailed under me, but we stayed upright over the washed out trail, babyheads roling under my tires, we caught air over water bars and splashed down a shallow stream that decided to share the trail for a ways, navigated the tight switchbacks that caused me so much time last race, passed the Boulder girls halfway down and crossed the finish line in first place. I probably would not have done so well, but the girl who beats me almost every race did not show up to this one, and "that girl Marlee" decided to move up to Expert. I was tied for second place overall going into the race, so I knew I had gotten second overall. I was a little sad I wold never have another season to try for first overall, never have that pretty plaque with my picture to hang on my wall and remember my glory days, but at least I would get a medal as a consolation prize. I finally got to stand on the tallest podium, and I got a new pair of bike gloves as a prize. After all the awards were handed out for that day's race, they started on the overall awards. I was expecting second, but the race organizer started in on this explanation before he announced my name. "And there was a tie for first place overall. We break the tie by who has the highest score in this race, and since one of the girls was not at this race, the tie goes to..." And suddenly my teammates were cheering and jostling me, and I realized I had won first overall. That was unexpected. I felt bad for the girl I have been neck-and-neck with all season, because she actually did consistantly better than me, I was down one race, up the next, but their rule of taking the best six out of seven scores meant she had to drop more points than I did. I have my getting lost on that second race of the season to thank for my high overall score, as bizarre as that seems. If I had had to drop a higher score, my overall score would have been lower and I would not have been tied for first, but second.
It was a good feeling knowing that while I won't be racing again, at least not for the forseeable future, I did accomplish more than I had hoped to with this season. I could have had more podiums, but I still helped my team win the series, I won the overall championship, and I had fun and didn't miss a race. I was also extremely lucky- not a flat tire, not a broken chain all race season.
The last happening in the lives of me and mine is that my mom has decided to go back in for another surgery. Her last one was a single mastectomy with a lumpectomy on the other side, and at the time, it was important to her to keep as much of her body as she could. She has since become less attached to her girls, and has decided to have the other side removed, as well. Less careful monitoring, more peace of mind knowing that she won't be getting breast cancer again if there are no breasts left to get cancer. It was hard, agonizing, to know that she was losing one of them, but after one has been gone for six months, the other has finally become more of a priority. Her appointment is set for September 30. I hate to see her have to go through that again-the surgery, the pain, the rehab. But I do agree with her decision- I'd like to think if it was me, I would do the same thing.
The month ahead looks like a long series of trips between here and Kansas, with several other trips thrown in, like the one to Michigan for Heather's wedding. It looks like the little Focus will be carrying four girls- Marci, me, Laci, and my mom on a 14 hour road trip Northeast. It's not really a comfy car for traveling, but it does get good gas mileage. In the meantime, I am trying to not think about the future, since we still don't have a house in Kansas, still don't know when I will be moving, don't know if I want to move or not. Out there, I will get to be with Bobby, but there I might lose my mind with boredom, while here, I can at least bike, and after the resort opens this fall, I can still ski. But alone. That just isn't as much fun. When I am out there, I will be spending 16 hour days waiting for Bobby to get home from work so I can see him for a few hours a day, while up here, I can fill my days up with work and play, as long as I don't mind being apart from him. There's really no good solution.
Until later, faithful few. Here's hoping honesty doesn't make you squirm.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where life is a roller coaster. If this were a real roller coaster, we would be screaming WOOOOHOOOO! and throwing our hands in the air on the way down, not curling into dead-weight balls of misery and dropping like rocks. Real roller coasters are fun. Emotional ones really suck. We're supposed to yell WOOOOOHOOOOO on the way up, but we never realize we were up until we drop again. At least not all the time. There have been a few times this last month when I have actually looked up and around me when I was on top, smiled and said something to the effect of "this is living".
Let's see...since my last post... oh, dear. It's been so long, I will just have to hit the highlights. There were several weeks of work that left us (Marci and me) exhausted. We spent several days moving an apartment's worth of furniture from her apartment, down two flights of stairs to a trailer, cleaned out her apartment, moved her and her cat and her essentials into my place, and left the rest of it in the trailer, not to be used again until she is living in Kansas. We moved a trailer load of Bobby's and my furniture down to a storage unit in Kansas. We made a trip to Kansas to put on a surprise birthday party for my mom, who turned fifty this year. I spent a fun weekend hiking and biking with a "boot camp" of a motley crew of people I came to have deep respect for. I got sunburned. I spazzed/danced with friends at an impromptu street party at the Swan Mountain King-of-the-Mountain line during the USA Pro Cycling Challenge, screamed until I was hoarse as Andy and Cadel, America's tour de France darlings, shot past. I missed Bobby. We fussed. We saw each other once. Marci and I pulled an empty trailer back to Colorado. We hired new help. I all but stopped working. I started working at the bike shop again, then immediately quit- my last two shifts are this week. We put the house on the market. We worked on finishing the bathroom project. I showed the house. B wondered why I was so testy and I didn't have a good answer for him, except to say that I am so sick and tired of not knowing what manner of thing is going to come up tomorrow, and I am tired of being adaptable, and I am tired of being agreeable when it really bothers me to not know where I am going to be tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
And that was still just the half of it.
The trip to Kansas was fun. Since having a birthday party for my mom on her actual birthday was not possible for everyone's schedule, Leroy, Mary and I practiced some lies and deceit, swore the community to secrecy, and had it a week early. We decorated the shelter house in the state park and had a magical, full moon evening in the soft glow of the twinkly lights we hung from the rafters, homemade ice cream and Jason Koehn's brisket. Since Bobby's home is a camper right now, the three of us (B, Andy and me) shared a couch/bed and stumbled over each other in the mornings, trying to wake up and eat breakfast in the mornings, took 3 minute showers, since that is as long as the hot water lasts, enjoyed being together.
I did a really fun road ride with a co-worker on August 22. We took off from Dillon, after a stop for air in tires and lube on chains at the bike shop, and rode to Frisco, on to Copper Mountain, and on to the top of Vail Pass. We stopped at the top and enjoyed the warm sun and cool breeze before coasting (me) and flying (him) down to Frisco, then taking the bike path to Farmer's Corner and Swan Mountain Road home. 42 miles and 5,000 feet of climbing in three and a half hours. I came home more exhausted than I wanted to admit, and hunched over a bit in pain, since Mother Nature had chosen that morning to bless me with the present she feels compelled to give me every month. (I would like to say, though, that I have started taking a Mangosteen and multivitamin supplement called Vemma, and the pain has gotten bearable lately). That evening, I finally got back up off the couch about 6:30, packed my backback and my bike, and went to preride the race course I was going to be racing on the 24th. In hindsight, I should have remembered Fall is approaching. The days are gettig shorter. But I wasn't thinking, and I stopped halfway up to take pictures of a brilliant double rainbow framing the damp but sundrenched valley below me, and didn't ride hard, and it was getting dark by the time I got to the top of Keystone Mountain. I took the race course trail down to the turnoff where we were to start climbing again in deep twilight, my senses numbing as I barely registered trees flashing by, as I bounced and rattled down the rough trail, my bike somehow staying under me, glad I knew the trail well. Then I started climbing again, back up all the vertical feet I had just lost, over to the other side of the mountain. The elevation profile for this race is a big M. Up,down partway, back up, then down. By the time I got almost to the top of the second climb, it was so dark I began to wonder how exactly I was going to be able to see anything by the time I got down. I gave up looking for the turn-off, decided to skip the singletrack descent and descend on the road. Then I saw a needle of light through the trees. Another rider, as crazy but smarter than I. He had remembered his lights. I turned around and rode with him until the single track turned into the forest, then I turned around and cautiously, blindly made my way down the mountain on the faintly visible white ribbon of road, the friendly forests of Keystone, my benevolent playground, suddenly ominous and full of unearthly sounds, strange groans and creaks and grumbles.
When I had navigated the last portion of trail, a quarter mile of mandatory singletrack that I rode slowly, my behind hung far back over the rear wheel and my front wheel light so it could ride over the rocks I did not see, I breathed a sigh of relief. The other rider finished just behind me and we laughed about my predicament and how I would definitely not be making that mistake again.
The race was a good one. I came ready to do some damage. This was my home turf, and nobody deserved a win here more than me, I reasoned. I straightened my hair and put on make-up for the team photo, posed with the 15 or so riders who wear the jersey of the bike shop I work for, as well as Smith Optics, Keystone Bike Park, and Clif Luna Bars. As I was getting my helmet on and attaching my race plate, a coworker asked me if I planned on leaving Andy in the truck. I had planned on it, I said, but if he wanted to get him out and walk him around while he waited, he was welcome to. I hooked Andy's leash as I have a hundred other times, I thought, and handed it to him, with instructions to make Andy socialize and get a little less psychotic around strangers. And then the starting whistle, and I pedalled to the top of keystone. That part is a blur, What I do know is that I know the way to the top of Keystone like the back of my hand. I couls almost do it with my eyes closed. I know where to push hard, when to downshift, when to stay in a high gear and stand on my pedals. And I watched to gaps close between me and my fellow Sport category women, then I was passing Sport men who started a minute ahead of us, then every muscle in my lower body was screaming at me but I was closing on the top, then I crested and was flying down the trail I had ridden in the near dark two nights before, bike and trail and me in three part harmony as I ducked and swerved and danced to the tune it sang, knowing every line through every technical portion. I popped out at the bottom and pointed it uphill, passing one of the Expert category women, who had started three minutes ahead of us. And with a final burst of power, I crested the top and flew down, and down, and down until I was at the bottom and crossed the finish line. It was my best finish of the year, long minutes ahead of all the riders I battle with every race. I only finished a minute later than that girl Marlee, who has just started racing and can climb like a mountain goat and should be racing Expert, if not Pro, but for some reason keeps racing Sport and making the race for the rest of us about being first place after her, which is actually second, but there is no chance of beating her, so second has become the new first. (Did I mention I have no appreciation for sandbaggers?)Across the finish line, then a cool-down lap around the parking lot. I stopped and talked to a friend, then went to find Andy. He wasn't in the truck, and his "handler" was nowhere to be seen. I began peeling off my helmet when my co-worker rode up on a borrowed bike and skidded to a stop. "Oh, I am so, so sorry, I lost Andy!" He handed me Andy's tags and leash. "These fell off when he bolted. I'm so sorry, he was fine, and then, just like that-". I had attached his leash to the flimsy keyring holding his tags onto his collar, rather than to the sturdy ring on his collar.
I tried not to panic. Andy has done this before. "He probably just ran home", I told him. "Don't worry." Then I got back on my bike and took off for home, six miles away, thinking I would find a smallish Golden Retriever somewhere along the bikepath between Keystone and Summit Cove. I called for him every few seconds, in case he was off the trail. Nothing. I left my bike and jumped into my car and sped back to Keystone, thinking I'd see him on the road. Nothing. I fought a rising panic. I drove back home and jumped back on my bike, knowing that they were calling my name right now, and that in Keystone a podium was standing empty, but I didn't care. I jammed my headlamp onto my helmet and a measly light onto my handlebars and careened over the singletrack connecting Summit Cove to Keystone. I took corners too fast. I called his name every few seconds. I took maverick trails that I normally don't ride in order to do my part to stop erosion. I skidded my tires down them, since they are too steep and loose to ride without leaving a mark, and I didn't care. The sound of "AAAAAAANNNNNNDYYYYYYY!" echoed through the silent, dark woods. I finally got back to Keystone, where the after party and awards ceremony was dying down, and met several friends there who offered to help me look. I called animal control and Keystone emergency services, in case anyone had reported a stray dog, and left them my number. Then Bobby called to tell me he was going to bed, and I finally gave into my panic and sobbed like a little girl. I told him I needed him so much right then, and how ridiculous it was that he wasn't there for me. His worry took the form of anger. Several of my friends took their big race van and drove up to Montezuma, after someone said he had bolted that way. The coworker from whom he had bolted gave me a hug and apologized again and tried to reassure me that he was just out chasing squirrels, but I know Andy. He bolted trying to find me, and if he wasn't at home, there was no telling where he might be looking, alone and scared and puzzled over why his mama would abandon him like that. I drove all over Keystone, calling out the window, crying. The breeze had died and the air was crisp, I could hear my calls echoing back to me from the mountains. Why could he not hear them? Five hours after he had bolted, I drove home and collapsed into bed still wearing my bike shoes, and sobbed until I was achy but still not asleep. The only sound outside my open window was packs of howling coyotes, rangy mountain coyotes that a 65 lb scaredy-cat golden retriever would be no match for. An hour later Bobby called me. His anger had passed, and now he was crying, too. "We have to find him. He's our boy. We can't not find him. We can't not know what happened. If I was up there, I would still be out looking. Can you go ride the bikepath one more time?" So at midnight I bundled up in Bobby's old orange coat and jeans, pulled on my full-finger bike gloves and ratcheted my bike shoes tight and rode slowly out of the cove, back to Keystone. I begged Bobby not to hang up, since his voice in my ear helped me feel less alone as I rode under a brilliantly starlit sky, my voice echoing, my whistle thin because my mouth was too dry and my lips were too cold. Finally, he hung up and I kept looking and calling. I returned home at 3:30am, every muscle hurting from shivering so hard in the 40 degree night air, my bike light dead and my headlamp dim, opened the car door in the driveway so Andy could crawl inside if he came home, put a piece of tape over the front door latch so if he scratched on it or bumped it, it would swing open, and left my bedroom window wide open with the screen out, so I could stick my head out and check if he was home from time to time. And not a wink did I sleep. I had not eaten anything but a Honey Stinger shot before the race, just glucose and B vitamins, and I was so hungry I shook, but I couldn't force food down my throat without gagging on it. I watched the sky turn from black to gray to pink. Every pop of rafters, every rustle of grass I sat up, thinking it was him. At 6 o'clock, I was back up, bundled in fleece and driving around Keystone and Summit cove, and up to Montezuma, calling him. Bobby had called back and we had cried some more, wishing we at least had the closure of knowing he was dead and not lost and panicky and cold and hungry. I had just parked at the Keystone Lake and was walking in to go check some more of his favorite haunts about 9am when my phone rang. It was Keystone Inn. The only dog-friendly hotel in Keystone. "I think we have your dog", a woman's voice said, and I decided it must be a hallucination from too little sleep or food. All the same, I raced to the Keystone Inn, and there, behind the inn, under a flight of stairs, sat a shivering pile of dead leaves, dirt, mud, and yellow fur. His tail was between his legs, and his head hung to his straggly chest, and he was shying away from the hands offering him doggie treats and water, growling a half-hearted warning that was more "I'm scared" than "you should be scared." I rushed him, and cried all over him, and he tried to crawl in my lap and turn himself inside out, then righted himself and began snarfing doggy treats and water from the strangers he had been growling at a moment ago, and I thanked Kassandra from the front desk about a hundred times because I swear she grew a halo, or maybe it was just my low blood sugar. And then I called Bobby and we cried some more, and swore to never let him out of our sight, and to stop loving him so much because someday, we will lose him for real and we don't ever want to have another night like that one.
The rest of the day, Andy slept, and while he slept he whimpered. Not the usual dream-whimpers that must mean he is closing in on the squirrel as his paws twitch and he smacks his lips, but long, keening sobs that broke my heart and made me wake him up with a kiss and a cuddle just to show him that he was home with me.
The following days were full of activities, courtesy of my friend's boot camp. My friend Annie represents the vitamin and antioxidant company I mentioned earlier, which makes high-quality liquid antioxidants and multivitamins, as well as several other extremely healthy options for high-performance athletes, such as energy drinks and shots and electrolytes that rely on healthy ingredients instead of sugar. She had been bugging me to try taking it for a while, and I finally gave in, telling her I would try it since everyone had such good things to say about it, I didn't expect to see great changes. Turns out, after two weeks on it, Mother Nature's monthly present didn't keep me on the couch. I was hooked. I had better energy and less bonking. I had a clear complexion. I sailed through two weeks in an office full of sick people, flying snot and wet, phlegmy coughing and had nary a sniffle, even though I had as little sleep and as much stress as the rest of them. I called Annie up to tell her that, and she invited me to spend the weekend with a group of people who, she said, have literally had their lives changed by this product, and represent the company along with her.
I had my life changed by them. All of them have an incredible story to tell, about personal anguish and physical devastation. They have come to realize, as I have, that life is about the people you share it with, and that health is about giving our bodies the best possible fuel. There was Don and Chris. Don was infected with HIV in 1981. For the last 15 years, he has had full-blown AIDS. In 1995, he was lying in a hospital bed with less of an immune system than a newborn baby, and he had a dream that he would live to educate thousands of people about HIV so they would never have to go through what he was. The AIDS cocktail came out in '96, and he was able to get out of bed. He went home and began trying to live his life. He'd get up, eat breakfast, try to do some work and pursue his dream of spreading AIDS awareness, but by 3pm, he was back in bed for the rest of the day and night. Until someone talked him into trying Vemma. Within two weeks, he had stopped taking naps and now, although he only has the equivalent of one lung and is still battling AIDS related cancer, his immunity is that of any other 60 year old man. He comes to the mountains every year from Kansas City every year to hike and bike at 11,000 feet, and his book, My Dream to Trample AIDS, is coming out soon. His partner, Chris, is also HIV positive, but the two of them show such a cheerful face to the world it was a joy to spend a weekend with them. There was also P-nut, the deaf Olympic wrestler, and Gene, who's legs are solid scar tissue from being run-skidded over by a car when he was four, and Brian and Clem, who are so freakishly fit they gave me a run for my money, and I am used to the altitude! And Eric, who is a bike racer, and with whom I instantly found camaraderie. And several others, all of the same mind, all as worshipful of good nutrition and as grateful for good health as I am. I went home after that weekend exhausted. It was an exhaustion I couldn't quite shake after my 36 hours without sleep during Andy's lost-and-found episode. It hung with me- that tired, dizzy, coming-down-with-something feeling that had me juicing carrots, eating apples, drinking caffeine, and running and biking harder than ever trying to shake it, since sleeping in didn't seem to be fixing it.
A week later, it rained in Kansas, and Bobby wasted no time coming home. True, he wanted to see me, but it was Andy, lost and found, that he couldn't wait to see. They tumbled about together, paws and tongue and flopping ears and happy whines and pet names and ear-scratching and belly-rubbing. A man and his best friend. I worked at the bike shop that night and the next night, and the next afternoon, we drove up to Steamboat springs and spent the evening soaking in the hot springs up at Strawberry park, hanging out in a shallow rock alcove as the water ran through it and cascaded trhough the rocks into a lower pool. I propped my feet up on a big rock and leaned my head against Bobby's shoulder, looked up at the stars above us, bright in the absence of lights (Strawberry park is mostly off the grid, lights there are solar powered and dim)and reflected on how divinely happy I was, and how alive I felt. We drove our relaxed, smiling selves back down to town and found our cabin, left the lights off and relaxed on the front porch, a few feet from the bank of the Yampa River, the lights of town reflecting off low hanging clouds, making them look oddly sci-fi and beautiful. Eventually we got cold, so we dragged blankets out to the porch and lay under them and drifted asleep. Some time later, a car pulled in to the tent site next to us, waking us up, and we moved inside, the three of us, boy, girl, dog, falling asleep in a big pile under the blankets on a cheap blue plastic mattress.
The next morning, the pain in my innards I had been registering all day the day before and blaming pizza for woke me up. My back hurt, but I blamed the hard matress, and squirmed about until I woke Andy up and he vacated the pile for a cooler spot on the floor. I finally woke Bobby up, and we lay there chatting for a while, until I finally pulled the covers off of him and forced him to get up. We ate a fast food breakfast on our way out of town, and that apparently added to the pizza/cheap mattress discomfort, and I squirmed all the way over Rabbit Ears Pass. On a whim, we took a side trip over Ute Pass, and by them time we got home, my tummy was complaining and I wanted to go back to bed. I was beginning to wonder if mother nature had bumped up her schedule.
At five o'clock that night, sudden pain shot through my left side, between belly button and hip. It shot down my leg and curled me right up where I sat. I started breathing raggedly, and B asked what was wrong. My leg, in the vicinity of femoral artery, was cramping so badly I could barely stand. Now, one doesn't experience a best friend dropping dead from a pulmonary embolism without spending the rest of one's life having the word "blood clot" pass through one's mind every time one has unexplained leg pain. I tried to walk it off, but walking was a bit of a problem, given the pain level. I called the doctor. I know they would tell me to come in, and the clinic was already closed so it would mean a trip to the ER, but I called anyway, but by that point there really wasn't a rational thought left, just irritation that it was taking them so long to ask for all my history. They, of course, told me to waste no time coming in, and the trip to the ER is a hazy memory of feeling the air conditioning fan my sweaty face and clutching the top half of Bobby's cheese and cracker's tray under my chin, because the pain had make me nauseus and I was fully expecting pancakes and maple syrup to make their forcefull escape at any moment.
Just as he was squealing into the parking lot, I felt something give in my innards just behind the jutting bone on my front left hip. The pain subsided the tiniest fraction. I staggered through the door and explained my woes while holding onto the nurse's station white-knuckled, and soon they had shoved a percocet and a cherry-flavored anti-nausea pill down my throat and were wheeling me places. And then-could this day get any better? I was sitting in blood and they were drawing blood and they finally informed me that surprise, this is what a problematic pregnancy feels like.
Our mouths, naturally, dropped open. We looked at each other for a moment. I had been assuring them that there was no way I could be pregnant, after all, half of that equation had only been seen once in the last four weeks, and the timing was all wrong for that, and Mother Nature had been right on schedule and since immaculate conception had aready been copyrighted, we were going for "not possible". And great, was our first thought. Our insurance covers accidents and emergency room visits, not pregnancy. They probably wouldn't be amused if we tried to call it "accidental pregnancy". Of course, the chances of the pregnancy surviving an ordeal like that were slim to none, so after the first flip-flop of the stomach at the words "You're pregnant", the goofy grin that I felt spread over my face that surprised the heck out of me and I immediately tried to blame on the percocet making me loopy, we immediately proceeded on to "Not anymore".
We drove home slowly, with glazed eyes, afraid to ask what the other was thinking. It was one thing to decide we might be ready for a kid. I mean, we're closing on a decade together. We don't even know if we can have kids. I still dream of adopting. We had thought it would take us a while. We could stop the careful planning we put into preventing one and just let it run it's course.. But it's another to have it happen so soon, only to be gone again so soon. Now I just felt annoyed at the waste of time-annoyed that now I would have to actually try to make it happen again, and annoyed that if it had stuck, I'd be six weeks pregnant and know where my life was going and what I would be doing in eight months, instead of still asking that annoying question. I kept flashing back to that split second between "You're pregnant" and "probably not anymore", when that stupid grin forced itself across my face. What am I? Who am I? My clock's not ticking. At least I didn't think so. But that sudden wave of hope and happiness and fierce protectiveness for that thing inside me that at that point, was nothing more than an abstract notion of some possible future life, and that sudden feeling of loss for something I never knew I had made me scratch my head and get extremely quiet for the rest of the night. I'm still analyzing.
They told me to come back to the ER tonight so they could check hormone levels and be able to tell for sure that the pregnancy was terminated. Maybe it survived, they waggled their eyebrows, but I don't see how. I know what I felt. There was surely no way anything survived that. But I still hate that they gave me a tiny bit of hope, because I can't get it out of my head that maybe, just maybe... But I don't think I'll go. There has been no pain since, so I'm not worried, like they were initially, about an ectopic pregnancy. What difference does it make if I go in tonight so they can check my HcG level and tell me if I am or am not still pregnant, most likely not, when I can save several hundred dollars and go to the clinic when it opens again on Tuesday and hear the same thing? It's just another 36 hours, is all. Thirty six long hours with the tiniest glimmer of hope, and my brain trying to squash it. In the meantime, I have been ordered to stay quiet and not to ride bike or run or lift heavy objects or stress out or worry or any of my usuall coping methods, because apparently all of those things could compromise an already compromised pregnancy, and until I find out if things are hanging on in there, I have to live as if they are. Which means Bobby had to go ride Keystone by himself yesterday and came home smelling of outside and crisp fall air, while I sat on the couch with my Kindle and the TV remote and reflected on how silly this is, and how annoyed I am at my body for playing tricks on me, and if it's gonna do something, for Heaven's sake, get it right! And go for full disclosure! I don't want to be six weeks pregnant before I realize it next time, even though it saved me from heartbreak this time.
And after all that, with a new floor finally down in the bathroom, and a trailer load of stuff, Bobby had to head back to Kansas this afternoon. Now I'm back to being the me that I am when he's not here- the me who cleans because she doesn't like to watch TV or go out to eat or ride bike by herself. I have a bottle of Barefoot Moscato in the fridge and I want a glass. For an extra couple hundred dollars, I could go find out if I could have one tonight. I like Barefoot Moscato, but it's not worth that much.
And that is the story of the roller coaster ride that has been our lives lately. I'm still queasy from it. At least we'll say it was the wild ride...
Let's see...since my last post... oh, dear. It's been so long, I will just have to hit the highlights. There were several weeks of work that left us (Marci and me) exhausted. We spent several days moving an apartment's worth of furniture from her apartment, down two flights of stairs to a trailer, cleaned out her apartment, moved her and her cat and her essentials into my place, and left the rest of it in the trailer, not to be used again until she is living in Kansas. We moved a trailer load of Bobby's and my furniture down to a storage unit in Kansas. We made a trip to Kansas to put on a surprise birthday party for my mom, who turned fifty this year. I spent a fun weekend hiking and biking with a "boot camp" of a motley crew of people I came to have deep respect for. I got sunburned. I spazzed/danced with friends at an impromptu street party at the Swan Mountain King-of-the-Mountain line during the USA Pro Cycling Challenge, screamed until I was hoarse as Andy and Cadel, America's tour de France darlings, shot past. I missed Bobby. We fussed. We saw each other once. Marci and I pulled an empty trailer back to Colorado. We hired new help. I all but stopped working. I started working at the bike shop again, then immediately quit- my last two shifts are this week. We put the house on the market. We worked on finishing the bathroom project. I showed the house. B wondered why I was so testy and I didn't have a good answer for him, except to say that I am so sick and tired of not knowing what manner of thing is going to come up tomorrow, and I am tired of being adaptable, and I am tired of being agreeable when it really bothers me to not know where I am going to be tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
And that was still just the half of it.
The trip to Kansas was fun. Since having a birthday party for my mom on her actual birthday was not possible for everyone's schedule, Leroy, Mary and I practiced some lies and deceit, swore the community to secrecy, and had it a week early. We decorated the shelter house in the state park and had a magical, full moon evening in the soft glow of the twinkly lights we hung from the rafters, homemade ice cream and Jason Koehn's brisket. Since Bobby's home is a camper right now, the three of us (B, Andy and me) shared a couch/bed and stumbled over each other in the mornings, trying to wake up and eat breakfast in the mornings, took 3 minute showers, since that is as long as the hot water lasts, enjoyed being together.
I did a really fun road ride with a co-worker on August 22. We took off from Dillon, after a stop for air in tires and lube on chains at the bike shop, and rode to Frisco, on to Copper Mountain, and on to the top of Vail Pass. We stopped at the top and enjoyed the warm sun and cool breeze before coasting (me) and flying (him) down to Frisco, then taking the bike path to Farmer's Corner and Swan Mountain Road home. 42 miles and 5,000 feet of climbing in three and a half hours. I came home more exhausted than I wanted to admit, and hunched over a bit in pain, since Mother Nature had chosen that morning to bless me with the present she feels compelled to give me every month. (I would like to say, though, that I have started taking a Mangosteen and multivitamin supplement called Vemma, and the pain has gotten bearable lately). That evening, I finally got back up off the couch about 6:30, packed my backback and my bike, and went to preride the race course I was going to be racing on the 24th. In hindsight, I should have remembered Fall is approaching. The days are gettig shorter. But I wasn't thinking, and I stopped halfway up to take pictures of a brilliant double rainbow framing the damp but sundrenched valley below me, and didn't ride hard, and it was getting dark by the time I got to the top of Keystone Mountain. I took the race course trail down to the turnoff where we were to start climbing again in deep twilight, my senses numbing as I barely registered trees flashing by, as I bounced and rattled down the rough trail, my bike somehow staying under me, glad I knew the trail well. Then I started climbing again, back up all the vertical feet I had just lost, over to the other side of the mountain. The elevation profile for this race is a big M. Up,down partway, back up, then down. By the time I got almost to the top of the second climb, it was so dark I began to wonder how exactly I was going to be able to see anything by the time I got down. I gave up looking for the turn-off, decided to skip the singletrack descent and descend on the road. Then I saw a needle of light through the trees. Another rider, as crazy but smarter than I. He had remembered his lights. I turned around and rode with him until the single track turned into the forest, then I turned around and cautiously, blindly made my way down the mountain on the faintly visible white ribbon of road, the friendly forests of Keystone, my benevolent playground, suddenly ominous and full of unearthly sounds, strange groans and creaks and grumbles.
When I had navigated the last portion of trail, a quarter mile of mandatory singletrack that I rode slowly, my behind hung far back over the rear wheel and my front wheel light so it could ride over the rocks I did not see, I breathed a sigh of relief. The other rider finished just behind me and we laughed about my predicament and how I would definitely not be making that mistake again.
The race was a good one. I came ready to do some damage. This was my home turf, and nobody deserved a win here more than me, I reasoned. I straightened my hair and put on make-up for the team photo, posed with the 15 or so riders who wear the jersey of the bike shop I work for, as well as Smith Optics, Keystone Bike Park, and Clif Luna Bars. As I was getting my helmet on and attaching my race plate, a coworker asked me if I planned on leaving Andy in the truck. I had planned on it, I said, but if he wanted to get him out and walk him around while he waited, he was welcome to. I hooked Andy's leash as I have a hundred other times, I thought, and handed it to him, with instructions to make Andy socialize and get a little less psychotic around strangers. And then the starting whistle, and I pedalled to the top of keystone. That part is a blur, What I do know is that I know the way to the top of Keystone like the back of my hand. I couls almost do it with my eyes closed. I know where to push hard, when to downshift, when to stay in a high gear and stand on my pedals. And I watched to gaps close between me and my fellow Sport category women, then I was passing Sport men who started a minute ahead of us, then every muscle in my lower body was screaming at me but I was closing on the top, then I crested and was flying down the trail I had ridden in the near dark two nights before, bike and trail and me in three part harmony as I ducked and swerved and danced to the tune it sang, knowing every line through every technical portion. I popped out at the bottom and pointed it uphill, passing one of the Expert category women, who had started three minutes ahead of us. And with a final burst of power, I crested the top and flew down, and down, and down until I was at the bottom and crossed the finish line. It was my best finish of the year, long minutes ahead of all the riders I battle with every race. I only finished a minute later than that girl Marlee, who has just started racing and can climb like a mountain goat and should be racing Expert, if not Pro, but for some reason keeps racing Sport and making the race for the rest of us about being first place after her, which is actually second, but there is no chance of beating her, so second has become the new first. (Did I mention I have no appreciation for sandbaggers?)Across the finish line, then a cool-down lap around the parking lot. I stopped and talked to a friend, then went to find Andy. He wasn't in the truck, and his "handler" was nowhere to be seen. I began peeling off my helmet when my co-worker rode up on a borrowed bike and skidded to a stop. "Oh, I am so, so sorry, I lost Andy!" He handed me Andy's tags and leash. "These fell off when he bolted. I'm so sorry, he was fine, and then, just like that-". I had attached his leash to the flimsy keyring holding his tags onto his collar, rather than to the sturdy ring on his collar.
I tried not to panic. Andy has done this before. "He probably just ran home", I told him. "Don't worry." Then I got back on my bike and took off for home, six miles away, thinking I would find a smallish Golden Retriever somewhere along the bikepath between Keystone and Summit Cove. I called for him every few seconds, in case he was off the trail. Nothing. I left my bike and jumped into my car and sped back to Keystone, thinking I'd see him on the road. Nothing. I fought a rising panic. I drove back home and jumped back on my bike, knowing that they were calling my name right now, and that in Keystone a podium was standing empty, but I didn't care. I jammed my headlamp onto my helmet and a measly light onto my handlebars and careened over the singletrack connecting Summit Cove to Keystone. I took corners too fast. I called his name every few seconds. I took maverick trails that I normally don't ride in order to do my part to stop erosion. I skidded my tires down them, since they are too steep and loose to ride without leaving a mark, and I didn't care. The sound of "AAAAAAANNNNNNDYYYYYYY!" echoed through the silent, dark woods. I finally got back to Keystone, where the after party and awards ceremony was dying down, and met several friends there who offered to help me look. I called animal control and Keystone emergency services, in case anyone had reported a stray dog, and left them my number. Then Bobby called to tell me he was going to bed, and I finally gave into my panic and sobbed like a little girl. I told him I needed him so much right then, and how ridiculous it was that he wasn't there for me. His worry took the form of anger. Several of my friends took their big race van and drove up to Montezuma, after someone said he had bolted that way. The coworker from whom he had bolted gave me a hug and apologized again and tried to reassure me that he was just out chasing squirrels, but I know Andy. He bolted trying to find me, and if he wasn't at home, there was no telling where he might be looking, alone and scared and puzzled over why his mama would abandon him like that. I drove all over Keystone, calling out the window, crying. The breeze had died and the air was crisp, I could hear my calls echoing back to me from the mountains. Why could he not hear them? Five hours after he had bolted, I drove home and collapsed into bed still wearing my bike shoes, and sobbed until I was achy but still not asleep. The only sound outside my open window was packs of howling coyotes, rangy mountain coyotes that a 65 lb scaredy-cat golden retriever would be no match for. An hour later Bobby called me. His anger had passed, and now he was crying, too. "We have to find him. He's our boy. We can't not find him. We can't not know what happened. If I was up there, I would still be out looking. Can you go ride the bikepath one more time?" So at midnight I bundled up in Bobby's old orange coat and jeans, pulled on my full-finger bike gloves and ratcheted my bike shoes tight and rode slowly out of the cove, back to Keystone. I begged Bobby not to hang up, since his voice in my ear helped me feel less alone as I rode under a brilliantly starlit sky, my voice echoing, my whistle thin because my mouth was too dry and my lips were too cold. Finally, he hung up and I kept looking and calling. I returned home at 3:30am, every muscle hurting from shivering so hard in the 40 degree night air, my bike light dead and my headlamp dim, opened the car door in the driveway so Andy could crawl inside if he came home, put a piece of tape over the front door latch so if he scratched on it or bumped it, it would swing open, and left my bedroom window wide open with the screen out, so I could stick my head out and check if he was home from time to time. And not a wink did I sleep. I had not eaten anything but a Honey Stinger shot before the race, just glucose and B vitamins, and I was so hungry I shook, but I couldn't force food down my throat without gagging on it. I watched the sky turn from black to gray to pink. Every pop of rafters, every rustle of grass I sat up, thinking it was him. At 6 o'clock, I was back up, bundled in fleece and driving around Keystone and Summit cove, and up to Montezuma, calling him. Bobby had called back and we had cried some more, wishing we at least had the closure of knowing he was dead and not lost and panicky and cold and hungry. I had just parked at the Keystone Lake and was walking in to go check some more of his favorite haunts about 9am when my phone rang. It was Keystone Inn. The only dog-friendly hotel in Keystone. "I think we have your dog", a woman's voice said, and I decided it must be a hallucination from too little sleep or food. All the same, I raced to the Keystone Inn, and there, behind the inn, under a flight of stairs, sat a shivering pile of dead leaves, dirt, mud, and yellow fur. His tail was between his legs, and his head hung to his straggly chest, and he was shying away from the hands offering him doggie treats and water, growling a half-hearted warning that was more "I'm scared" than "you should be scared." I rushed him, and cried all over him, and he tried to crawl in my lap and turn himself inside out, then righted himself and began snarfing doggy treats and water from the strangers he had been growling at a moment ago, and I thanked Kassandra from the front desk about a hundred times because I swear she grew a halo, or maybe it was just my low blood sugar. And then I called Bobby and we cried some more, and swore to never let him out of our sight, and to stop loving him so much because someday, we will lose him for real and we don't ever want to have another night like that one.
The rest of the day, Andy slept, and while he slept he whimpered. Not the usual dream-whimpers that must mean he is closing in on the squirrel as his paws twitch and he smacks his lips, but long, keening sobs that broke my heart and made me wake him up with a kiss and a cuddle just to show him that he was home with me.
The following days were full of activities, courtesy of my friend's boot camp. My friend Annie represents the vitamin and antioxidant company I mentioned earlier, which makes high-quality liquid antioxidants and multivitamins, as well as several other extremely healthy options for high-performance athletes, such as energy drinks and shots and electrolytes that rely on healthy ingredients instead of sugar. She had been bugging me to try taking it for a while, and I finally gave in, telling her I would try it since everyone had such good things to say about it, I didn't expect to see great changes. Turns out, after two weeks on it, Mother Nature's monthly present didn't keep me on the couch. I was hooked. I had better energy and less bonking. I had a clear complexion. I sailed through two weeks in an office full of sick people, flying snot and wet, phlegmy coughing and had nary a sniffle, even though I had as little sleep and as much stress as the rest of them. I called Annie up to tell her that, and she invited me to spend the weekend with a group of people who, she said, have literally had their lives changed by this product, and represent the company along with her.
I had my life changed by them. All of them have an incredible story to tell, about personal anguish and physical devastation. They have come to realize, as I have, that life is about the people you share it with, and that health is about giving our bodies the best possible fuel. There was Don and Chris. Don was infected with HIV in 1981. For the last 15 years, he has had full-blown AIDS. In 1995, he was lying in a hospital bed with less of an immune system than a newborn baby, and he had a dream that he would live to educate thousands of people about HIV so they would never have to go through what he was. The AIDS cocktail came out in '96, and he was able to get out of bed. He went home and began trying to live his life. He'd get up, eat breakfast, try to do some work and pursue his dream of spreading AIDS awareness, but by 3pm, he was back in bed for the rest of the day and night. Until someone talked him into trying Vemma. Within two weeks, he had stopped taking naps and now, although he only has the equivalent of one lung and is still battling AIDS related cancer, his immunity is that of any other 60 year old man. He comes to the mountains every year from Kansas City every year to hike and bike at 11,000 feet, and his book, My Dream to Trample AIDS, is coming out soon. His partner, Chris, is also HIV positive, but the two of them show such a cheerful face to the world it was a joy to spend a weekend with them. There was also P-nut, the deaf Olympic wrestler, and Gene, who's legs are solid scar tissue from being run-skidded over by a car when he was four, and Brian and Clem, who are so freakishly fit they gave me a run for my money, and I am used to the altitude! And Eric, who is a bike racer, and with whom I instantly found camaraderie. And several others, all of the same mind, all as worshipful of good nutrition and as grateful for good health as I am. I went home after that weekend exhausted. It was an exhaustion I couldn't quite shake after my 36 hours without sleep during Andy's lost-and-found episode. It hung with me- that tired, dizzy, coming-down-with-something feeling that had me juicing carrots, eating apples, drinking caffeine, and running and biking harder than ever trying to shake it, since sleeping in didn't seem to be fixing it.
A week later, it rained in Kansas, and Bobby wasted no time coming home. True, he wanted to see me, but it was Andy, lost and found, that he couldn't wait to see. They tumbled about together, paws and tongue and flopping ears and happy whines and pet names and ear-scratching and belly-rubbing. A man and his best friend. I worked at the bike shop that night and the next night, and the next afternoon, we drove up to Steamboat springs and spent the evening soaking in the hot springs up at Strawberry park, hanging out in a shallow rock alcove as the water ran through it and cascaded trhough the rocks into a lower pool. I propped my feet up on a big rock and leaned my head against Bobby's shoulder, looked up at the stars above us, bright in the absence of lights (Strawberry park is mostly off the grid, lights there are solar powered and dim)and reflected on how divinely happy I was, and how alive I felt. We drove our relaxed, smiling selves back down to town and found our cabin, left the lights off and relaxed on the front porch, a few feet from the bank of the Yampa River, the lights of town reflecting off low hanging clouds, making them look oddly sci-fi and beautiful. Eventually we got cold, so we dragged blankets out to the porch and lay under them and drifted asleep. Some time later, a car pulled in to the tent site next to us, waking us up, and we moved inside, the three of us, boy, girl, dog, falling asleep in a big pile under the blankets on a cheap blue plastic mattress.
The next morning, the pain in my innards I had been registering all day the day before and blaming pizza for woke me up. My back hurt, but I blamed the hard matress, and squirmed about until I woke Andy up and he vacated the pile for a cooler spot on the floor. I finally woke Bobby up, and we lay there chatting for a while, until I finally pulled the covers off of him and forced him to get up. We ate a fast food breakfast on our way out of town, and that apparently added to the pizza/cheap mattress discomfort, and I squirmed all the way over Rabbit Ears Pass. On a whim, we took a side trip over Ute Pass, and by them time we got home, my tummy was complaining and I wanted to go back to bed. I was beginning to wonder if mother nature had bumped up her schedule.
At five o'clock that night, sudden pain shot through my left side, between belly button and hip. It shot down my leg and curled me right up where I sat. I started breathing raggedly, and B asked what was wrong. My leg, in the vicinity of femoral artery, was cramping so badly I could barely stand. Now, one doesn't experience a best friend dropping dead from a pulmonary embolism without spending the rest of one's life having the word "blood clot" pass through one's mind every time one has unexplained leg pain. I tried to walk it off, but walking was a bit of a problem, given the pain level. I called the doctor. I know they would tell me to come in, and the clinic was already closed so it would mean a trip to the ER, but I called anyway, but by that point there really wasn't a rational thought left, just irritation that it was taking them so long to ask for all my history. They, of course, told me to waste no time coming in, and the trip to the ER is a hazy memory of feeling the air conditioning fan my sweaty face and clutching the top half of Bobby's cheese and cracker's tray under my chin, because the pain had make me nauseus and I was fully expecting pancakes and maple syrup to make their forcefull escape at any moment.
Just as he was squealing into the parking lot, I felt something give in my innards just behind the jutting bone on my front left hip. The pain subsided the tiniest fraction. I staggered through the door and explained my woes while holding onto the nurse's station white-knuckled, and soon they had shoved a percocet and a cherry-flavored anti-nausea pill down my throat and were wheeling me places. And then-could this day get any better? I was sitting in blood and they were drawing blood and they finally informed me that surprise, this is what a problematic pregnancy feels like.
Our mouths, naturally, dropped open. We looked at each other for a moment. I had been assuring them that there was no way I could be pregnant, after all, half of that equation had only been seen once in the last four weeks, and the timing was all wrong for that, and Mother Nature had been right on schedule and since immaculate conception had aready been copyrighted, we were going for "not possible". And great, was our first thought. Our insurance covers accidents and emergency room visits, not pregnancy. They probably wouldn't be amused if we tried to call it "accidental pregnancy". Of course, the chances of the pregnancy surviving an ordeal like that were slim to none, so after the first flip-flop of the stomach at the words "You're pregnant", the goofy grin that I felt spread over my face that surprised the heck out of me and I immediately tried to blame on the percocet making me loopy, we immediately proceeded on to "Not anymore".
We drove home slowly, with glazed eyes, afraid to ask what the other was thinking. It was one thing to decide we might be ready for a kid. I mean, we're closing on a decade together. We don't even know if we can have kids. I still dream of adopting. We had thought it would take us a while. We could stop the careful planning we put into preventing one and just let it run it's course.. But it's another to have it happen so soon, only to be gone again so soon. Now I just felt annoyed at the waste of time-annoyed that now I would have to actually try to make it happen again, and annoyed that if it had stuck, I'd be six weeks pregnant and know where my life was going and what I would be doing in eight months, instead of still asking that annoying question. I kept flashing back to that split second between "You're pregnant" and "probably not anymore", when that stupid grin forced itself across my face. What am I? Who am I? My clock's not ticking. At least I didn't think so. But that sudden wave of hope and happiness and fierce protectiveness for that thing inside me that at that point, was nothing more than an abstract notion of some possible future life, and that sudden feeling of loss for something I never knew I had made me scratch my head and get extremely quiet for the rest of the night. I'm still analyzing.
They told me to come back to the ER tonight so they could check hormone levels and be able to tell for sure that the pregnancy was terminated. Maybe it survived, they waggled their eyebrows, but I don't see how. I know what I felt. There was surely no way anything survived that. But I still hate that they gave me a tiny bit of hope, because I can't get it out of my head that maybe, just maybe... But I don't think I'll go. There has been no pain since, so I'm not worried, like they were initially, about an ectopic pregnancy. What difference does it make if I go in tonight so they can check my HcG level and tell me if I am or am not still pregnant, most likely not, when I can save several hundred dollars and go to the clinic when it opens again on Tuesday and hear the same thing? It's just another 36 hours, is all. Thirty six long hours with the tiniest glimmer of hope, and my brain trying to squash it. In the meantime, I have been ordered to stay quiet and not to ride bike or run or lift heavy objects or stress out or worry or any of my usuall coping methods, because apparently all of those things could compromise an already compromised pregnancy, and until I find out if things are hanging on in there, I have to live as if they are. Which means Bobby had to go ride Keystone by himself yesterday and came home smelling of outside and crisp fall air, while I sat on the couch with my Kindle and the TV remote and reflected on how silly this is, and how annoyed I am at my body for playing tricks on me, and if it's gonna do something, for Heaven's sake, get it right! And go for full disclosure! I don't want to be six weeks pregnant before I realize it next time, even though it saved me from heartbreak this time.
And after all that, with a new floor finally down in the bathroom, and a trailer load of stuff, Bobby had to head back to Kansas this afternoon. Now I'm back to being the me that I am when he's not here- the me who cleans because she doesn't like to watch TV or go out to eat or ride bike by herself. I have a bottle of Barefoot Moscato in the fridge and I want a glass. For an extra couple hundred dollars, I could go find out if I could have one tonight. I like Barefoot Moscato, but it's not worth that much.
And that is the story of the roller coaster ride that has been our lives lately. I'm still queasy from it. At least we'll say it was the wild ride...
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where everything changes on a daily basis. It has been a wild ride the last two and a half weeks. There was loneliness, and it was crazy busy and stressful and there were tears and rage and pity parties and a whole bunch of politically charged conversations between us, the in-county staff and the far-removed out of county staff who have been doing reservations and collecting money and writing our checks, but really have no clue what has actually gone on in the county, and who are now wanting to be involved and we are not sure where we fit anymore. Since we promised to stay until new help was trained (which could take until next spring, according to the out-of-county managers, who are panicking at the thought of losing us). And then thee was just the crazy. I have concluded that people who live under the constant high stress of property management are a special breed- they are, by necessity, a little unbalanced. That is certainly us, but we are beginning to conclude it may apply to others in this company as well. B has been trying to drive truck and spread manure, a process that takes both hands, while being available to give us advice on an as-needed basis, which has him frusterated and us panicking, because we don't call him unless we really do need him, and then he is often out in some field without good cell reception or does not hear his phone ring, or is simply to preoccupied to take the call. So if you ask how we are doing, we probably won't lie and say we are doing fabulously. We will say we knew this is how it would be, and it was still more important to us that B stop the creeping of gray into his hair that wasn't there five years ago, that he remove himself from an industry that does nothing but create angry, resentful people with no trust in the goodness of humanity. After a day up here, as wonderful as it is to see each other, he is ready to leave again and go back to where the only stress is trying to get a field done before the evening thunderstorm. A day here witnessing Marci and me falling apart because in trying to do the right thing, the things we thought our absentee bosses wanted us to do, we do the exact wrong thing and have been chewed out for it and now are wondering how we are even going to manage to make it another day, let alone another eight months up here, all he wants to do is escape to where there are no crying women. By the time the phone finally stops ringing in the evenings, Marci and I find it difficult to even finish sentences, our brains are so fried.
I have not been on my bike but twice in the last two weeks. There was a ride one evening up Ptarmigan, then the race last night. I knew I was ill-prepared to race, feeling so drained from all the other distractions, but I went because I was on the roster for my race team, so if I didn't show up, there would be a zero on their points total. Even finishing DFL (Dead Freaking Last) is more points than a zero, so I went, and finding my stores of energy drained and my legs heavy after two weeks of no training, I just settled in and focused on merely trying to catch those immediately in front of me instead of the leaders. About 30 minutes into it, I suddenly realized it had been 30 minutes since I had thought about work, and it had been thirty minutes since that tight knot of worry in my stomach had somehow untied itself. I have never been so happy to have been racing. There was nothing but my ragged breath and the pounding of my heart and the squeak of my bike and the mantra that I whispered to myself with every breath. This mantra changes with every stage of every race and it helps me focus on my breathing and cadence, keeping my vo2 max in an optimum range while focusing my mind. It ranges from "What am..." (on the inhale) "I doing"(on the exhale), to "Catching her...catching her" to "Ride this...damn bike" to "I can...do this" to "stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid" (on steep climbs when my nose is over the handlebars, someone's riding my wheel and I am panting in short gasps) to nonsense syllables like "Haloodalee...haloodaloo". Yes, when I am biking, I tend to swear at myself a lot. I do not say things like that until I am yelling at myself to go faster and harder, and even then, they stay safely under my breath, my tongue just barely forming them. Last night though, the words I repeated with each breath were "This is...what I need. This is...what I need." And it was. I came in fifth, the losing a photo finish by a hair's width to the girl who is this year's enemy on the course, friend off the course. I slept soundly last night, in spite of having consumed a caffeine-laced Clif shot, and awoke in a better frame of mind than I have been in a while.
So there is your update. It's not exactly fun up here right now, but we are surviving. We think. Little things like a glass of wine and a bike race (though not in that order), a few minutes to read a book while drifting off to sleep, lunch on a sunny patio make us realize we are okay.
I have not been on my bike but twice in the last two weeks. There was a ride one evening up Ptarmigan, then the race last night. I knew I was ill-prepared to race, feeling so drained from all the other distractions, but I went because I was on the roster for my race team, so if I didn't show up, there would be a zero on their points total. Even finishing DFL (Dead Freaking Last) is more points than a zero, so I went, and finding my stores of energy drained and my legs heavy after two weeks of no training, I just settled in and focused on merely trying to catch those immediately in front of me instead of the leaders. About 30 minutes into it, I suddenly realized it had been 30 minutes since I had thought about work, and it had been thirty minutes since that tight knot of worry in my stomach had somehow untied itself. I have never been so happy to have been racing. There was nothing but my ragged breath and the pounding of my heart and the squeak of my bike and the mantra that I whispered to myself with every breath. This mantra changes with every stage of every race and it helps me focus on my breathing and cadence, keeping my vo2 max in an optimum range while focusing my mind. It ranges from "What am..." (on the inhale) "I doing"(on the exhale), to "Catching her...catching her" to "Ride this...damn bike" to "I can...do this" to "stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid" (on steep climbs when my nose is over the handlebars, someone's riding my wheel and I am panting in short gasps) to nonsense syllables like "Haloodalee...haloodaloo". Yes, when I am biking, I tend to swear at myself a lot. I do not say things like that until I am yelling at myself to go faster and harder, and even then, they stay safely under my breath, my tongue just barely forming them. Last night though, the words I repeated with each breath were "This is...what I need. This is...what I need." And it was. I came in fifth, the losing a photo finish by a hair's width to the girl who is this year's enemy on the course, friend off the course. I slept soundly last night, in spite of having consumed a caffeine-laced Clif shot, and awoke in a better frame of mind than I have been in a while.
So there is your update. It's not exactly fun up here right now, but we are surviving. We think. Little things like a glass of wine and a bike race (though not in that order), a few minutes to read a book while drifting off to sleep, lunch on a sunny patio make us realize we are okay.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the only things I want to tell have happened while in the bike saddle. Oh, there are other things to tell but it's exhausting to even replay it in my mind, let alone let my fingers tap it all out. But tap it out I shall, all in good time, possibly at the cost of my usual blow-by-blow recounting of the latest race, or bike ride, or other high country adventure (I know, try not to act so disappointed).
Summer has arrived for real. All but the highest trails are clear by now. We enjoyed two weeks of absolutely idyllic blue summer days before monsoon weather patterns moved in. Most of this week, by 9 am the clouds are starting to build, and it is raining by noon. Then there is a brief hole in the clouds in the afternoon, followed by rain in the evening and through the night.
We have spent our days lately in a haze of stress so high we wonder if the tightness in our throats is ever going to go away. We have actually hit that point where we food tastes like cardboard and eating it is just more work than going hungry. I can think of exactly twice in the last ten years that has happened. It's just as well, since going to the grocery store is such a monumental undertaking. Aisles and aisles full of so many options, and buying food means having to plan ahead for menus, and we end up buying cereal but forgetting coconut milk, or buying onions but forgetting green peppers, or coming home (if you are me) with bags and bags of fruit because you were thirsty when you were shopping and nothing else sounded good. And then you spent $100 and all you have to show for it is a pitiful pile of food that now needs preparation. Then you decide that you are so hungry you are shaking, and just five miles away is a Qdoba or a Noodles and Company, and you could just pay $6 and voila! Instant food!
The cause of said stress comes from several different sources. First, the job has been unusually demanding lately. B has been working late into the evenings trying to satisfy guests, some of their complaints legitimate, and some just plain silly. He spent an entire eight hours the other day working with a group who had the misfortune of checking into a condo after a month-long construction crew booking checked out. Reservations gave us a day to clean it and fix it between bookings, and we spent it changing every light bulb in the place, revacuuming and recleaning after housekeeping had left (in their defense, I know how it works when you are a housekeeper and walk into a unit that is as absolutely filthy as that one was- after you have spent all day in it, you think it is sparkling. Then someone else walks in and sees all the things you have been looking at and not seeing all day because you are so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of yuck that you have already scrubbed through.) Once the guests noticed some of their dishes were less than sparkling, they were on a tear to find everything wrong that they possibly could. B ended up making many trips to the hardware store and walmart to buy odds and ends that they suddenly decided they simply could not have a successful vacation without- another spaghetti pot, non-slip mats for the tubs, new plates, new teflon pans, more fans, the list goes on and on. At eight o'clock that night, he was still working in their condo around them, while they sat in the living room and the most demanding woman in the group reiterated again and again how ashamed of himself he should feel, how ridiculous it was that they should be paying good money for such a dump, and when he walked into the other room, the rest of the group, by now somewhat placated, tried to shush her and tell her it wasn't his fault, so she should stop taking it out on him. When he came home, he was absolutely drained. The next few days weren't much better, with several of our duplexes rented out to groups who can not solve their differences, calling Bobby to complain incessantly about each other, a tenant who threatens to call the cops every time the child in the unit above him runs across the floor, rent payments to chase down and collect in wrinkled twenty dollar bills from tenants we urged our boss to not rent to. Every time I called him from a unit to report more maintenance, he could not get his maintenance guy out there to fix it because the maintenance guy is a family man who's wife also works, so if the wife is at work or little league needs a coach or the inlaws are out, he is unavailable. It was one of these evenings, when at 5:00 we were supposed to be at the Frisco Bay Marina wishing a friend good luck on upcoming nuptials and a move to Golden and a graduate's degree at the School of Mines, but were instead in a condo stuffing feather duvets into egyptian cotton covers and pillows into microsuede shams and remaking beds with freshly washed mattress pads, in the rare event that the owner might show up unannounced and think the world was coming to an end if her condo was in less than perfect shape, that we got good and angry and began to talk.
I can probably count on one hand the times in the last near-decade that I have been married to him that I have seen B angry enough to be nearly violent. Those have been times when he felt directly insulted in such a way that it was absolutely impossible to take it any other way. A certain night nearly a decade ago comes to mind involving some not-yet-mature bros of his,(And at my mom's suggestion, after reading this blog, I should explain, as I had to to her, that "bro" is not short for those who came from the same parent, but simply means male friends, as in, those whith whom one can hunt and fish and golf and have a bromance that wives are half pleased by, and half envy. Bros follow the Bro Code-click the link for a sample, but please know that I do not endorse such bro-tish vulgarity, and be warned that it is there.) These particular bros, having planned an evening in Garden City with us, then met two girls there, and after having offered to go reserve us all a table together in a restaurant, asked for a table for four, not seven, and were already seated at it with said girls when we arrived, and after a meal at a different restaurant, B licking his wounds over his buddies choosing 'ho's over bros (again, see the above Bro Code link), a certain pickup truck bearing said bros came flying around us on the way home with the hairy backside of one bro hung out the back window exposed to our headlights. After which a confrontation involving a high speed chase ensued, followed by a phone call in which the bros were made to understand a fair amount of things, including the ramifications of breaking the bro code. This one incident has stayed with me because it was completely uncharacteristic, and in a really weird way, reassuring, because I had wondered until then if anything would cause him to stand up for himself or me. It showed me that this man whom I married because, first and foremost, he would never hurt me or threaten me, was also capable of protecting me if the need should arise.
But I digress. I only related that story to say that B has varying kinds of angry, and this was not that one. It was the kind for more common to him- the wallowing in self-pity kind that smolders rather than burns hot and bright, the kind that comes from being beat down time and again until he is too tired to fight back. The really dangerous kind. The kind of anger that leads to bitingly condescending remarks in a normal, conversational voice that eventually leads to my own bright-and-hot flare, because I run much hotter than he does and my redline is a little lower, and I panic when I recognize that I am unhappy because my deepest terror is living my life in the absence of love and cheer. Which does nothing except end with me crying myself to sleep because after all that effort and rage, I have accomplished nothing except being less attractive to him now that my face is red and all the scary that I keep inside has just spilled all over him and he can't possibly love me anymore. And he responds by digging just a bit lower into his hole of self-pity and self-flagellation, and so it continues.
So we talked like angry but mature adults, with me trying hard not to interpret his comments that nobody else works around here to mean that I am a lazy, selfish person without a single redeeming feature, as I usually take such statements, and we eventually came to an agreement we have come to before, but always with an abstract plan- we have to make a change. This plan has been a thing of constantly evolving shape- it involves running a hotel, it involves a beach and a flunky job with no stress, it involves a small western-slope town on a river somewhere, it involves doing exactly what we are doing now, but in a place of equatorial perpetual summer. It has never even held the hint of going back to that place we ran from, the place that was always our back-up plan, our bomb shelter, as our first option. We stood there, me leaning against the loft railing looking down at him as he stood leaning against the couch downstairs looking up at me, and we finally both sighed and stated the obvious- if we gamble and go somewhere and blow our savings on a move without a job secured, and if it's a flunky job and we never save any money again, and then we end up living in Kansas driving tractor for low wages in a farm economy that my be weaker than it is right now, will we hate ourselves for not paying our dues now and going back there while the economy is strong out there, jumping into a business opportunity that most likely will not be there in a few years after we are too broke to finance it? And in that moment, going out to Kansas where there are no screaming New York vacationers, no high-maintenance Chinese women calling every few minutes because they have another inane question (not to sound racist. I am sure there are some very self-sufficient, laid-back Chinese women. They just don't vacation in Keystone.), no Texas housewives asking for one more wineglass at midnight, no "You should be ashamed of yourself, I can't believe you are still in business if you run it like this" comments from guests he has just spend eight hours and driven a hundred miles trying to please... a field stretching to the bare, flat horizon and the whine of a diesel engine sounded like just the medicine he needed. And I could see it so plainly in his face that it overwhelmed all of the selfish reasons I had for wanting to stay here- the summer days that drip past like warm pine sap, hot sun and cool breeze, nodding wildflowers and trickling streams and damp earth. The winter days that are so brisk they crackle, deep, pillowy blankets of fresh snow in the morning. Friends who routinely do the impossible, win world championships, throw insane tricks off of fifty-foot cliffs and star in action films, race bikes in Europe, then come home and lay flooring and cut down trees and sell ski gear like any average joe, never thinking to mention in normal conversation that they are celebrities in certain circles. All the reasons I have for never wanting to leave Summit County died as I saw this glimmer of a smile on his face at the thought of walking away from this job.
Like so many things that are life-changing, this one started with that glimmer. No need to mention it to anyone. Maybe make a phone call or two and see if it's even a possibility. A phone call became a trip out there to discuss options with a seller of a business, a trip turned into a meeting with a banker, a meeting with a banker resulted in financing being available and came right back to the question that suddenly needs answered immediately- do we want to do it or not? And here we are on the brink of a huge fork in our life's path, bewildered and silent and brooding and terrified and excited and reluctant. Bewildered because this thing has taken on a life of it's own and thrown us into the back seat, but the promise of money is far better than what we are making here, so it makes sense, and all we have to do is say yes. Silent because we never really wanted to go back there, aside from a sense of responsibility to family, and how glad hey would be to see us move back. Even though our roots are there and our family is there, we have seen such beauty and we have become such different and better people living in Colorado that we are reluctant to go back, terrified that we will become who we were when we lived there, falling back into the mess that is peer pressure and conspicuous consumption and the need to prove one's self worth by sheer tonnage of one's vehicle and the newness of one's house, and the need to prove that we are still good people, gentle and loving, possibly more than ever before, in spite of the fact that there will be those who watch our every move for a less-than-Godly agenda. (And even if those dear black-capped and bearded ones don't do that, we still imagine they do. After all, it was they who passed judgement on us and declared us spiritually dead and shunned us, at a point in our lives when we were coming into our own mentally and spiritually and had never felt so close to God and all that is holy and loving.) Excited because the business holds the promise of a better payday, because B has lived the last eight years trying to quell his entrepreneurial spirit, because old friends still live there and we look forward to reconnecting with them, and because Kansas businesses simply do not know the level of stress that a lodging company in a world class ski resort town knows. Reluctant because none of our dreams involved a life with no adventure beyond what we create for ourselves, limited by those flat horizons and neighbors who see no fun in adventure, surrounded by judgement and hemmed in by the lack of options in everything from food to recreation to jobs. And our silence becomes more of an obstacle every day, because it is so hard to explain all of these feelings to our friends up here, justify why we are leaving them, that it is easier to just pretend that everything will just go on as it always has, and sooner or later, we will have to tell them, and we dread it.
And besides, I can't leave here. Not yet. I still have a company to manage along with Marci. Our days off for the next nine months just got cancelled by the fact that there will be no Bobby to take the abuse that this company can give out. Marci and I have to stay here and keep things from falling apart and train in new managers. It's bittersweet for me- I can stay, but I won't have time for any of the things that make this place so amazing. I will only have time to make sure it is amazing for everyone else. I will become Bobby, with no me to help share the load. In the meantime, I will miss him like crazy.
I am confused about the thought that we are willing to live in separate states for nine months. Do we think it will be easy? Are we in denial? I admit, a part of me wants to know if I am strong and independent, if I can do this. A part of me can't wait for him to leave so I can be my own person and make my own decisions. I went from being a minor living with my parents to being a wife, and I have never really flexed my muscles on my own. We have settled into our routines together, and we understand, on some basic level, when the other needs space and needs to make a decision for themselves. Hence the reason he wanted to see the banker and seller without me, for various reasons that may or may not have made sense, and I didn't argue, because I happily spent that time on a two day road trip, just me and my bike and miles of pedalling on the road shoulder, camping in a grassy mountainside clearing under a brilliant milky way while dew collected on my bike and my sleeping bag, deliciously alone in the silence and the dark that was far from black. I think normal people find this alone place in their lives working separate jobs, sharing childcare responsibilities that take their minds off of each other and focus it on a common goal. I think it's a normal part of co-existing, but one that few can ever articulate for fear of being seen as unhappy together. And it's true, my mind doesn't really understand all the long evenings and lonely nights that are nine months apart. My army wife friends know only too well, having spent entire years apart without the option of a five-hour car trip if the loneliness gets overwhelming. I just don't know. What I do know is that Bobby quitting this job may be the best thing he ever did for his own health and sanity, and that a change was going to happen, so maybe it's a good thing that it is solidifying sooner rather than later.
So, faithful few, that is how it has come to be that next Tuesday, we plan on signing all our savings over to the bank in exchange for a loader and a raw manure spreader, and possibly by the end of next week, B will be out there running it, and I will be here running the lodging company, and my two week notice has been turned in at the bike shop. And that is the reason for the stress-induced malnourishment. And the silence and refusal to commit to anything. And now you know as much as we do.
Summer has arrived for real. All but the highest trails are clear by now. We enjoyed two weeks of absolutely idyllic blue summer days before monsoon weather patterns moved in. Most of this week, by 9 am the clouds are starting to build, and it is raining by noon. Then there is a brief hole in the clouds in the afternoon, followed by rain in the evening and through the night.
We have spent our days lately in a haze of stress so high we wonder if the tightness in our throats is ever going to go away. We have actually hit that point where we food tastes like cardboard and eating it is just more work than going hungry. I can think of exactly twice in the last ten years that has happened. It's just as well, since going to the grocery store is such a monumental undertaking. Aisles and aisles full of so many options, and buying food means having to plan ahead for menus, and we end up buying cereal but forgetting coconut milk, or buying onions but forgetting green peppers, or coming home (if you are me) with bags and bags of fruit because you were thirsty when you were shopping and nothing else sounded good. And then you spent $100 and all you have to show for it is a pitiful pile of food that now needs preparation. Then you decide that you are so hungry you are shaking, and just five miles away is a Qdoba or a Noodles and Company, and you could just pay $6 and voila! Instant food!
The cause of said stress comes from several different sources. First, the job has been unusually demanding lately. B has been working late into the evenings trying to satisfy guests, some of their complaints legitimate, and some just plain silly. He spent an entire eight hours the other day working with a group who had the misfortune of checking into a condo after a month-long construction crew booking checked out. Reservations gave us a day to clean it and fix it between bookings, and we spent it changing every light bulb in the place, revacuuming and recleaning after housekeeping had left (in their defense, I know how it works when you are a housekeeper and walk into a unit that is as absolutely filthy as that one was- after you have spent all day in it, you think it is sparkling. Then someone else walks in and sees all the things you have been looking at and not seeing all day because you are so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of yuck that you have already scrubbed through.) Once the guests noticed some of their dishes were less than sparkling, they were on a tear to find everything wrong that they possibly could. B ended up making many trips to the hardware store and walmart to buy odds and ends that they suddenly decided they simply could not have a successful vacation without- another spaghetti pot, non-slip mats for the tubs, new plates, new teflon pans, more fans, the list goes on and on. At eight o'clock that night, he was still working in their condo around them, while they sat in the living room and the most demanding woman in the group reiterated again and again how ashamed of himself he should feel, how ridiculous it was that they should be paying good money for such a dump, and when he walked into the other room, the rest of the group, by now somewhat placated, tried to shush her and tell her it wasn't his fault, so she should stop taking it out on him. When he came home, he was absolutely drained. The next few days weren't much better, with several of our duplexes rented out to groups who can not solve their differences, calling Bobby to complain incessantly about each other, a tenant who threatens to call the cops every time the child in the unit above him runs across the floor, rent payments to chase down and collect in wrinkled twenty dollar bills from tenants we urged our boss to not rent to. Every time I called him from a unit to report more maintenance, he could not get his maintenance guy out there to fix it because the maintenance guy is a family man who's wife also works, so if the wife is at work or little league needs a coach or the inlaws are out, he is unavailable. It was one of these evenings, when at 5:00 we were supposed to be at the Frisco Bay Marina wishing a friend good luck on upcoming nuptials and a move to Golden and a graduate's degree at the School of Mines, but were instead in a condo stuffing feather duvets into egyptian cotton covers and pillows into microsuede shams and remaking beds with freshly washed mattress pads, in the rare event that the owner might show up unannounced and think the world was coming to an end if her condo was in less than perfect shape, that we got good and angry and began to talk.
I can probably count on one hand the times in the last near-decade that I have been married to him that I have seen B angry enough to be nearly violent. Those have been times when he felt directly insulted in such a way that it was absolutely impossible to take it any other way. A certain night nearly a decade ago comes to mind involving some not-yet-mature bros of his,(And at my mom's suggestion, after reading this blog, I should explain, as I had to to her, that "bro" is not short for those who came from the same parent, but simply means male friends, as in, those whith whom one can hunt and fish and golf and have a bromance that wives are half pleased by, and half envy. Bros follow the Bro Code-click the link for a sample, but please know that I do not endorse such bro-tish vulgarity, and be warned that it is there.) These particular bros, having planned an evening in Garden City with us, then met two girls there, and after having offered to go reserve us all a table together in a restaurant, asked for a table for four, not seven, and were already seated at it with said girls when we arrived, and after a meal at a different restaurant, B licking his wounds over his buddies choosing 'ho's over bros (again, see the above Bro Code link), a certain pickup truck bearing said bros came flying around us on the way home with the hairy backside of one bro hung out the back window exposed to our headlights. After which a confrontation involving a high speed chase ensued, followed by a phone call in which the bros were made to understand a fair amount of things, including the ramifications of breaking the bro code. This one incident has stayed with me because it was completely uncharacteristic, and in a really weird way, reassuring, because I had wondered until then if anything would cause him to stand up for himself or me. It showed me that this man whom I married because, first and foremost, he would never hurt me or threaten me, was also capable of protecting me if the need should arise.
But I digress. I only related that story to say that B has varying kinds of angry, and this was not that one. It was the kind for more common to him- the wallowing in self-pity kind that smolders rather than burns hot and bright, the kind that comes from being beat down time and again until he is too tired to fight back. The really dangerous kind. The kind of anger that leads to bitingly condescending remarks in a normal, conversational voice that eventually leads to my own bright-and-hot flare, because I run much hotter than he does and my redline is a little lower, and I panic when I recognize that I am unhappy because my deepest terror is living my life in the absence of love and cheer. Which does nothing except end with me crying myself to sleep because after all that effort and rage, I have accomplished nothing except being less attractive to him now that my face is red and all the scary that I keep inside has just spilled all over him and he can't possibly love me anymore. And he responds by digging just a bit lower into his hole of self-pity and self-flagellation, and so it continues.
So we talked like angry but mature adults, with me trying hard not to interpret his comments that nobody else works around here to mean that I am a lazy, selfish person without a single redeeming feature, as I usually take such statements, and we eventually came to an agreement we have come to before, but always with an abstract plan- we have to make a change. This plan has been a thing of constantly evolving shape- it involves running a hotel, it involves a beach and a flunky job with no stress, it involves a small western-slope town on a river somewhere, it involves doing exactly what we are doing now, but in a place of equatorial perpetual summer. It has never even held the hint of going back to that place we ran from, the place that was always our back-up plan, our bomb shelter, as our first option. We stood there, me leaning against the loft railing looking down at him as he stood leaning against the couch downstairs looking up at me, and we finally both sighed and stated the obvious- if we gamble and go somewhere and blow our savings on a move without a job secured, and if it's a flunky job and we never save any money again, and then we end up living in Kansas driving tractor for low wages in a farm economy that my be weaker than it is right now, will we hate ourselves for not paying our dues now and going back there while the economy is strong out there, jumping into a business opportunity that most likely will not be there in a few years after we are too broke to finance it? And in that moment, going out to Kansas where there are no screaming New York vacationers, no high-maintenance Chinese women calling every few minutes because they have another inane question (not to sound racist. I am sure there are some very self-sufficient, laid-back Chinese women. They just don't vacation in Keystone.), no Texas housewives asking for one more wineglass at midnight, no "You should be ashamed of yourself, I can't believe you are still in business if you run it like this" comments from guests he has just spend eight hours and driven a hundred miles trying to please... a field stretching to the bare, flat horizon and the whine of a diesel engine sounded like just the medicine he needed. And I could see it so plainly in his face that it overwhelmed all of the selfish reasons I had for wanting to stay here- the summer days that drip past like warm pine sap, hot sun and cool breeze, nodding wildflowers and trickling streams and damp earth. The winter days that are so brisk they crackle, deep, pillowy blankets of fresh snow in the morning. Friends who routinely do the impossible, win world championships, throw insane tricks off of fifty-foot cliffs and star in action films, race bikes in Europe, then come home and lay flooring and cut down trees and sell ski gear like any average joe, never thinking to mention in normal conversation that they are celebrities in certain circles. All the reasons I have for never wanting to leave Summit County died as I saw this glimmer of a smile on his face at the thought of walking away from this job.
Like so many things that are life-changing, this one started with that glimmer. No need to mention it to anyone. Maybe make a phone call or two and see if it's even a possibility. A phone call became a trip out there to discuss options with a seller of a business, a trip turned into a meeting with a banker, a meeting with a banker resulted in financing being available and came right back to the question that suddenly needs answered immediately- do we want to do it or not? And here we are on the brink of a huge fork in our life's path, bewildered and silent and brooding and terrified and excited and reluctant. Bewildered because this thing has taken on a life of it's own and thrown us into the back seat, but the promise of money is far better than what we are making here, so it makes sense, and all we have to do is say yes. Silent because we never really wanted to go back there, aside from a sense of responsibility to family, and how glad hey would be to see us move back. Even though our roots are there and our family is there, we have seen such beauty and we have become such different and better people living in Colorado that we are reluctant to go back, terrified that we will become who we were when we lived there, falling back into the mess that is peer pressure and conspicuous consumption and the need to prove one's self worth by sheer tonnage of one's vehicle and the newness of one's house, and the need to prove that we are still good people, gentle and loving, possibly more than ever before, in spite of the fact that there will be those who watch our every move for a less-than-Godly agenda. (And even if those dear black-capped and bearded ones don't do that, we still imagine they do. After all, it was they who passed judgement on us and declared us spiritually dead and shunned us, at a point in our lives when we were coming into our own mentally and spiritually and had never felt so close to God and all that is holy and loving.) Excited because the business holds the promise of a better payday, because B has lived the last eight years trying to quell his entrepreneurial spirit, because old friends still live there and we look forward to reconnecting with them, and because Kansas businesses simply do not know the level of stress that a lodging company in a world class ski resort town knows. Reluctant because none of our dreams involved a life with no adventure beyond what we create for ourselves, limited by those flat horizons and neighbors who see no fun in adventure, surrounded by judgement and hemmed in by the lack of options in everything from food to recreation to jobs. And our silence becomes more of an obstacle every day, because it is so hard to explain all of these feelings to our friends up here, justify why we are leaving them, that it is easier to just pretend that everything will just go on as it always has, and sooner or later, we will have to tell them, and we dread it.
And besides, I can't leave here. Not yet. I still have a company to manage along with Marci. Our days off for the next nine months just got cancelled by the fact that there will be no Bobby to take the abuse that this company can give out. Marci and I have to stay here and keep things from falling apart and train in new managers. It's bittersweet for me- I can stay, but I won't have time for any of the things that make this place so amazing. I will only have time to make sure it is amazing for everyone else. I will become Bobby, with no me to help share the load. In the meantime, I will miss him like crazy.
I am confused about the thought that we are willing to live in separate states for nine months. Do we think it will be easy? Are we in denial? I admit, a part of me wants to know if I am strong and independent, if I can do this. A part of me can't wait for him to leave so I can be my own person and make my own decisions. I went from being a minor living with my parents to being a wife, and I have never really flexed my muscles on my own. We have settled into our routines together, and we understand, on some basic level, when the other needs space and needs to make a decision for themselves. Hence the reason he wanted to see the banker and seller without me, for various reasons that may or may not have made sense, and I didn't argue, because I happily spent that time on a two day road trip, just me and my bike and miles of pedalling on the road shoulder, camping in a grassy mountainside clearing under a brilliant milky way while dew collected on my bike and my sleeping bag, deliciously alone in the silence and the dark that was far from black. I think normal people find this alone place in their lives working separate jobs, sharing childcare responsibilities that take their minds off of each other and focus it on a common goal. I think it's a normal part of co-existing, but one that few can ever articulate for fear of being seen as unhappy together. And it's true, my mind doesn't really understand all the long evenings and lonely nights that are nine months apart. My army wife friends know only too well, having spent entire years apart without the option of a five-hour car trip if the loneliness gets overwhelming. I just don't know. What I do know is that Bobby quitting this job may be the best thing he ever did for his own health and sanity, and that a change was going to happen, so maybe it's a good thing that it is solidifying sooner rather than later.
So, faithful few, that is how it has come to be that next Tuesday, we plan on signing all our savings over to the bank in exchange for a loader and a raw manure spreader, and possibly by the end of next week, B will be out there running it, and I will be here running the lodging company, and my two week notice has been turned in at the bike shop. And that is the reason for the stress-induced malnourishment. And the silence and refusal to commit to anything. And now you know as much as we do.
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