Termination

I was elected the one to fire the realtor, having the most experience in that area. Totally inappropriately, given my nonexistent relevant background, when I worked for a social services provider that contracted with the local Department of Family and Children Services, I did all the hiring and firing, of which there was a lot, as no competent people could or would stay in that job. I left after just five months or so myself.

I remember interviewing people when the electricity and phone had been shut off (due to nonpayment). And still people accepted the job. Right, if we couldn’t pay for the utilities, we’re definitely going to pay your cut, pocket change though it would be. The whole outfit was just ridiculously mismanaged; it operated out of the back of a super-shabby warehouse. The front half was the owner’s husband’s church, some sort of charismatic variety. The couple’s young kids ran around the office all day. The owner kept hiring people from her church who were just miserably unable to do the job, and I kept having to fire them. And too late I realized that the owner’s argument that I, with just a B.A. at the time, could perform psychological and drug/alcohol dependency assessments as I was being “supervised” by her, as she had a Psy.D. (later this turned out to be entirely not the case, when she told me to write her application to grad school), was flawed.

Lots of things were flawed. Like when I couldn’t get the state to care about finding out whether/how a five-year-old girl had herpes. Or when no resources were available for a family whose kids couldn’t attend school due to lice from living in a home with a mother who was a textbook trash hoarder (if I ever feel attached to some object I need to get rid of, I just need to think of that hovel. Shudder.) I remember the first night I was sent into the field to, it turned out, provide therapy to a family with domestic violence/sexual spousal abuse problems—in Spanish. Boy did I come home crying then. And all the sad, sad kids in foster care I shuffled to and fro doctors’ visits, listening to how they felt about their parents’ rights being terminated, and back to the overstuffed foster homes with “mothers” who thought it was funny to slam the door in our faces when we came back, pretending not to know us, not to let the children in.

Compared to all that, firing the histrionic, deceptive realtor–that was easy.

My staff

You may recall my mother insisted, as part of letting us live here, that we employ a housekeeper. I did and do find this insulting, irritating, not to mention unnecessary, given that I am perfectly capable of keeping house and this one isn’t even that big and is relatively easy to maintain, especially as we aren’t allowed to let the dogs in it beyond the kitchen. But I didn’t have a choice and said I would find one.

First I put up a Craigslist ad and got several responses. I had one nice lady come to the house and, though she talked me into paying her nearly twice what I’d posted and didn’t have her own supplies and had scheduling difficulties, I felt so guilty and uncomfortable about the housekeeper thing (too much women’s studies at college?) I hired her anyway. And then thought better of it and told her I had to find someone else. I made interview appointments with two more applicants; one didn’t show, and the next canceled the hour before. Finally I took the recommendation of a neighbor to try her housekeeper, who, like the first lady, asked for 20 dollars an hour. Look, I don’t quite make 20 an hour! (At my research job it’s 19.77 now. I do, or did, make more teaching. Just, you know, FYI). 20 dollars an hour! Christ.

But by this point, it’d been two months here and I still only had a fictional maid when talking to my mother, so I asked her to come today. I was going to have her do things I technically can do but likely will not, like cleaning the window exteriors. And now it looks like she’s not showing up, either. Sheesh. Why is this so difficult? I guess I’d be more pissed if I actually wanted some household help, but I’d at least like people to keep their appointments. *

There’s also a yardman, one my grandparents originally hired. He speaks Gullah, which I am slowly learning to understand, and requires Cokes whenever he comes by. My mother, and now I, pay him really just excessive amounts of money to do very little, as my mother insists I clean up the yard, instructing that “no palm frond should be on the ground more than 24 hours.” And there’s also a handyman, and thank goodness I don’t have to pay him, as he is jovial and talented but OH SO SLOW. I haven’t asked him to come as Husband is up for all that kind of handyman stuff, anyway. (For that matter, he also mowed the lawn.)

In conclusion, good help is hard to find, even when you don’t actually want any help.

* Okay, now she showed up, and I feel compelled the clean the crap out of the rooms she is not in.

Out of work

It’s been years now since my dad was employed as a philosophy professor. But that’s what he is, and what he should be doing. (Really he’d be an excellent guru, and an even better cult leader, if he had the ambition and worked up a good shtick.) He was laid off about five years ago from his last university and though he applies, of his own volition and as part of receiving unemployment, to several jobs a week, it’s been nothing. For about a year and a half he worked in insurance in some paper-shuffling capacity, but he was, a year ago, laid off from that, too.

Every few months a job possibility that really excites him comes up, and it’ll be all he offers for his side of the conversation. He’ll talk about moving logistics, and tell me all about the program, and his hopes are always so high. And it never comes to anything. It pisses me off. What, they only want inexperienced, unintelligent candidates, is that it? There’s no one better than my dad at expounding on hermeneutics. No one! They are missing out! He oozes charisma and erudition. There’s a reason his grad students like to sleep with him. He is a captivating professor.

But I worry his teaching career may be over. He’s too old, he’s now been out of the game too long, his publications are not sexy enough. The possibility of just giving up and calling himself retired and trying to live on that pittance, though, well, I don’t know that his battered self-esteem can take it. He’s used to being master in the classroom, and he’s not ready to admit defeat and call it a day on a career he’d love to continue. Plus, he’d like health insurance.

There was a period of about six months when I was desperately trying to break into social work and nothing was happening. The combination of impotence and desire–not to mention need–I recall was a constant cloud, a shame and disappointment that was hard to shake. I’m so unhappy my dad has been stuck feeling like his life’s work, all his knowledge and consideration and talent for teaching, is now, for all practical purposes, worthless. Because he’s not.

Aboutface

Today was Little Girl’s first day of “school.” Not only did I send her to preschool way before I’d planned (by which I mean: at all), but it’s at a church. A Baptist church. A Southern Baptist church in South Carolina. And it’s a super-religious program, too. All their little library’s books are about Jesus. They teach the shapes thusly: The Trinity is a triangle! The Bible is a rectangle!

And that’s okay. Eight six-hour weeks of religion at age two isn’t going to ruin her for rationality. And you know what it will do? It will introduce her to new buddies, as she pines for her old ones. It will give me some time to do my work-from-home gig, as I’m getting tired of squeezing that in between her bedtime and mine. It will keep her more productively occupied than I’ve often been up for lately, as they don’t show videos (more on that later). And it’s biking-distance! Cheap! And the people are very nice. And if Little Girl starts wanting us to take a moment to consider our good fortune before meals I think that’s probably a very good idea.

I teared up walking her into the room, and felt very sad as she clung to me when I made to leave and told me she was “gonna be sad, Mama!” But when I left she was doing a puzzle, only a little morose. And when I picked her up–”Mama come back!”–she greeted me, then went back to the toys. She hasn’t been especially forthcoming about what she did today, but I did get “I like my buddies!” and that’s just great.

In an impressively skillful bit of scheduling, I interviewed for the university teaching position off-island during “school” (sorry, I can only use ironic quotation marks when using that word for a two-year-old), and it went very, very satisfactorily. And that’s great, too.

(I was all worked up about how I had to be off-island for her first day of “school”, so pinned to her backpack is a very complex note for the teacher involving neighbors’ numbers and schedules. I also interrogated the teacher afterwards about activities and emotions, which none of the other mothers did, so I hope I don’t come off as neurotic as I, uh, guess I evidently am.)

Life continues anon

–Happy 35th Birthday to Husband! He’s taking it rather better than his 30th, but really that’s not hard to do. I made him Moxie’s Bacon Brown-Sugar Coffee Cake and gave him new undergarments (this was fraught with symbolism, since evidently men’s underwear-buying habits improve with their sense of economic well-being) and a Thai cook book and a new but otherwise identical version of his favorite sneakers, which have disintegrated. Little Girl was quite thoughtful and gave him a pepper mill since our good one is in storage, awaiting Europe, and the man needs–deserves!–his fresh-ground pepper. She picked one out that’s got bunny ears and was on sale for seven dollars! Well done, Little Girl.

–Lowered price on house. It’s been shown rather a lot, actually, but those damn power lines freak people out. Look, Little Girl was gestated and reared in that house, and she is perfect in every way. What other evidence do you need of their harmlessness? They are not even that near the house! Really, the worst thing about power lines is that they make it harder to sell your house later.

–The university called me in for an interview. This is gratifying, even if I doubt the logistics will work out.

–Here in my glass-walled tree house (please, no throwing stones, ha ha) we have twice heard a THWUMP and then the dogs barking downstairs. Birds–first an Eastern Bluebird, then a Woodpecker–didn’t realize the walls were there and, well, thwumped. The first time Little Girl was with me when I had to take a shovel and bury it in the sand out under a palm at the edge of the property. She was absolutely appalled that I did not “give it medicine, make it all better!” The second time I managed to keep my layman’s gravedigging from her, to avoid further questions like “Where’d the baby bird go, Mama? It say tweet tweet?” I tried to explain about how it was dead, and it couldn’t fly anymore, and we couldn’t take it to the doctor, and it was sad, but she just looked at me, displeased with my bird-neglect, putting a baby bird in a hole in the ground. When we later went to visit my mother’s, which of course was the home of the, if not exactly adorable (she was scrappy), then fascinating, rabbit Inga, who just died, too, she likewise was dubious when I said Inga was dead, she couldn’t hop anymore, and we wouldn’t see her again, and it was sad. “Where’d Inga go, Mama? My wanna give her a carrot!” Ah, yes. That’s life.

Technical difficulties

God, there’s nothing like internet connection problems to frustrate the crap out of me. I have no patience in that area. Blech. I want my internet and I want it now and always.

Recently Little Girl and I went briefly to visit my mom and grandparents. Perhaps–probably?–it’s disrespectful and maybe even incorrect to think of it like this, but I always compare Little Girl’s developmental progress to her great-grandmother’s deterioration. Little Girl now leads in pretty much every area–mobility, following of social norms and directions, toilet usage, self-care, even fashion and logic. My hope for my grandparents had always been that they live as long as they enjoy it, but it’s beginning to be clear that my grandmother finds life only confusing, terrifying, frustrating, humiliating, and unfair. There are small moments–like when Little Girl gives her big hugs–that she lights up. But it is sadly obvious that she’s not at all happy or even content. She doesn’t even know she’s in her own house of the last forty years, and keeps pleading, “I need to get out of here. I need to go home.” So, mom, if I want my grandmother to pass on, it’s for her own good, not the cash. Her mind has failed her.

Husband has returned from Europe with great fanfare (i.e. Little Girl was so excited she didn’t go to sleep until after 11 PM). It’s just in time, too, since I have a huge, technical, crazy-making work project going on that combines translation with computer programming with the internet. I’m sorry, did I not go to grad school for something else entirely? I originally left this field for a reason. Sigh. I’ve actually been trying to get a university teaching post again but all the avenues of inquiry I have pursued–snail mail, phone, email–have been ignored. All that remains is just showing on up uninvited, but I’d have to bring Little Girl, which might not win me points for professionalism. She’s pretty cute, though, so I guess it’s worth a shot.

Island living

You know, I’m not so sure I want to move to Sweden anymore. This whole living-on-a-tropical-island thing is pretty nice. While I still have to do everyday things like visit the post office and put away the laundry and work remotely at night, the majority of our time is spent at the beach, biking around lagoons, visiting playgrounds, and enjoying tourist hot spots at marinas where live music plays and gentle winds rustle palm trees. For that matter, gentle winds rustle palm trees in my yard. I can go lie on the hammock anytime I want and lose myself in it. It’s a perpetual vacation. Who would choose darkness and snow and foreign languages over this?

Of course, I can’t exactly bring this up with Husband, who’s hammered out an agreement with his job through the fall to be there in person just three days a week, and who is very stressed about work and selling the house and the car accident aftermath and all that, and who is basically getting himself through this period by getting psyched about moving to Sweden. He’s totally thrilled that his brother, and his pregnant wife, might have finally found a house in the little village we’re supposed to move to, too, and likes to talk about how great it will be when we’re all there. And here I am, trying to figure out, even if we do move to Sweden, how long we should stay there before moving here again. Because it is NICE.

But natural beauty isn’t, I suppose, the main way people decide where they live. How did you end up where you are?

And

Did you know that I am still not done miscarrying? Stupid hCG won’t go down. Ultrasound and another blood draw the day before we move. Awesome! Oh, and the lady scheduling the ultrasound blithely asked me how many weeks I was. “Uh, that’s all done,” I had to say in the waiting room, waving my arm casually. Fun times at the OB’s today.

The research corporation I work for was just bought. This means massive amounts of urgent paperwork on servers that refuse my password. And as for the actual work part someone discovered this big error and I had to spend all evening fixing it when I had The Dining Room Sorting scheduled, meaning I have to do that–when, exactly? It’s certainly a good thing I’ve taught the class I have now five times because I certainly am not interested in fitting in time for it right now. There are just not enough hours in the day.

Do you know what I am up to? Putting everything in my jam-packed house into three categories: ship to Sweden, take to beach house, get rid of. I’d say just about half is stuff I want out of the house Anyone who comes to the house is harassed to take tables and knick knacks and books with them when they leave. It’s really a nightmare, all this. Sometimes I can’t believe how many thousands of dollars we are paying to continue owning the same crap, too. And I can’t sleep anymore. Midnight to one AM are some of my most productive hours. This is crazy; I feel just this side of a panic attack at all times. I will really need to be at the beach by the time this is all wrapped up, just to decompress, to have nothing to do.

Plus I still have my two jobs, have to get all our medical records, am running around doing a million errands, applying for a teaching job at the beach, had a flat tire, have to go out of town to fulfill prior charity commitment this weekend, get the house ready to put on the market, Husband has to paint everything, I need to do the yard…and…well it’s really just too much. Friends are pitching in, and I am so, so, so grateful, but this is just wildly unpleasant and too, too much, and I hate having to get rid of some of the things, or rushing to go through them, and I am still putting off the baby stuff and…two weeks left, one and a half till the stuff goes to storage, and I can’t even figure out when to schedule the packing what with work and the dentist and the OB and…

Mobility

The night before my D & E the real estate agent came over as we’d already planned some time prior. With the pregnancy out of the equation it was easier for us to agree with her that it made the most sense to put the house on the market ASAP given the particulars of our situation and the local market. And in the days since we’ve also finally decided on where we are moving. To the beach house. On April 23rd. For six or so months. And then Sweden.

I’m going to go ahead and agree with you that this is all very sudden and making such decisions while also dealing with the miscarriage is less than ideal. On the bright side it’s something else to think about.

We won’t be living in this house while it’s on the market as the agent believed it will “show better empty.” I am pretty sure this is code for “you guys own weird stuff.” Plus we have all the pets and the master bedroom is the playroom and the market is so tight you have to make a real effort and, well, the beach house is rent-free, anyway. She also wants us to paint, like, every single room. Husband’s been a madman getting stuff done (and as I am very much still recovering, Little Girl has been watching about four movies a day, in between visits from my friends).

Until June, Husband will be mostly in Europe for work, actually, so Little Girl and I are sort of moving there alone. When his work calms down, he intends to request to telecommute from the beach house full-time (it’s more than four hours from our current city). If they say no, I have already arranged with my research job to telecommute full-time and we can get benefits that way. We’ll continue in that vein until our house sells and we have made the final arrangements for the international move.

Sometimes these plans sound exciting. The beach! Sweden! More often I am somewhere between morose and apprehensive about leaving my friends, about Little Girl’s having to leave her buddies and her beloved babysitter, about being away from Husband so much of the time, about having to quit my teaching job, about maybe having to support us all with a really boring job. I worry my psyche will conflate these coincidental occurrences of miscarriage and move and I’ll unconsciously think of myself as having run away from it–or if I’m unhappy with the move(s), blaming them on the loss. These plans were, of course, in the works all along, but it’s an unavoidable truth that we never would or could have chosen the beach option and moving up the Sweden move if we hadn’t lost the pregnancy and didn’t need as much stability. So here we go.

Pressing

Before, I have mentioned that my neighborhood, along with the surrounding areas, has been going downhill, though it was lovely when we moved in seven years ago. Gangs are a problem at the high school a mile away; teenagers roam the streets and cars slowly wander around our cul de sac in the middle of the night; people walk along the highway nearby with their possessions in grocery carts; the police have repeatedly been called to break up outdoor arguments at the house immediately to our right; and the guy two doors down very obviously grows and sells pot from his home, in front of which, at all hours, cars park for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, loud music playing, before the owners climb back into their vehicles and speed off. This weekend, when we discovered items have been stolen (ladders from a good hiding spot under the porch, and our neighbor’s kid’s bike was stolen from his front porch), was the last straw. We have to move. It’s only going to get worse.

But where to? In a year we plan to move to Sweden, and we’ve talked about just going ahead and doing that now and not trying to move with a zero-year-old, should this pregnancy continue. Or we could move to a rental for a year in the very nice area close to Husband’s work, reducing his commute, which is over an hour. This way we’d at least be somewhat near friends, and I could continue my teaching job. There’s my family’s beach house, which has the advantage of being rent-free and gorgeous, but we have no jobs there, though I could work full-time remotely and get benefits that way, though I’m more of a quitter than a maternity-leave taker so I’m not sure that would work. Each day, amidst all the mad Freeycling and Craigslisting to get rid of the stuff we don’t want to move no matter where we go, I wander amongst these options, settling on one, then finding some fatal flaw with it, then wishing just to stay here, then thinking of thieving strangers paying attention to when we are home, and wishing to flee. Husband will be gone for much of April and May in Europe again, and he wants us out of here, somewhere, before the trips begin. I agree–but where?

Yesterday was all about moving to Sweden. An adventure! The beautiful summer there! Having a baby surrounded by family! My sister-in-law’s child is due three months before mine–how fun! Then Husband started talking about how we should give living there a trial run and not kick his parents out of the house right away (we are supposed to buy the homestead from them and they’re retiring to an apartment). He opined that his father would clear out the little office with the walk-in closet and we could live there. Um, you want me to live in a foreign country with my in-laws and no chance of using my own furniture or decorations or doing any renovations while living in a former smoking room with a baby and a preschooler? Thanks, but no thanks. When I told him I could see myself “not enjoying” that situation–no chance to make the place my own, no play room, no solitude–he completely failed to understand, making me really not want to get into that situation with no advocate.

So now we’ve given ourselves a week to decide. And I just don’t know. What should we keep in mind?

Perfection

Today one of my ESL students told me that I “speak better than any of the other teachers in the school.” This was privately hilarious to me given that, outside of class, I’m pretty mumbly and I sometimes talk crazy-fast with lots of ironical usage of other dialects, but since I do speak carefully in class, I figured he meant I was easy to understand. But no, he said. He meant that my accent was perfect. I spoke perfect American, he said. Unlike the other teachers who said things wrong.

This was also kind of funny. I’m guessing he’s getting this idea from the fact that I, despite growing up mainly in the South, mostly speak what some call “Newscaster English,” the kind of theoretically region-free, though vaguely Midwestern, unmarked accent that you hear from people on the news. The kind of accent that doesn’t make you think anything like, “That guy is from Brooklyn.” It doesn’t make you think of anywhere.

I first learned English in China, then New York, then North Carolina, then Georgia, with lots of extended trips to Alaska and California and Washington, so it makes some sense that it’s hard to pinpoint where I am from, besides the US. But my mom sounds Southern (except when meeting new people; then she suddenly and, I think, unconsciously, puts on an Irish accent, of all things), and I definitely speak Southern when talking to my grandparents. So who knows.

I explained to the student about dialects, thanked him heartily for the compliment, and walked away from this grateful that my students like how I talk since they think they are supposed to be learning to do it just like I do (though I have some issues with that idea–for one thing it’s impossible, for another it’s unnecessary, and finally it is contrary to the concept I approve of wherein many Englishes in the world are acceptable). It was nice to hear, anyway; the students are stuck in my class, so it’s better if they enjoy it and feel they’re in appropriate hands.

Introductions

Today was the first day of the new session of classes and so brought with it fifteen new names to learn. Many of my students, all studying abroad here in the US, come from Asian countries, though there are Arab and South American and European ones scattered around the room, too.

It always takes me aback how much more difficult it is for me to learn the Asian names. Though I wish I didn’t, I really do prefer it when they have an English nickname picked out (“David” and “Amy” are weirdly popular). At least with those names I know I am hearing and saying them correctly, and I remember them more easily than what are, to my Western ears, a jumble of random sounds. My name probably sounds like that to them, too, of course. I feel disrespectful when I can’t quite get the name, when I get the Korean students, many of whose names are a variation on the theme of “soo,” “yong,” and “kim,” mixed up, when it feels too obvious I connect better with, say, Brazilian students than Vietnamese ones, when I can’t help but say Japanese names in a chipper sing-song. At least I used to live in China. That always seems to make up for it a bit, give me some Asian street cred, even though I no longer speak Mandarin and can’t say the name of the city I lived in correctly.

Within a few classes this sort of unintentional Latin alphabet preference washes out. And it’s good for me to have a renewed realization as I do with each new group during the name-learning process of how frustrating it can be to have to deal with another language’s sound system, especially since I teach oral communication. The first day of class I always share with them the stuff that drove me nuts when I was living in other countries (e.g. the inescapability of ham in Spain) and ask them to tell me what they can’t stand as newcomers to the US (example from today: the fact that you have to have a car where we live and that no one told them that when they were scouting out schools so they don’t have one and can’t do anything). And because you gotta have some positivity, then we talk about what they do like. So by the end of the first day I won’t have most of their names, but we’ve started to get comfortable with one another, and that counts for a lot.