great plains

Today I feel more like the Great Plains--standing in the face of winds and storms but able to endure.

feeling like the appalachians...

...old and worn down.

I'm having a rough time right now.

One of the the casualties of unemployment is what happens inside us--and I'm not just talking about the person who has lost a job.

My husband seems to have lost any inclination he had to act decently to his family.  He assumes the worst of the kids and me, he blames things on everyone, and he's generally growly.  We never know what will set him off.  This weekend it was listening to our daughter try to explain why she was upset with a teacher and became a one-hour walking-on-eggshells experience for us after we watched him yell and our daughter and get right in her face about her tone.  Today, he was looking for his military photo album.  Yes, the kids were the last ones to have it and look at it.  They should have put it back where they'd found it.  However, he never had a designated spot for it in the first place, and he's had six months when he could be going through our very messy living room, bedroom, basement, and back porch to simply organize things.  Chances are, he would have found it then.  Meanwhile, he expects us all to stop what we're doing to meet his needs, and he takes everything as a personal affront intentionally done unto him.

He is constantly cutting me off in the middle of my sentences--even if I am answering one of his questions.  So just a few minutes ago, when I was cut off again (literally, after four words) to turn the power off something for him, I sat down and tried to put my thought out of my mind.  Then when he  finally asked me what I'd been saying and I responded with a quiet "never mind," I got chewed on because he finds it frustrating that I am so easily distracted.  I just can't win.


I spend all my time at home trying to keep him calm, keep the kids quiet, and I just can't do it any more.  I can't imagine what this is like for him.  I sense that if he were to take on any project--whether it be volunteering, cleaning, or exercising--he would be required to accept that he is unemployed.  As long as he can think, "I don't want to commit to something new because I might have a job next week," everything can feel okay.  Yet he spends all day sitting on the chair in the living room--with the laptop on his lap, food in his mouth, and the tv blasting away and his anxiety.

I know he's not at his best.  This has got to be so hard for him.  I worry that he has no structure or sense of purpose to his life, but I have so many moments when I simply don't know how to be a good wife for him anymore.




As for me, I'm stressed, too.  I am having a difficult time at work--trying to get projects done under pressure and with no support, suffering a 3% paycut resulting from mandated furlough days, watching the people I work with on a daily basis get laid off, and seeing general low morale--not to mention that this is the time of the semester I always start to feel stressed anyway since it's the end of the semester.

It is beyond me how we still have our house, our car, our cable, our electricity.  Truly.  How is this possible?  I'm behind on paying every single account we have.  The grace of God has kept us in our home and minimized the sacrifices we've had to make so far.  So why can't I feel greater joy?


I'm halfway into my third course of antibiotics trying to kill this stupid sinus infection.  I have no energy, I'm sleepy all the time, I can't breathe through my nose, and I simply feel like I'm beaten down.  My immune system hasn't completely recovered from my hysterectomy, and I feel like I have nothing left inside me to fight with.

Meanwhile, we have three kids in high school.  We can't give them the things or the opportunities we would like to.  Even the money for college applications is a challenge.  I can't even imagine how it will feel next year to watch our son have to pay for college himself because of our financial troubles.

I just feel that every step I take, I'm facing my own failures--as a wife, as a mother, as a partner, as an employee, as a daughter, as a child of God, as me.

Feeling like the Appalachians does not make me majestic, magnificent, enduring, or beautiful.  It  just makes me old, worn down, feeling like I've been forgotten.

finding purpose

This has been a hard year.  It began with me recovering from a major surgery, one that forced me to think about what it means to be a woman and what my purpose has been.

For months, our finances have spun out of control as my husband has been unemployed.  Some days, it feels like my head is exploding from the phone calls, the mail, the decisions.  I just want to shut down.

Yet, every morning, I wake up and go through another day.  For months, I've been thinking about how so often, it seems that I'm going through the motions of life rather than actually living my life.  It hasn't helped any that I've been experiencing a great deal of stress at work.  I am stepping back from my administrative position and returning to full-time teaching, though, and I have to say that I'm feeling quite relieved and much more centered.

I've been struggling to have a sense of purpose for myself.  With all three kids in high school and headed toward responsible adulthood, I am no longer "Mommy."  I've been struggling to be a good wife during my husband's unemployment,  yet I've been trying to protect myself, too, so I don't disappear.

I've been wondering who I am, why I am here, what I add to the world with my presence.  I have days when it feels like my presence is irrelevant in the world--but then there are moments when I feel like I truly know why I am here on this earth.

I had one of those moments this morning.  I got an email from one of my co-workers asking if she could talk to me this afternoon.  I can't, because I'm home with weird sinus-related symtpoms and a CT scan scheduled for this afternoon.  So I replied with a "What's up?" email.  I then learned that her same-age cousin died overnight and that she just needed a friend to talk to.  I felt so touched that someone thought of me as a source of comfort.

And then I thought about the work I'm doing on HysterSisters, and how although I don't touch everyone, I do touch some.  And I think about what I did with Sidelines, and cub scouts, and brownies.

I've often wondered if something is wrong with me that I can't just pick one thing and have it be my passion in life.  I do something for a while, doing great and then doing okay and then fizzling out.  I'm starting to think that this is okay.  I can give a lot, whether I give in small amounts in many different ways throughout my life or choose to dedicate the span of my life to one thing.  I am a multiplicity, with a multiplicity of purposes, and I think I will try to live purposefully rather than to live to try to find one sense of purpose.    

six months and going

Well, it's been nearly six months six my husband became unemployed--and there are no prospects at the moment.  Every day, I think about all the mistakes we've made--financial decisions, moving here when it meant leaving a good-paying tenured position for me, getting into bad housekeeping habits, etc.  I wake up every morning and have to deal with all my failures.  I have to make difficult phone calls and difficult decisions, all the while supporting my husband through his own emotional response to this situation.

My heart is heavy.  While I know things will be okay eventually, some days it's just really hard.

when is it tmi?

I've had a couple blog entries running around my head recently, but I haven't been able to bring myself to write them yet.  They deal with pubic hair styles and women's perceptions of their, um, private areas.  In order to write about any of this or explain why this is even an issue, I would have to tell a couple stories of my own--about getting older, about getting heavier, about being middle-aged, about trying to spice up my life a bit, about . . . well, you get the picture.

What is TMI (too much information)?  On one hand, I have no problem sharing things about myself.  It's my life and my body and if someone doesn't want to read about it, then they can choose not to.  I would provide lots of warnings--but wouldn't some people choose to read on and then have certain pictures they could never get out of my head?

Although I write here and don't often think about people reading it, I know that they do.  I have the link on my Facebook page, so it's available to all my Facebook friends--friends from gradeschool and high school, colleagues, relatives, my husband's relatives, my kids, my kids' friends, . . .  So then I thought that maybe I should just remove the link from my Facebook page.  But I like having it there, and I like the fact that people who've been out of touch for a while can find out what I've been up to in my life.

So for now, I am refraining from making the pubic public.

Is this the right choice?  Could I write about it in a way that would be entertaining enough to cancel out the TMI factor?  And would that make it okay?  And what about the fact that when I share the story verbally, it's still mine--but when it's on the web it belongs to everyone who links or copies it.

I'll have to continue pondering this, but I'm curious what people think.  What is TMI?

unemployment sucks bigtime

It's been almost five months since my husband lost his job. Our finances are in the toilet, our stress levels are high (even the kids are anxious a lot), and some days I think I've forgotten how to dream.

I know it will come back. I know it's a phase. But right now it just feels rotten. :(

lessons learned at the Wisconsin Highland Games

1. Men in kilts look much more manly than I had ever imagined...
2. ...especially in the heavy athletic events.
3. Some large men who say "but it's all muscle" are telling the truth.
4. Sometimes the caber turns over.
5. Total strangers sitting next to each other on the bleachers can have the most hysterical conversations.
6. A 150-member bagpipe mass band can reach into your soul in an unimaginable way.
7. Sometimes, when a man bends over wearing a kilt, it really is a good thing when it turns out he's not a true Scot.