2020: The Shit-Show That Was

It's fair to say that 2020 was a rough year for most of the people I know. "Rough" is vague enough to describe the continuum of minor impacts of the COVID-19 virus to I know people that died, lost jobs, struggled really hard this year. I am in the latter.

I've gone through my soon to be outdated calendar and can list more crappy events in every month than I can "Oh yay!" happenings. I realize I need to check my gratitude because I'm not taking into account I've had a roof over my head and food in my kitchen all year. I can't manage how to make those things important enough to overcome the monthly feeding of crap this year. My mind is not in that place of gratitude right now, and hasn't been for several months. My apologies to those of you reading this and thinking, "Just shut up about the crap and focus on the gratitude." It's a cognitive thing. I'm a therapist, getting clients to recognize and accept gratitude has been my the bread and butter of my career. Right now I'm in an obstinate, stubborn, very dark place. I'm in the sloppy, muddy pit of depression and I'm comfortable here, thank you, and it seems I may stay awhile.

If I don't find a job soon, Mark & I won't be able to afford rent to keep this particular roof over our heads by February 1st. If it hadn't been for Food Share, I don't know how we would've managed food for ourselves. We've had enough money to feed and care for the dog, and I started Christmas shopping in September, when finances weren't so dour. We're getting energy assistance. I'm not getting unemployment. I've never been in this financial situation. I've never been dependent on social services or public aid.

What has kept us treading water is my parents. They've paid for medical and dental bills, sent home days' worth of leftover meals from when we visit. God knows we appreciate everything they've done for us, but it's humiliating. That's my own ego talking, but there's truth in it. Who hopes to be turning 50 in six months and calling your dad to ask for insurance premium money? (No job means I have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and pay insane amounts of money each month for sub-par coverage.) Who plans on your only regular income to be checks from your parents? I'm starting to look for cheaper apartments because my parents can't afford my rent. How fucked up is that?? This is not the life I pictured...ever. 

The humiliation I feel, the disappointment I see in my father's eyes, the incompetence I feel as a therapist unemployed for five months with no options in sight...I don't know how much longer I can survive in the depression pit. But I don't know what will help me find the energy or motivation to get out.

 

On This Christmas Eve...

I had to remind myself before I started typing tonight that Christmas Eve is not New Year's Eve and I need to save my end-of-this-absolutely-disastrous-fucking-year rant for another 168 hours. I've been writing down the low-lights, of which there are a plethora, since January when this shit-show of a year began. Ok, ok, focus. Back to Christmas Eve.

Throughout the day I've been remembering past Christmas Eves. My earliest Christmas Eve (I'll shorten that to CE going forward) memories are related to participating in my church's Christmas Pageant which, for my Sunday School years, was held on CE, not the Saturday before or after Christmas like it is now. I remember as a kindergartener and at least through 2nd grade, we dressed as angels. Donned in white sheets with halos fashioned from horribly misshapen wire hangers with silver or gold tinsel lopsidedly taped to them, we sang Away in the Manger for three consecutive years.

I'm not sure what our 4th grade class sang or wore, but I remember getting out of the car in the church parking lot that CE and inhaling the brisk winter air which stunned me slightly. I looked up to a cloudless sky, searching for the Christmas star, the star that led the Wise Men to the baby Jesus. In my nine year old mind, the brightest star I saw, likely the North star, was the Christmas star. 

My church had Sunday School through 8th grade, the end of which culminated in Confirmation. Every CE for four years the brightest star I could see in the night sky from the church parking lot on Marquette Street became the Christmas star. It was shortly after that when pageants were performed on a Saturday afternoon, which included my younger sister and brother. I was in college by the time my brother participated in his last pageant.

I was thinking of the first CE I no longer believed in Santa while reminiscing earlier today. That would be Christmas of 5th grade. 

My mother has always had a mild obsession with Little House on the Prairie. The TV show, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, touring the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum somewhere in Minnesota, she's done the whole Little House gambit. For some unknown reason she made me and my sister wear cotton bonnets with the brim and long ribbons fashioned into a bow on the side of our chins, certainly not directly under them. I should define "made us wear cotton bonnets". She bought one for each of us and I remember wearing it a few times prior to attending junior high, but why we had them and when exactly we wore them is fuzzy. Anyway, the point is that my sister and I shared a full size bed like Laura and Mary Ingalls until Christmas of 7th grade when we got bunk beds. I've gone Freudian on that until my head spins, so don't go there.

Our bedroom was at the end of the hallway of your typical three bedroom, single level ranch house: the hallway starts in the dining area, first door on the left: bathroom, second door on the left: master bedroom, first (and only) door on the right: small bedroom, and the hallway empties like a river into a delta which was our bedroom. From our doorway we had a straight shot to see someone walking from the basement, through the kitchen and dining area into the living room, walking right to left.

By CE of 5th grade I was questioning this whole Santa thing. Our house didn't have a fireplace and chimney until 1978-ish. How did he get into our house before that? Was Santa committing B&E at every house in the world that didn't have a fireplace??

My 2nd grade sister and I agreed to stay up and monitor the view from our bedroom door opened just a crack, that CE. She was asleep by 8:30pm. I managed to stay up until 10:30pm when the show began. From bed I could hear repeated footsteps cross the kitchen and dining area. I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter! (LOL!) I peaked through the 2" opening between the door and the frame and watched my dad make the trip past me at least a dozen times, his arms loaded with wrapped packages. I shook my sister to show her who Santa really was. She groaned for a moment then continued her slumber. Dad starting shutting off lights and I jumped back in bed. My parents' room was to the right of ours, we shared a common wall with an air vent which is the cause of many nightmares I'll save for another story. So I had proven there was no Santa. 

I kept this nugget of information to myself through adulthood. As I write this I'm not entirely sure if I ever shared this discovery with anyone in my family. The lapse of memory could be due to age. That happens more often at a scary rate. It surprises me that I didn't tell my family because I was kind of a loud-mouthed kid and when I knew something my sister or brother didn't know, I liked to climb up the pedestal I created and look down on the world from Judgement Land. 

Today it's Christmas Eve 2020. I've spent time in quiet contemplation of Luke's telling of Jesus' birth from the New Testament. I've spent time outside and found my Christmas star. 

Merry Christmas everyone. May you find your own Christmas star.

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It's Off to Work I Go

I start a new job tomorrow, Wednesday, September 16, 2020, ending 45 days of unemployment.

I didn’t shout from the roof tops that I was fired on July 31, 2020. Although it came as a shock, after a few hours I realized that this was one of those situations when the Universe, God, Karma, a Higher Power, whatever you choose to call “it”, intervened and made a decision for me my deep, inner-self knew I should make, but I didn’t have the courage to do so. I even said that in the message I left for my shrink. Although I loved the clients I worked with, the brass tacks of the “job” was becoming a shit-show I didn’t want any part of or responsibility for. My parting words there are: Good luck at the upcoming annual Federal review. You’re fucked.

I’m not naming my new employer so don’t even ask me. I’ve removed my profile from Linked In. I removed the previous agency where I worked from my employment history on Facebook and I no longer “follow” them. You won’t find the name of my new employer associated with me in any way on social media. I’ve been fucked too many times by employers trampling all over my First Amendment rights while I’ve never disclosed any PHI (Protected Health Information) or violated anyone’s HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rights. Yet somehow, I managed to get myself in trouble with previous employers, particularly by what I write about in this blog.   

I am a storyteller. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you’ve encountered me “setting the background” of whatever it is I’m finally going to tell you or engage in conversation with you about. My case notes can be horrendously long if I’m not mindful of keeping it to the “Description, Affect, Plan”. I am well aware of the ethical boundaries of my profession regarding confidentiality. No one has ever accused me of violating anything related to inappropriate disclosure of PHI because I never have. Simple enough from my point of view.

I’ve documented something every day of the last 45. It could be whom I spoke with regarding Food Share or comparing insurance plans on the healthcare.gov marketplace. It could be how useless and disappointed in myself I felt because I could no longer provide my husband’s Part B for Medicare by having employer sponsored health insurance. It’s there and sometime in the future I’ll re-read all of it; just not when doing so feels like walking across a sea of grit.

Tomorrow I’ll get up, shower, do my make-up (minus lipstick because thank heaven we’re all still wearing masks at work), and try to do something with my hair that doesn’t look like it’s 1986 and hanging over my eyes. I choose my work clothes the night before which prevents me from standing in front of my closet and drooling in the morning while I attempt to make a shirt and a pair of pants not look like I’m walking off a golf course in 1974.

As you get up and go to wherever it is you work, remember that I’m with you. Starting something new.

Gravehopping and Finding My Way Home

My favorite song about home is “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith. The summer of 1989 my life-long group of high school friends and I saw Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Alpine Valley. 

We started the aimless trudge through the parking lot on the hunt for Eric’s Ford Escort, when Rolf called “Shotgun!” When we found the car, 45 minutes later, by parking lot etiquette, Rolf sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the back seat of what was really, quite a teeny, tiny little car. 

That Blind Faith song was on a “mix tape” stuck in Eric’s cassette player. I swear to god we heard that song two dozen times. I fell asleep at one point so that may be a low-ball estimate.

We were driving to Madison without a map, just some sketchy directions and a lot of pot. Did I mention we were all totally high the entire night? That probably explains why we shrieked like Howler Monkeys when we finally got to someone’s brother’s cousin’s house we’d been searching for in Madison.

“Home” has had multiple locations and connotations throughout my life. Geographically “home” has included Appleton, Boston, Neenah, Menasha, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oconomowoc, and Shawano. The consistent location of home has always been Shawano. My maternal grandparents spent their entire lives there, or within the “suburbs” of Wescott and Richmond. My grandma grew up on what was or would become the Menominee Rez. My parents met and married there. I was baptized three weeks after being born there because my father was shipping out to Basic Training before deploying to Vietnam. While he was in country my mother and I lived with her parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Krause. 

We moved to Appleton within weeks of my second birthday, but still, Shawano was Home. When we were leaving after a weekend there, Grandma would kiss us gently on both cheeks and say, “Now you come home again soon.” Her cheeks were soft like powered pillows. I cannot remember a single time when leaving that house without hearing her speak those words.

Sometime in early 2003 my sister and I discovered that on Saturdays of Memorial Day Weekends, our grandparents and our grandma’s two sisters and their husbands, our great-aunts and great-uncles, spent the day driving to the graves of our ancestors. They cleaned off the headstones, pulled out the fake, faded flowers from last Memorial Day Weekend and stuck in a bouquet of new, brighter fake flowers, and shared stories on the drive to the three cemeteries they visited. With their tasks complete, they stopped at a tavern in Red River, another Shawano suburb. In this part of Wisconsin there are no “bars” – far too “big city.” These were taverns. They had supper at one of dozens of supper clubs they could choose from. Places we went to when I was kid and thought eating frog legs made me “exotic” and “sophisticated.” I was eight years old.

Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend 2003 my sister and I tailed along with our grandparents, great-aunt Margaret and great-uncle Dave, great-aunt Shirley and great-Uncle Butch. Butch and Shirley had an enormous Suburban with a back row tiny enough to rival the back seat of my friend Eric’s Ford Escort, which is where my sister and I sat. I swear to god every time we stopped at a cemetery, tavern or the supper club, Margaret would forget my sister and I in that cocoon and shut the door without letting us out of the car. That was the only way we could get out and every stinkin’ time she forgot, we knocked on the window looking forlorn and pissed off at the same time.

Every year at her grandmother’s grave, a woman I never met yet lives inside of me, my grandma said, “There was never a better grandma than her.” Every year I said, “She has a run for her money because you’re the best grandma there ever is.” She held me a little closer and said, “I can only hope so, Dolly.” She called all five of her granddaughters “Dolly”.

It didn’t take long before my maternal aunts and cousins filtered in to Gravehopping with us on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekends. The more we gained, the more we lost. We all lose those we love to the inevitable unknown of Death. It may come fast or slow, tragically or peacefully, but still, it comes. There can be no other way. Margaret was the first of “the Golden Girls”, as we referred to them, to pass in 2010. Then it was Grandma in 2016 and finally Shirley in 2018.

My husband and I moved to Green Bay in August 2019 for my new job. With the help of Siri, Irish accent version, I can now find more places than the casino, the airport and the stadium which was the extent of my geographical knowledge of this town until moving here.

As Memorial Day Weekend closed in around me this spring, plans for Gravehopping were made. As I was writing down ingredients for Cucumber Salad, my signature dish and meal contribution since Grandma died, I stood in my kitchen and suddenly dropped my pencil, my notepad, and I couldn’t shut the cupboard door because I was literally paralyzed. I didn’t blink, I don’t remember breathing although obviously I was, I stood there with one thought banging inside of my skull: From where I stood, I didn’t know how to find my way Home.

Shawano has been my true north since conception. Not knowing exactly how to get there is akin to fate shaking me like a snow globe only when I land, the earth is sand, the air is stiffening fog and I have no voice.

Just like so many decades before when trying to reach Madison without a map made driving monotonous and pointless, I felt that way about driving up to Shawano. For the first time in my life I couldn’t find my way Home. 

Of course, Irish Siri got me to my aunt’s house easily. Gravehopping was accomplished and is in the books for another year. However, if I had to get in my car right now and drive to Shawano, I couldn’t do it...without GPS. In the genuine sense of the lyric, “I can’t find my way home.”

Where Do I Begin?

First of all, there's got to be more font options than the seven shown to me, in addition to "Default." What the hell is "default"? Rhetorical. No comments or instructions please. 

06/14/2020 was the one year anniversary of me leaving my employer of roughly eight or nine years. Here's a secret I'll share if you promise not to tell anyone: Theirs is a name I do not speak (or type) for fear of getting myself in more trouble with the higher-ups than my big mouth/opinionated, free-thinking brain/First Amendment rights have already gotten me into.

By experience of leaving this employer once before, maybe I should have expected the shit-show my life has been for the past year. I left for approximately six months approximately eight years ago and got into trouble for expressing myself via this same blog at that new employer. I guess unless I choose a nom de plume, I'm always at risk of being reported to the higher ups, which is something I continue to struggle to wrap my brain around. I'm too afraid to say anything more than that in this medium.

I've previously posted about the nightmare moving to Green Bay was logistically, fuck ups with the cable company, the moving company, the utility company. I'm sure sometime after 06/14/2019 I posted about the stress commuting from Menasha to Waupaca, then suddenly commuting from Menasha to Green Bay two days a week (of course not consecutive days because that would've made too much fucking common sense) and continuing to commute to Waupaca on three non-consecutive days a week.

I absolutely loved working at King. Don't confuse that with I loved the work I did at King. I started working there full time on 06/17/19 and was told on 06/21/19 that the King program was closing by 09/03/19 and the focus of all staff was on successfully moving 26 veterans into stable housing. As a therapist that task wasn't in my wheelhouse. 

What I loved about working at the Wisconsin Veteran's Home at King includes the following:

1) A family connection: My Grandpa Porath (paternal grandpa) spent the last years of his life at King & when we visited he'd take us to the three lane bowling alley, show us where the local water skiing group performed on the lake weekly for the veterans during the summer, and the quaint whitewashed cottages where  married couples lived (currently these cottages stand vacant, however the last I heard was that they couldn't be demolished because of their lead paint or asbestos level so they were going to be refurbished for safe habitation). This is the place where my Grandpa Porath died.

2) Watching the veterans fish: Veterans from our Program and other veterans spent hours each day at the designated fishing  docks located behind the building that housed the Post Office, the volunteer office, and the KX. I can't remember the name of the building and don't want to Google it just for the sake of naming it in a rather unremarkable blog.

3) Although trying to find a parking spot close to the building any employee actually worked in was a challenge of strategy and patience, driving around the campus was beautiful. The Veterans Home at King somewhat resembles a small, mid-western or east coast college campus. You need to look beyond the institutional buildings to see the mini golf course, the gazebos, the pure and clear lake-shoreline, the grand Commandants House, the flower window boxes on the cottages, the bell chiming from the Pilgrim-like white steepeled church. Sounds remarkably like Amherst or Holyoke, Mass to me.

4) The other veterans I didn't work with. One thing I quickly learned working on the King campus is that the vast majority of veterans I would encounter showed me gentlemanly respect by letting me cross a threshold before they did, enter and exit an elevator before they did, and greet me with "Good morning" or "Have a nice weekend" before I did. There was a veteran who often spent time on a bench swing right around the time I left work. Minimally I sat down with him once a week and we chatted. He talked about his wife and son who were both "gone with God" and he'd tell me about his wife's funeral right at the chapel across the green space from where we were lightly swinging. Every time I sat down to talk with him he told me the exact same stories. As the time of my transfer to Green Bay drew closer and closer, I told him I was going to miss talking with him after work. His response: "Well, you just think of me here on this swing young lady and I'll tell you about my wife and son someday. My wife's funeral was right here at that chapel" (he was pointing across the green space to the small steepeled church where the bells toll every hour) and I thanked him for his generosity for sharing his stories with me. 
Since I no longer needed to carry a small suitcase on wheels to and from work, I began carrying a large-ish, gray twill shoulder bag with my initials embroidered in burgundy on one side. About twice a week one particular veteran would be sitting outside when I left the building where I worked while I headed to my car. With my initials facing the outside of my bag, he'd call to me, "Have a good evening KS!" I'd wave and call back to him, "You too sir!"  I never learned his name, but I hope that if Grandpa Porath ever offered good night wishes to someone, that person would've sent the same wish back to him. (I have to admit that Rog takes after Grandpa Porath in his stoicism and I really can't imagine my paternal grandfather or my father just calling out well wishes to a complete stranger, but who knows? This scenario is my fantasy.)

That's the best way I can express the blanket of depression I've been wrapped in for the past year. Sometimes it feels as light as a high thread count sheet and at other times it feels as heavy as a lead radiology cover.

So I've begun sharing about work, to the best of my ability while fearing I may lose my job or get officially written up and placed on a corrective action plan which would totally fucking suck.

Anyone know the phone number to the local ACLU office? 😳😳😳