On August 28th, my wife lost her job. 24 hours later, I lost mine. This blog is a continuation of the day-by-day chronicling of our emotional journey back to employment. This is bound to be upsetting, hilarious and hopeful.
Wednesday – October 1, 2014
Spent the morning doing something I wouldn’t have done while I had a job: taking care of our friend’s daughter and Violet while her mom and Erin went out to run some errands together. I’m not a terrible babysitter, but I probably seemed like one when mom came to pick her little girl up. At the time, I was doing my best impression of the undead as I looked practically passed out on the couch. I wasn’t, of course, but I made almost no attempt to make it appear otherwise.I slept terribly last night, but couldn’t even muster up enough energy to explain that before they were both gone. Had to send mom an explanation and an apology later.
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Had an exercise in futility this morning as I tried to shop for interview clothing. My Mother-in-Law, Lynn, was kind enough to pick up some clothes for me with Erin’s help, but I pretty much hated them. I have a severe prejudice against gray blazers and sport coats. Hitler wore gray sports coats, did you know that? You can’t tell because the photos are in black and white. There was no way Erin and Lynn could have known about my extensive Nazi research beforehand, but I didn’t feel right about lying and saying I liked them. So, I told them I hated the outfit. This made me feel terribly ungrateful.
Lynn was perfectly fine with it and encouraged me to exchange the clothes for something more my speed. Tried and failed. All the clothes in Fresno are boring. Dead boring. I’m not a particularly flamboyant person or anything, but I like the needle to move at least a little off “drab.”
I find I don’t really care about clothes (and you can tell) until somebody asks me to. Then I care a lot.
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I spent the afternoon writing and feeling fulfilled. Writing does that for me. I can push everything else away and just give myself over to the story and the process. Feeling less fulfilled today? Erin. There are good days and bad days and today was a bad one for her. She’s really struggling with the change to our lives. She wants things back to the way they were before, when I had a job that supported us sufficiently and we had that security and I was gone for most of the day and she got at least a few seconds to herself. She was used to having her own space, but now I’m home. All the time. Not that she doesn’t love me, but my presence is, I’m sure, a constant reminder of what we’ve both lost, and it changes things. It changes her schedule to have me there, and it robs her of her “me” time.
This is partly why I left the house today to go hang out at Panera to do my writing–to at least imitate how things were before when I would leave and not come home until 5pm. Today was bad enough that she wasn’t exactly helped by my absence, but there’s always tomorrow.
Though, hopefully, not very many of them.
Brock Heasley 