Really?

AKA  August slips away  AKA What was I thinking?

At the top of Mt Martin - sun in the wrong direction.

I stop in Vancouver and visit with my best friend Sheila. I do Summerfest. Ben and Steph are home. We chat and eat and go for walks and play board games. I touch base with other Deep River friends. Shelley and I meet and sit and drink wine or walk and talk for hours. I go to Arnprior and find somewhere to rent starting in September. I will move in the day before school starts which is not ideal but better than nothing. Fred and Alex come home for a glorious weekend and then I spend a few days at Suzanne’s cottage and then I go back to Ottawa for a few days to re-visit Ben again and then to Kingston to re-visit the other kids again…

So I am following my plan. But… don’t get me wrong I am happy with the little things. I am thrilled to see my kids. There is just this huge dark cloud hanging over me - What am I going to do with my life? - that is numbing me, rendering me incapacitated. I am so terrified by the black box of my future that I am not functioning in my daily life. Fred happens to be home, on his actual birthday, and I don’t even think to make him a cake.  How could I miss that? It is a bad sign. A very bad sign.

I feel as if I am in a car, going 200 kph, heading towards a brick wall. With broken steering. And no brakes. I am expecting at any minute to crash. It will not be pretty.

I am totally out of control. I have accepted this job. Teaching Art. In Arnprior. I have rented a house and I will likely buy a car. It will all cost a lot and at the end of the year I will have nothing to show for it. I am not committing to being there forever. I am looking at it all as a trial year. I am not expecting to make enough money to get ahead. I cannot imagine finding out that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, settling down in Arnprior and, magically, making friends, and becoming a good art teacher. I am not a good teacher to start with and I know nothing, at all, about Art. And people scare me.

I don’t want new friends, I want old ones. I don’t want to go on line and look for a new date, I want to be celebrating my 30^th anniversary. I don’t want to be starting a new job, I want to be retiring. But I am not. Past-me did not get married and stick with it and so present-me is not in a relationship. Past-me did not establish a solid network of friends so present-me does not have one. Past-me did not work enough so present-me has to.

I tell strangers that I have been stuck working part-time forever in Deep River and need to work for 5 full years before I retire in order to have a good enough pension. If pushed I add that my marriage fell apart and my children grew up and left home and that I am starting over and that Arnprior is appropriate because it is close to Ottawa where my oldest son lives and perhaps even that being close to Ottawa opens up social opportunities. Some of this is true. And I say it so often I start to believe it. Except that, in reality, I will likely need to work 25 years in order to have enough pension. And I don’t want to work even for five. That is not in my life plan. I am not looking forward to one.

I see a posting of a facebook friend in Peru looking very happy and I want to be there. The sensation is so strong as to be almost a physical pain. I want, desperately, to be there. There as in somewhere, somewhere else, not here, nor, I fear, in Arnprior. Who would want to live in Arnprior? Who would want to teach? Who would want to be tied down in a cold dark climate? Why am I choosing to do this? Is the money good enough? (I think not.)

What else could I do? Now this is a productive question. My oldest son and I walk for miles along the canal in Ottawa and discuss real possibilities; go to Vegas and put all my money on red 10 times in a row, rob a bank, buy a lottery ticket, marry an aging millionaire, and also, total impossibilities; start up a business, find a better job… I can’t imagine doing any of it. But… the option that I have, apparently, chosen, to work in Arnprior, I can’t imagine doing that either. And if I don’t make enough money doing it then what is the point? If I am just treading water, just keeping my head above, with no hope of getting ahead, buying a house (do you know how much those cost these days?), if…. I am 50, I want to travel now, not work long enough to afford a house, and, even if I buy one, then I won’t want to live in it, I’ll want to go off to Peru.

Fred and Alexander come to Deep River and we climb Mount Martin with a group of their friends, some from high school, some from university. I am thrilled that they are so gregarious and also that they are such good friends with each other. I go to visit them in Kingston and we go SCUBA diving, visit Sandbanks Provincial Park. I am amazed at their level of energy, at their poise and conviviality and self-assurance, at how much they resemble, in so many ways, their father. How is it possible that I, so constantly full of trepidation and foreboding, could have produced such amazing sons?

I have no solid goal. No tether holding me to anything. Robin Williams commits suicide. If he, so rich and famous, could not find a solution, then what hope is there for me? A radio announcer states categorically that this exact thought is a total fallacy but it nonetheless resonates with authenticity to me.

A friend suggests I go off, be footloose and fancy free, drop out of the rat-race, quit my job, travel endlessly stopping only to get a part-time job whenever I needed money to eat. It appeals. If I were 20 I’d jump at the chance to do so. And I could do it now, for a while, but… I want to have money when I am 80, in case I am still alive, and, given no house and barely any pension then where, exactly, is that money supposed to come from? And if, god forbid, one of my kids meets with disaster, I want to be there, available, as in solvent, should they need to boomerang back, since they have so little other family. So I feel I can’t just give up and go. But I also feel I only have a few good years left and I am not sure I want to waste them treading water in Arnprior.

But…

So…

I will do this year as planned. I will count my pennies. I will look at my pension options. (Who knows? Maybe I will love it, want to stay and teach forever.) (More likely I will cry.) I will hope that a long term solution appears out of the blue; I cannot imagine where else it might come from.

As I will hope, though I am still metaphorically in a car going 200 kph towards an unyielding brick wall, that, somehow, I don’t hit it.

(And then, somewhat ironically, a few minutes after writing this I back the car I have rented, without insurance, into a telephone pole, and do an unbelievable amount of damage to it. But, fortunately, I am too numb to care. Life will go on. More disasters will follow.)

I have coffee with Rick. His parting advice to me is, ‘Be happy.’

Be happy. Yes. So simple.

Can I do it?

August 30^th I take the bus from Arnprior back to Deep. I will pack a U-Haul with boxes and then will drive back. And then I will be there. Why? Why? Why did I think that this all might be a good decision? Why? In what universe did it make any sense?

When I get off the bus in Deep River Steve happens to see me and stops to pick me up and I visit happy as a clam with his family for several hours and we talk about all sorts of things and many of the people in town enter our conversation and it is just so friendly… And Cheryl and Dave - who basically brought up my oldest son because I was too busy with the younger two – have the two of us over for dinner and I just want to curl up in a corner and live with them forever. When I get to Arnprior none of this will happen. I will know no one, and, even if I do meet someone, we will not have twenty years of shared history living, breathing, bringing up kids, interconnected within the same community. 

I lie in bed anxious and terrified. What have I done now? Chosen to move to Arnprior? Really? What was I thinking? If I felt alone in Deep River, the town where I was born and grew up, the town where my kids were born and grew up, the town where I have lived, however ineffectually, for literally decades... did I stop and think, for even a second, how very very much MORE lonely I’d be in Arnprior?  At my new school I have no office, so, therefore, no small group that I touch base with every day, nowhere, literally, to hang my hat. How will I connect? I have chosen a house that is isolated. How will that help? AKKK! I am NOT happy.

Unhappy as I may be however with this decision, it is nonetheless the decision that I have made, and, so, I will just have to go ahead and make the best of it.

I feel like my life, in this instant, is like the last Calvin and Hobbes panel.

The world awaits. What’s next?

And I know what I have to do: Be happy. Just that.

Be happy.

Be happy. If I can remember that, just that, if I can succeed at that, just that, then the rest ought to fall into place.

Yes. Be happy. Just do it.

AKKK!