The Worst Days
Lately, I've had what seems to be a rash of Awfulness--the loss of my mother, my lover and my job.
But this is nothing compared to what happened to me back in 1998 and continued thru until 2001. These incidents happened before blogs, before I found my way to the Internet, and before I moved to Massachusetts.
So, here's the story of The Worst Days of My Life....
It started the weekend that Princess Diana died.
I was on my way home from a weekend at my friend's in Maryland.
It'd been a strange weekend, as I was feeling a bit unmoored, having spent the summer trying to find a job with little luck. My then-husband and I had graduated from community college the previous year, at the top of the class, with awards and honors and everything and I'd thought that this would have made it easy for me to find a job. It didn't. I was told without computer skills I was useless to the job market.
Worse was that we'd spent the money I'd saved for a new apartment on a post-graduation vacation. We'd been living with my mother in law for two years, and I wanted out, but he wanted to get away. So, we celebrated our graduations, and stayed put. He got accepted to state U. with a full scholarship, and his mother said we could stay there until he finished. But this was not helping our marriage the way that moving into our own aparment might have.
Then again, we'd been on the skids for years, so I'm not sure moving out would have helped.
As I was driving home, I'd crossed the border into New Jersey and heard the news of Diana's death. It felt weird. We were the same age.
When I got home, I found my husband sitting in his chair with the TV off, tapping his foot, looking troubled, chewing on one of his fingers. "What's wrong?" I asked.
He said he'd missed me, had been worried, was glad I was home...then started to cry hysterically. I didn't know what was wrong, thought it might have something to do with me being away for 4 days, and tried to console him.
It wasn't that at all.
Over the next several months, he would get more and more condescending and cruel. He would ignore me, distance himself from me, drive dangerously when I was in the car with him (as if he were trying to kill both me and him). We got strange phone calls from girls who were his classmates, and he went out and came back later than he should have.
I applied to Smith, NYU, and Rutgers. Rutgers gave me crap about needing more information for my application, and I have no idea if I'd hear from NYU. Smith sent a Big Envelope and I knew I'd got in.
A few days later, my husband disappeared. He'd left some convaluted note about needing to get his head togeter and would be staying at a friend's. I had no idea where he was, nor how to handle it. I didn't know if I should call the cops or what. My mother in law did nothing and I cried hysterically for 3 days.
Until I phoned all his friends and they found him and sent him home....then he admitted he'd been having an affair with another student who was 13 years his junior (and 16 years mine).
Three days after my accpetance to Smith, and my return response that I accepted, my marriage was, for the most part, over. As were most of the dreams and plans we'd had for the next several years.
I spent the summer moving stuff out of his mother's house, living with my parents, working at a down-and-out jewelry box importer, trying to reconcile, crying, feeling like crap...and then I totalled my car....ten days before I was set to leave for Smith.
I never knew if I got accepted to NYU or not. My mother in law never forwarded my mail, and threw out whatever she'd received. She also forbid me to come to the house when she was there, as she didn't like hearing me and her son fight and cry. He was, after all, entitled to his happiness.
As if everything with me was misery. Without me bugging him to go to school and running around to file his scholarship paperwork, he would have still been driving a beer truck--as it is now, he's at The New School, living in Brookly, and getting a Ph.D. in Labor Studies.
I went to Smith, but had no idea how hostile wome could be when they smelled fresh blood on the emotionally vulnerable. I admitted I'd left my husband and why, and I was viewed as someone who could not keep her man. I was low woman on the social totem pole in the house I lived in--a house of women of non-traditional age. There was no sympathy among my peers..and, later, no good advice or guidance from administration.
I was on anti-depressants, meds for hypothyroid, and then albuterol for what was thought to be asthma. No one had told me that Zoloft counter-acts Synthroid, and Albuterol also counter-acts the effects of Synthroid. Not to mention that I was taking the wrong dose of Synthroid, but wouldn't find that out for another year and a half.
I made it thru that first year at Smith--I have no idea how. I was alone and frightened most of the time. I didn't know if I should go home or stay or what. I tried to tell people, but no one listened. Therapists thought I was hiding my lesbianism, administration thought I should go home and tend to my husband's abandonment issues, and doctors thought I was asthmatic. No one at the house really wanted to know me as I was a strange downer, and they had their own issues with their sexualities, their fears of failure, and their general adjustment problems.
Giving up an adult life to live as an undergrad can seriously fuck with one's head.
My huband and I had found an uneasy truce over the academic year, and we were trying, long-distance, to reconcile. But that fell apart when, shortly after I returned to NJ, I caught him in bed with another young woman.
No wonder he wanted me to stay at my parents when I came home for the summer. It was one of his housemates that gave me the money to file the papers for the divorce.
When I went back to Smith, I sat in my room and thought of that musical line "Well, how did I get here?"
I had no idea, but I knew I had to get thru it.
I should have taken a break, but administration kept mentioning that I'd screw up my financial aid if I did. And, since I wasn't going to tend to my huband's abandonment issues, I might as well stay. My parents were screaming at me to come home because what was I going to do with a fancy education when I couldn't even keep a marriage. I hated both administration and my parents, and figured I'd stay in school because I didn't want to go back to a living space with no telephone, no tv, no heat, no a/c, no computer, and no social life. I didn't have much at school, but at least I was doing something I liked rather than suffering the ridicule of my family.
Actually, the ridicule of housemates was far easier to deal with, and I had free Internet access.
I stayed in college and switched my major to Religion and Biblical Lit (but kept a minor in English Lit) because it was the only subject I could concentrate on, that I found solace in, and that gave me a sense of accomplishment. It was a throwback to my days at The Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, to the memory of my mentor Paul Ramsey, and to the memories of the many wonderful theologians I'd learned from while I was there.
Meanwhile, I became a goth dj and began to explore the fetish world. In a sense I split into two different personnas as a means of managing my life. I became curious about the darker side of human nature as I learned about the laws and rules of religion.
Humans are amazingly adaptive, and I think I'm one of the more highly adaptive. But the adaptiveness is not without its pitfalls. I was gruesomely defensive at this time, had trouble communicating with pretty much everyone around me. I was surprised that, when I mentioned what I'd gone thru, nobody seemed to care nor to understand.
Even the counsellor I saw before graduation, who was supposed to try to help me figure out what I was going to do with my life. "What's your Dream Job?" she kept asking me.
I had no Dream Job. I'd lost all my dreams and had been putting one foot in front of the other for two years just trying to get thru the rigorous academics of Smith College...
...Which I managed to do--with a 3.7 gpa and highest honors for a thesis on depictions of Jesus in American film (all while going thru a miscarriage--the result of a liason with a young sex buddy, and having my divorce finalized. Not to mention a psychotic housemate berating my thesis work and badmouthing me like a 13 year old. Jealousy is an amazing thing, esp. in someone who is at an age when she should have been well beyond it. I never thought of myself who had anything to be jealous over or about, but apparently, in someone's eyes, I did.)
My thesis is in the library. You can search for it in the library's database if you'd like.
I didn't go home to New Jersey after graduation. I went to Las Vegas for a vacation. I had a couple of fun nights tooling around Vegas with a guy I knew from the NYTimes Film Forums, Marc Campbell, who'd been the lead singer of The Nails. I felt special. I needed that.
Then I returned to stay in Western Mass. I needed to stay put for a bit, in a place where I wouldn't be bombarded with negativity, bad memories, destroyed dreams, and no friends. I couldn't soldier on and move to New York in search of that Dream Job.
It hasn't been all that peachy here though--my after-graudation housemate turned on me and threw me out after 6 months because she'd promised my room to a friend of hers who had the unfortunate luck of not landing her Dream Job in NYC. But I'd made some friends over the summer of '01, and they helped me find the little garret I still live in. Job-hunting has been awful, as it's taken me several years and my mother's death to admit to what my "dream job" really is, as much as it has for me to admit that, yes, to have earned all those awards and honors and stuff, I must be pretty darned Smarter Than The Average Bear.
If my mother hadn't died, I'm not sure if I'd have had the courage to leave the job, even though without it there is this sense of ennui and the lack of structure sometimes leaves my mind to drift.
So, in the grander scheme of things, these particular days of loss are Bad Days...but not as Bad as they have been in the not-too-distant past. If I can get thru the Worst Days, I can make it thru these Bad Days.
But slowing down might not be such a bad thing.....
But this is nothing compared to what happened to me back in 1998 and continued thru until 2001. These incidents happened before blogs, before I found my way to the Internet, and before I moved to Massachusetts.
So, here's the story of The Worst Days of My Life....
It started the weekend that Princess Diana died.
I was on my way home from a weekend at my friend's in Maryland.
It'd been a strange weekend, as I was feeling a bit unmoored, having spent the summer trying to find a job with little luck. My then-husband and I had graduated from community college the previous year, at the top of the class, with awards and honors and everything and I'd thought that this would have made it easy for me to find a job. It didn't. I was told without computer skills I was useless to the job market.
Worse was that we'd spent the money I'd saved for a new apartment on a post-graduation vacation. We'd been living with my mother in law for two years, and I wanted out, but he wanted to get away. So, we celebrated our graduations, and stayed put. He got accepted to state U. with a full scholarship, and his mother said we could stay there until he finished. But this was not helping our marriage the way that moving into our own aparment might have.
Then again, we'd been on the skids for years, so I'm not sure moving out would have helped.
As I was driving home, I'd crossed the border into New Jersey and heard the news of Diana's death. It felt weird. We were the same age.
When I got home, I found my husband sitting in his chair with the TV off, tapping his foot, looking troubled, chewing on one of his fingers. "What's wrong?" I asked.
He said he'd missed me, had been worried, was glad I was home...then started to cry hysterically. I didn't know what was wrong, thought it might have something to do with me being away for 4 days, and tried to console him.
It wasn't that at all.
Over the next several months, he would get more and more condescending and cruel. He would ignore me, distance himself from me, drive dangerously when I was in the car with him (as if he were trying to kill both me and him). We got strange phone calls from girls who were his classmates, and he went out and came back later than he should have.
I applied to Smith, NYU, and Rutgers. Rutgers gave me crap about needing more information for my application, and I have no idea if I'd hear from NYU. Smith sent a Big Envelope and I knew I'd got in.
A few days later, my husband disappeared. He'd left some convaluted note about needing to get his head togeter and would be staying at a friend's. I had no idea where he was, nor how to handle it. I didn't know if I should call the cops or what. My mother in law did nothing and I cried hysterically for 3 days.
Until I phoned all his friends and they found him and sent him home....then he admitted he'd been having an affair with another student who was 13 years his junior (and 16 years mine).
Three days after my accpetance to Smith, and my return response that I accepted, my marriage was, for the most part, over. As were most of the dreams and plans we'd had for the next several years.
I spent the summer moving stuff out of his mother's house, living with my parents, working at a down-and-out jewelry box importer, trying to reconcile, crying, feeling like crap...and then I totalled my car....ten days before I was set to leave for Smith.
I never knew if I got accepted to NYU or not. My mother in law never forwarded my mail, and threw out whatever she'd received. She also forbid me to come to the house when she was there, as she didn't like hearing me and her son fight and cry. He was, after all, entitled to his happiness.
As if everything with me was misery. Without me bugging him to go to school and running around to file his scholarship paperwork, he would have still been driving a beer truck--as it is now, he's at The New School, living in Brookly, and getting a Ph.D. in Labor Studies.
I went to Smith, but had no idea how hostile wome could be when they smelled fresh blood on the emotionally vulnerable. I admitted I'd left my husband and why, and I was viewed as someone who could not keep her man. I was low woman on the social totem pole in the house I lived in--a house of women of non-traditional age. There was no sympathy among my peers..and, later, no good advice or guidance from administration.
I was on anti-depressants, meds for hypothyroid, and then albuterol for what was thought to be asthma. No one had told me that Zoloft counter-acts Synthroid, and Albuterol also counter-acts the effects of Synthroid. Not to mention that I was taking the wrong dose of Synthroid, but wouldn't find that out for another year and a half.
I made it thru that first year at Smith--I have no idea how. I was alone and frightened most of the time. I didn't know if I should go home or stay or what. I tried to tell people, but no one listened. Therapists thought I was hiding my lesbianism, administration thought I should go home and tend to my husband's abandonment issues, and doctors thought I was asthmatic. No one at the house really wanted to know me as I was a strange downer, and they had their own issues with their sexualities, their fears of failure, and their general adjustment problems.
Giving up an adult life to live as an undergrad can seriously fuck with one's head.
My huband and I had found an uneasy truce over the academic year, and we were trying, long-distance, to reconcile. But that fell apart when, shortly after I returned to NJ, I caught him in bed with another young woman.
No wonder he wanted me to stay at my parents when I came home for the summer. It was one of his housemates that gave me the money to file the papers for the divorce.
When I went back to Smith, I sat in my room and thought of that musical line "Well, how did I get here?"
I had no idea, but I knew I had to get thru it.
I should have taken a break, but administration kept mentioning that I'd screw up my financial aid if I did. And, since I wasn't going to tend to my huband's abandonment issues, I might as well stay. My parents were screaming at me to come home because what was I going to do with a fancy education when I couldn't even keep a marriage. I hated both administration and my parents, and figured I'd stay in school because I didn't want to go back to a living space with no telephone, no tv, no heat, no a/c, no computer, and no social life. I didn't have much at school, but at least I was doing something I liked rather than suffering the ridicule of my family.
Actually, the ridicule of housemates was far easier to deal with, and I had free Internet access.
I stayed in college and switched my major to Religion and Biblical Lit (but kept a minor in English Lit) because it was the only subject I could concentrate on, that I found solace in, and that gave me a sense of accomplishment. It was a throwback to my days at The Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, to the memory of my mentor Paul Ramsey, and to the memories of the many wonderful theologians I'd learned from while I was there.
Meanwhile, I became a goth dj and began to explore the fetish world. In a sense I split into two different personnas as a means of managing my life. I became curious about the darker side of human nature as I learned about the laws and rules of religion.
Humans are amazingly adaptive, and I think I'm one of the more highly adaptive. But the adaptiveness is not without its pitfalls. I was gruesomely defensive at this time, had trouble communicating with pretty much everyone around me. I was surprised that, when I mentioned what I'd gone thru, nobody seemed to care nor to understand.
Even the counsellor I saw before graduation, who was supposed to try to help me figure out what I was going to do with my life. "What's your Dream Job?" she kept asking me.
I had no Dream Job. I'd lost all my dreams and had been putting one foot in front of the other for two years just trying to get thru the rigorous academics of Smith College...
...Which I managed to do--with a 3.7 gpa and highest honors for a thesis on depictions of Jesus in American film (all while going thru a miscarriage--the result of a liason with a young sex buddy, and having my divorce finalized. Not to mention a psychotic housemate berating my thesis work and badmouthing me like a 13 year old. Jealousy is an amazing thing, esp. in someone who is at an age when she should have been well beyond it. I never thought of myself who had anything to be jealous over or about, but apparently, in someone's eyes, I did.)
My thesis is in the library. You can search for it in the library's database if you'd like.
I didn't go home to New Jersey after graduation. I went to Las Vegas for a vacation. I had a couple of fun nights tooling around Vegas with a guy I knew from the NYTimes Film Forums, Marc Campbell, who'd been the lead singer of The Nails. I felt special. I needed that.
Then I returned to stay in Western Mass. I needed to stay put for a bit, in a place where I wouldn't be bombarded with negativity, bad memories, destroyed dreams, and no friends. I couldn't soldier on and move to New York in search of that Dream Job.
It hasn't been all that peachy here though--my after-graudation housemate turned on me and threw me out after 6 months because she'd promised my room to a friend of hers who had the unfortunate luck of not landing her Dream Job in NYC. But I'd made some friends over the summer of '01, and they helped me find the little garret I still live in. Job-hunting has been awful, as it's taken me several years and my mother's death to admit to what my "dream job" really is, as much as it has for me to admit that, yes, to have earned all those awards and honors and stuff, I must be pretty darned Smarter Than The Average Bear.
If my mother hadn't died, I'm not sure if I'd have had the courage to leave the job, even though without it there is this sense of ennui and the lack of structure sometimes leaves my mind to drift.
So, in the grander scheme of things, these particular days of loss are Bad Days...but not as Bad as they have been in the not-too-distant past. If I can get thru the Worst Days, I can make it thru these Bad Days.
But slowing down might not be such a bad thing.....
posted by Tish Grier at 4:52 PM
4 Comments:
I appreciate the post too, having had my own Worst Days. Sometimes reliving them can help find perspective in the present moment - hope this helps you that way and hugs from me too.
:-)
you know, this post was amazingly cathartic. I finally put my finger on what the issue has been about my divorce that has not allowed me to let go of the whole thing....
Basically, it's that I was handed this huge, unique academic opportunity when I was accepted to Smith, and nobody gave a damn. I didn't even get a chance to celebrate before the whole thing was blasted out from under me by my amazingly jealous ex-husband
We had always competed, and I think there was a strong, unconscious desire to humiliate and destroy me.
He did....but it hasn't been forever.
I can now see much more clearly what happened, where the dreams all went wrong and that they had died before I was aware of the fact. I can understand his cruelty but certainly not forgive it.
and I can move forward...
wow...I am *seriously* alot stronger than I ever knew I was....
Wow, I enjoyed this story & am liking your blog. I think it is a particular kind of school-of-hard-knocks lots of us go through. And people who do everything "right" and have the way paved for them & are super healthy just don't get it.
One thing good about it is that you learn flexibility. Imagine a world scenario where there's general disaster. Who will cope better, you, or someone who went right through college and came out with Perfect Job and Perfect Marriage (TM)? You know what I mean? Think of how many people's perfection crashes & burns. And as we age we all will come up against other things, hard physical limits for example. It's not like life is a contest that way, but I guess I feel like pointing it out, that life trajectories can shoot up and up like a tall plant, or can be more low-growing and bushy. Well, blah blah blah from me, and sometimes I envy the tall plants who have all sorts of support but seem unconscious of it & who can see only certain things from their high view - but mostly I am happy with how things have been in a story that has a lot of simliarities to yours especially in the potential & the lack of encouragement or support for higher ed and ambition.
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