Family drama, and shifting gears

Sometimes, when you can't fix your own messed-up life, it's gratifying to try to fix someone else's.  I've adopted a family, a Dominican woman and her two young kids, who are living in a domestic violence shelter, although I'm not sure how much violence they've really experienced.  There were other forms of abuse for sure, and I sympathize with her, but I'm starting to think she is overly optimistic about what her life is going to be like now, because all she's seen of the USA is the suburban middle-class lifestyle she's lived since her American husband brought her here.  It's hard for an uneducated single mother to make a decent life in this country, maybe not as hard as I think it is, but definitely harder than she thinks it is.  She's going to have to adjust her expectations a lot.  And if she's going to move in with me - which is my plan, if I can convince my mother to let me have a housemate - she's going to have to get used to conserving energy and water and reducing waste, recycling and composting; and I hope helping with the garden and feeding her kids healthier foods than chocolate milk and potato chips.  I've been wanting a roommate anyway, and I want it to be a single mother with kids for my son to play with.  I've been anxious about my situation in the near future, being alone in the house most of the time, without a car, and no one really even checks on us on a regular basis.  Then there's the fact that my son likes to go play next door because he doesn't have anyone else to play with, and the 11-year-old kid he plays with is strange and sometimes mean, and I'd like to find a way to reduce the temptation for him to go over there.  And I hope that having another adult around to keep an eye on my son might allow me to do some work at home, or ride my bike to the store sometimes.  And lastly, it just feels wasteful to live alone in so big a house when other people have no place to live.

Speaking of transportation, the countdown to my personal carmaggedon is less than 2 weeks.  I found a cheap child-carrier bike trailer at a consignment store, but I've got to get to a bike shop to try to get new tubes for the tires, along with a more comfortable seat and a kickstand for my hand-me-down mountain bike.  I also need my brother to give me a roadside bike repair crash course.  I've been lamenting that there are no mobile bike mechanics, no AAA for bicycles, something a mechanically clueless rider pulling a small child in a trailer would really appreciate. 

Being with my mother is an exercise in patience.  It annoys me how she wastes money, even when I'm the beneficiary; how she buys so many toys for my son, and eats out at restaurants constantly.  I think she's going to be really obnoxious in a poor country.  She is an occupational therapist who works with young kids, and she doesn't seem to be able to shift gears and just enjoy her grandson without trying to fix him.  I haven't asked for help with his behavior, potty training, or anything else, but I am trying to tolerate her help, even though our parenting styles and values are different. 

As far as our plans, the news is good, but not as good as I'd hoped.  We've pretty much agreed to look at 3 possible destinations in Mexico, of my choosing: Morelia, Michoacan; Oaxaca; and Cordoba, Veracruz.  Mexico makes sense, it has always made sense, and it is the default after everyplace else has been disqualified.  I have a lot of feelings about Mexico: I love it intensely, and it hurts me to think about it.  I won't be able to avoid Mexico City, where I have so dramatic a personal history, and I won't be able to avoid looking for my ex in the places he used to perform as a troubador, even though I'm pretty sure he's dead now, and I'll never be able to know for sure.  It's been so long since I was there and my life has changed so much, and Mexico has changed too, and it's hard to really know what to expect, other than a lot of emotions.  It is the known quality that makes it both attractive and also scary, because when you (think you) know something, you're really in danger of being disappointed.  But the worst part is that my mother wants to wait until 6 months after her retirement, in 3-5 years, before committing to where she's going to live and buying property.  Which makes sense for her, but I can't live in limbo for 5 years.  I want a place to garden.  I want a horse to ride. I don't know how I'm going to get those things.  I'm feeling like I have simplified the problem, but I haven't found the solution yet. 

I've just about given up the idea of going to Honduras in December, now that we've decided on Mexico.  Mom wants to wait a little longer to make our exploratory trip, and anyway, Honduras is far enough from Mexico that it is practically a separate trip.  She also wants me to stay in the house as long as I can, while she tries to sell it, so that she doesn't have to carry the full mortgage herself.  I hate to go back on my promise to my in-laws, but I'm really considering doing so.  It's been a while since I've talked to my brother-in-law Roman and I think both of us are getting over the presumably mutual crush and thinking more rationally, realizing we dodged a bullet, and wanting to keep a safe distance in order to avoid another round of that.  At least, that's how I'm feeling; I have to guess about him because there's never been much real communication between us, and at this point I'm pretty sure there never will be. 

I kind of knew this would happen with me if my mom agreed to Mexico: it opens a door I've kept tightly closed, and changes the way I feel about a lot of things.  I'll have to adjust some of my ideas, even the way I speak Spanish; I kind of feel like I need to reformat myself and reboot from an old backup disc.

Running on Hope and Coffee

I may have solved my storage delima.  My husband's cousin lives in a rented house in a very remote area and has a large storage shed they don't use, which they have offered to me for free.  The only problem is, if they move or get evicted, my stuff may get left behind.  I will probably take my chances.  I may ask for the owner's number so that if I need to, I can negociate with him to pay for the space. 

Today is my son's last day with his babysitter, a wonderful woman we call "Granny".  Next week my mom will keep him, and then I'll be unemployed.  My son has a hard time with change and I feel bad that I'm putting him through so much of it this year - some of it inevitable, but much of it by my choice. 

I'm happy to report my second compost pile measured 130 degrees, right on the line between "medium" and "hot" according to my compost thermometer. 

I'm actually pretty proud of myself right now .  I've managed to hold it together lately in the face of everything that's going on.  My husband hasn't even called this week, and I haven't felt up to reaching out to friends.  My friends are all new friends (because I'm not good about staying in touch with old friends), and I love, need, and enjoy them, but the social effort drains my energy.  So, I've been pretty lonely.  I was thinking as I washed my dishes last night - my dishwasher is leaking so I have a lot of dishes to hand-wash now - I might think I can't do it all by myself, but while I'm thinking that, I'm doing it.  I'm also suffering from insomnia lately, I just can't seem to turn off my brain at night, but even with less sleep than I'd like, I'm getting by.  I even finished putting the varnish on a cabinet my dad had made for my kitchen like two years ago, which I was determined to do before my mom's visit; and rewarded myself by playing with some leather stamping and dying. 

I hope the next time I post here, it will be to report some good news about our plans for the future. 

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Well, my plan to go with the flow ran into a glitch.  I got the books my mom sent me on living in Panama, and immediately skimmed them both, even though one was awful, self-published, unedited, and full of irrelevant stories, like a cheesy webpage in print.  I determined that it is going to be very difficult for me to get legal residency there.  It seems that if you're not on a pension, or rich, you have to either get a job, which is hard to do unless you're an experienced professional prostitute (a legal and in-demand job there, apparently); or marry a citizen.  I could go the latter route (after getting a divorce of course), but Panama only lets tourist stay for 90 days, and that's a pretty short time to find a husband, even one of convenience. 

Sometimes it's tempting to just give up on moving, and let the lullabye of everyday life put my adventurous dreams back to sleep, but then I remember that we owe over $100,000 on our house, and all the other reasons to believe we won't be just allowed to quietly tend our homestead here in years to come.  My Dad is pressuring me to look for another job, saying I can't count on unemployment even if I qualify for it.  He doesn't know much about my plans and my mom has asked me to tell him, because apparently he wants to meet with her while she's in the country to talk about his conerns about my brother, who is depressed, and mom doesn't want to have to keep my secrets.  So the next time I see my dad I have to have a serious talk with him, which I look forward to about as much as a root canal.

The bookbinding class I took opened some kind of creative floodgate for me and I've been daydreaming and sketching designs for books and shoes.  I ordered a reprint of a shoemaking book from the author.  I really don't have time to work on crafts right now, but I feel a need to do so. 

In my garden, the potatoes seem to have shed their bugs, and my reliable Roma tomatoes are about to ripen their first fruits.  I don't know what I'll do with them, because I'm not crazy about raw tomatoes like so many poeple seem to be, and preserving food right now seems foolish, as I'm trying to clean out my freezer and pantry ahead of my move.  I suppose I'll take a bunch to the food bank and see if its true that they accept fresh vegetables.  My grape vine is finally growing this year after taking two years to get settled (thanks in part to my husband weed-whacking it twice).  I've had bad luck with berries, but I have two blackberries setting fruit.  I wonder what the fate of this garden will be in the months to come, as it is subject to the chaos of our lives.

Stressed Out

Of the 5 adults in my immediate family: my parents, my brother, my husband and me; all of us have been affected by the economic downturn, 4 of the 5 having lost a job or suffered a large reduction in earnings and mom having suffered losses in her retirement funds.  I think all of us are suffering some feelings of isolation and depression.  My mother told me yesterday that she's had to see a counselor because she is so upset about my situation and our plans.  I give her stress, and she returns the favor: now she tells me she doesn't care enough about her stuff that's in our house to pay for shared storage when we move.  So all the stuff I'm going to want to send for when I settle down somewhere, including hundreds of books, my pots and pans and dishes, craft supplies and tools, household linens, clothes, and a couple of pieces of family heirloom furniture, I now have to figure out how to store.  My brother and my dad both rent rooms in someone else's house, and my husband plans to do the same, so there's no one to keep stuff for me, and I'll have no choice but to spend a large chunk of my very limited income on a rented storage space for a while.  I don't understand why my mother, who often throws money at us, is balking at paying for the storage, and making me feel like a moocher for even mentioning it.  Obviously we need to talk about the ground rules of this relationship, because they are not clear to me. 

My husband showed up for the weekend, and I dearly needed his help.  But still, I wish he weren't here.  My husband has an unfortunate character flaw: when I am distraught, rather than offering support or even indifference, he turns savagely cruel.  It's a trait that makes it hard not to hate him.  Considering I'm facing a job loss and the disintegration of my marriage, preparing for an international move and for economic and cultural decline, all while raising a difficult child mostly on my own, I think it's pretty understandable that I feel like crying or screaming much of the time.  I can't have someone around who makes me feel much worse.  He managed to make me feel bad again about taking his son away, before he started telling me that I shouldn't worry about our son's future because (in the event that I can't support him, I guess) he has a father who is, he proudly boasts, willing and able to pay someone to take care of him 24 hours a day, and who will send him to public school where he will learn to be social, instead of homeschooling him like his crazy mother wants to.  And that my desire to see my son happy, well-educated and well-adjusted makes me "the most stubborn, pig-headed person in the world".  Thank you dear for unburdening me of guilt.

Not all is gloomy and I am trying to think positively.  I found a garden task suitable for a 2-and-a-half-year-old to participate in: picking potato bugs and dropping them in soapy water.  I took a leatherworking class and made a Coptic-stitched hand-bound leather book, which was fun and stress-relieving.  I long to do more leatherworking but it's hard to do anything at home.  My mom is sending me two books about living in Panama, and I am looking forward to reading them.  We desperately need to settle on a destination we can both get excited about, and I am trying not to be so attached to my picture of what that needs to be.  I made a prioritized list of requirements and asked my mom to do the same.  She will be here in less than a week!

What the Hell am I Doing?

I've been doing the kind of crying that makes you feel like your guts have been turned inside out.  Partly it's hormones - isn't everything hormones?  Partly it's because Netflix picked entirely the wrong time to send me The Bridges of Madison County. And partly it's frustration from trying to live in two worlds, and not knowing what the hell I'm doing in either of them. 

My husband is working out of town for unpredictable numbers of days now, then showing up suddenly in the middle of the night without telling me he's coming.  His presence should be a relief, but increasingly it seems he comes home only to criticize me, fight, and yell at our son.  When he's not here I'm alone with an intense, demanding two-and-a-half-year-old, and barely able to keep up with the most urgent household tasks.  Yesterday evening I locked my son in the house while I worked outside, because I could not get anything done between retrieving him every two minutes from the neighbors' yard and from our front yard, where I can't see him from the garden.  If we could afford to fence the yard, my life would be a lot easier.  For about 45 minutes while I turned a compost pile and watered some seeds I had planted, my son stood at the window crying (and then he made me pay for it the rest of the night).  As I worked, I felt like I was doing the wrong thing.  I thought, what is the point of trying to learn to homestead if it means I have to neglect my child's needs?  I'm living in this crazy modern world of isolation and independence (and speeding cars and potential kidnappers), urgently trying to learn how to live in the other world that's coming, but without the support system that world generally offers. My mother doesn't want me move anyone else into her house who isn't family, even though we have 4 bedrooms.  My job is about to end, and even the hour a day I have to run errands between work and picking my son up from the babysitter's is about to disappear.  I won't be able to afford to pay a babysitter in order to pick beans or organize my belongings, much less to take some "me time" like the parenting books suggest.  Instead of getting more done at home when I'm unemployed, it's quite possible I'll actually accomplish less; and instead of being a better parent, I'll probably be a worse one.  Realistically, the odds of getting everything done I need to do in order to leave the country this year are pretty darn close to zero, and what I do get done will be because I've parked my child in front of the T.V.

All this has put me in a rare mood, and when my husband corralled me into the bedroom today for my semi-weekly duty, I told him, "I don't want you to come here anymore.  I want a separation."  I don't know yet what the consequences of this will be, in concrete terms.  The first words out of his mouth were about how he's going to have to start paying hookers.  It used to bother me when he said that, thinking that some poor exploited woman is going to have to take my place because she has no choice, but I'm no longer willing to take this particular bullet for all womankind. 

The other part of all this is the doubts I'm having about my plan.  Going to my in-laws' makes sense because I'd have child care, a free place to stay, and people to show me the ropes as I learn third-world subsistence living at my own pace. On the other hand, I don't want to get too settled in there, or ship a bunch of my stuff there.  I don't know exactly how I'm going to find another place to live with a built-in support system.  None of this information is new, it's just hitting home with more impact as the clock ticks down.

My Mom's Visit

In about 2 weeks my mom arrives for a visit.  She lives in Okinawa, where she is a civilian employed by the military, so we don’t see her very often.  This is a visit I’m not particularly looking forward to because we are overdue for a serious talk.  Mom and I have been planning to live together when she retires, a suggestion I made and was very surprised she accepted.  She likes the idea of living somewhere where her retirement money will go farther, and where the climate is warm.  She has been reading books about retiring overseas and studying Spanish with Rosetta Stone.  She has lived overseas for years, although always in the protective shadow of U.S. military bases, and with luxurious housing and plenty of money.  She has also lived alone for years and we already know we’re going to have some very basic getting-along issues with living together, without all the extra issues I’m going to pile on. 

We can’t agree on a destination.  Based on what she’s read, she likes Panama; I’ve never been there, and I’m trying to keep an open mind, but I have my doubts about the culture, climate, and the prospects for a country so dependent on fossil fuels and on the USA (at least, this is my impression of it).  I love Mexico.  Mom thinks, as most Americans these days do, that Mexico is too dangerous.  I tell her that’s like saying Vermont is too dangerous because of crime you’ve read about in Detroit, but she points out we’ll want to cross the northern border occasionally.  I love the culture of Mexico.  Mind you, I’m no fan of human sacrifice, but what survives in present-day Central Mexico of the Aztec and other cultures is rich, unique, and valuable.  (Unlike the surviving remnants of Mayan culture farther south, which doesn’t seem to do its beneficiaries a great deal of good.)  From what I’ve seen, I don’t find the Afro-Caribbean cultures, which is what I think Panama most closely resembles, appealing or very practical.  I also prefer a slightly cooler, higher altitude climate; mom likes the beach.  Clearly, some traveling together is called for to settle on a destination, at least one trip to each country.  But her vacation time will limit that and there might be a year between trips, which might be enough delay to render the second trip unfeasible, effectively forcing us to choose kind of blindly.

Then there are the issues like transportation and housing: mom is going to want a car and a car-friendly place, while I want a horse and a horse-friendly place; mom is going to want to live close to shopping and other American retirees; I like urban settings but also long for land and livestock.  Mom is going to want to rent an apartment, I’m going to want to buy a homestead.  She’s going to feel like she gets the deciding vote, and she does, because she’s the one with the money.  But when the money is gone or worthless, and mom is old and sickly (never having been of very robust health), she’s going to need us – how do I keep from using that probability to get a little leverage for myself?  Finally, our values are just so different.  I was horrified that after the disaster in Japan, her only concern was when her electricity would come back on.  She has taken trips to volunteer in China before but I haven’t heard a word about making any sacrifices to help the Japanese or even to determine what help they might need.  She doesn’t prepare for disasters herself, but blindly trusts governments and social institutions to keep her safe.  She is generous with her family and friends, but feels no personal, individual responsibility to the greater world. 

So, some not-fun talking is in order.  Communication is difficult for us.  Mom is very sensitive, and one cross word from me inevitably leads to a lot of drama, which leads to eye-rolling from me because I don’t really want to have a long tearful talk about why I said something snappy, I just want to apologize and get on with it.  I could go on – the point is, we get on each others’ nerves, and we have conflicting styles of dealing with that annoyance.   

But I think that somehow we have to learn to live together.  Otherwise I might be stuck with my husband, whose ignorant and increasingly harmful parenting practices are not what I want my son to grow up with.  If I could design the culture I want to live in, it would look something like one I read about somewhere – African, I think? – where women sleep with whoever they want, and raise their children with the help of their brothers and the rest of the maternal family.  (Of course this happens locally too, but I mean for it to be accepted as right, as normal, rather than dysfunctional.)

And as for Mom, neither I nor she knows what she’ll do if she doesn’t live with us.  She hadn’t given the first thought to retirement when I first asked her about it, and she was 51 at the time. 

To me, the fact that this is even a dilemma, that such choices are possible and have to be made, that such distance exists between generations and within pretty typical families, is just another sign that American culture has drifted so far from the normal human condition.

Oh, and on top of all this, we have a lot of work to do.  We have to make decisions about all the excessive stuff we have - what to store for shipment and what to get rid of.  What to do with the house.  Not looking forward to it.