Life’s a Traveling Circus
Life’s a Traveling Circus
It’s cold this morning. Not at all like preliminary summer. I can see the wind trembling the pine needles and tossing the oak branches. The dog’s asleep on the bed. And this is my husband’s second full day without a job. It’s the second day in 46 years, barring a bout with pneumonia, a broken arm, torn knee ligaments, and sparse vacations, that he hasn’t gotten up at 5:30 in the morning and gone to work.
It’s the weirdest feeling, to be out of a job. I was involuntarily retired in 2009, and it took me like a year at least to not feel guilty because I wasn’t at work. I still feel strange about it. You tell yourself in the beginning that “now I’ll have all the time to do the stuff I’ve always loved”, (writing, painting, making jewelry, knitting, cooking) but instead you wander aimlessly around. Thinking, “I should be doing something productive”. But what?
For me ‘something productive’ means something that brings in a paycheck. Things that don’t bring in a paycheck are frivolous, time-wasters, snatched out of the odd hours between work, cooking, housekeeping, finances, and errands. They’re NOT ‘productive’. Hence, the guilt. And the lost soul.
They say change is the one inevitable thing in this world, and yet we’ve gone all through our married life believing that change would never happen to us. And then 9 years ago our son and his family moved out of state, and a couple years later our daughter followed, and change has been creeping up on us ever since. First sneaking into trips to their houses, grandkids asking why we had to go (“you tay here wit me, Bumpy”), and our explanations that never really answered why their little persons were so easy to leave. Then iChat sessions and phone calls that made us miss them even more and drove home how far removed we are from their everyday lives, and just how long we’ve been suffering that remove. Children need loving families, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, so they know they’re not adrift in this world.
Now change has smacked us with the equivalent of a two-by-four to the back of the head. Ever since our daughter moved I’ve been nagging my husband to leave, to re-locate, to re-unite. I tell everybody I see I’m moving, I’m going . . . and subconsciously I must’ve felt safe saying that because I knew Mike would never leave his job. And now that he has no job?
I’m scared.
My daughter-in-law asks me every time she calls if I’ve put the house on the market, and I have a jillion excuses. She doesn’t even listen to them anymore. And she’s right not to. She keeps me honest, even if I won’t admit it to her.
I’m scared.
I’ve lived in this place 47 years, in this house 38 years. Mike was born here. It’s frightening. It’s easier when you’re younger, another excuse I give my son. He scoffs. And he’s right, too.
Once when we were visiting, we took the grandkids to see Up, the Pixar movie about the widower who tied balloons onto his house and drifted to South America, to Paradise Falls, his wife’s dream destination. I loved it. It made me cry, but it gave me hope. You’re never too old for an adventure. And recently I saw the movieThe Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I’ve now watched it about seven times. I love it too, and it also makes me cry. But at the end, when Judi Dench says “Nothing’s turned out the way I expected”, Maggie Smith replies, “It usually doesn’t. But sometimes, what you get instead, that’s the good stuff.”
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