I)
Any time I try to make sense my life, and especially what my early 30s were, I will always need to address my two great black holes. I think I have even achieved escape velocity from their event horizons, which would be impossible if they were real black holes. . . but this is just a metaphor.
The first black hole to mention is my time of grief. In the period of one year and ten days, I lost my grandfather (who was and is my clearest vision of what a man should be),
my father , and then
my uncle. Right before the last death, my grandmother had a major fall that left her hospitalized. She was put in a facility for skilled nursing, and when she came out she had to leave her home of many years and go to assisted living. My uncle had got the ball rolling on the assisted living before he passed, but as you can imagine my role in my grandmother's care enlarged significantly.
The year and ten days of trauma after trauma was one thing, but the pain dragged out with bad interpersonal relations and coping skills from the survivors. Grief can bring out the worst in people. And the more you try to overcome that, the more you can get sucked in, until you are well past your limit. “If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family,” sure
Ram, but also you could see them every weekend, either bunched on one day or spread out between Saturday and Sunday. . . In any case, it wasn't part of the healing process, at least not for me or my wife. I could have used that time, but more I needed the energy and emotional space. That's black hole #1. If I can dare to say I have escaped it, that has only happened recently. For two years, I couldn't really function, and it's been a slow, almost imperceptibly slow, build up since then.
The other black hole was coaching debate. It was a great way to work 80 to 100 hour weeks, with sub- minimum wage compensation for the extra hours beyond my teaching contract. But payment wasn't really the problem; that's just the most persuasive thing I can say to convince most people why I left. The real deal was that I lost the faith. . . When I started out, I believed in the activity and its meaning. I thought it was a way to help young people find the life of the mind, and move beyond pettiness. I thought I was making real ground, on growing a community, and that I could be part of it and belong. When it became clear to me that it was just a cesspool of elitism my reason for continuing collapsed.
While it's sad to know so much of my effort has been wasted, it shows how hard I can work and how much I can delay gratification. If turned toward reasonable pursuits, maybe I could really get somewhere.
II)
I wrote an email to a friend where he commented where I was in the healing process. I retread some of the the ground above, but it also takes the spin of how fortunate I have been both before and after the worst of it.
This is a second draft of that text:
I don't know if I'd say I'm further along in recovery as much as my trauma was sharp and, all things considered, relatively short. Before those times, I would say I had an unusually blessed life, particularly adjusted for being a child of the American working class. By working class I mean the more internationally accepted use of the term, as well as the U.S.'s garbled and relatively new invention. My father was a high school drop out and my mother did not attend college. She was a homemaker for a few key stretches but had many forays in working retail. When their work life got too frustrating for either of them, they took turns with who would work while the other would figure something out.
But, again, I was blessed. If I had not been an only child, I imagine we would have been in danger of really tough economic decisions and the emotional defects of my parents would have really shown. Instead, I got to do what I wanted. The television was always fucking on, but at least if I went into another room there wasn't some sibling there to bother me. I could live in my head and be as weird as I was without comparisons to some more normal Other that my parents would have no choice but to favor. Again, I thank all fates that this Other never existed -- I would have seen clearly what base things really thrilled my parents and what an enabler my mother was, and I would have seen these things as a child, rather than have them come to light in my late twenties and through candid conversations with my wife. Not understanding your parents flaws because they are not openly manifesting themselves . . . now that's a blessed childhood.
The other component was living so close to grandparents (my father's parents). You could say that my father was downwardly mobile working class, but considering where my grandpa came from, it might be more accurate to see his income as a temporary spike, riding the wave of U.S. empire, serving in the Korean War, and then working in the National Guard and [redacted] Air Force Base. He was an unassuming man, frugal rather than cheap, but frugal in a time when his career path meant you could have a stay-at-home wife, retire in your 50s, and with any financial prudence whatsoever could still have a large savings rate. He was an old-school useful man who could make home repairs. But what was best is that he never felt he had anything better to do then spend time with whoever he was with. He didn't impose an agenda, he didn't have any way you needed to improve. Come as you are. (And, yes, that is also how you get a downwardly mobile child -- but I am more interested in waxing poetic on what is passed right now).
My grandma was an artist with no need to make money, but who was good enough to sell some pieces and did so to defray some costs of supplies. But even when she was in the middle of a project, she would drop it for company, and never make you feel you were disrupting anything. Art was a sponge for her time when there were not people to be present for. My grandparents had a special grace for life, and were easy people to be around, and though it added to my pain during the darkest years, I am glad I had the good sense to be around them, visiting something like 90% of Sundays from the time I was able to drive until . . . the end.
My father absorbed some of grandparents' nobility. My wife really noticed it. It's a kind of un-American accept-you-as-you-are that outsiders can't fully perceive the miracle of if all they have seen is what is how the people in this horrible place act. To an American, you always need an upgrade, and you should be made aware of that -- but ideally you are made aware of this so subtly that the blame cannot be pinned for the feelings of unease. Plausible deniability with these bastards. To a Huddleston, on the other hand, you just are. But the Huddlestons are dead.
When they died, I was working 80-100 hour weeks, thinking I was changing the world with great teaching and coaching debate. Death was one thing, but the real trauma was working so much and then spending my weekends with the widows. I had no time, no space to grieve, but got to be trapped in their competitive grief. You would think with grandma losing her husband and all of her children, we could just hand her that -- but then you wouldn't know my mother. Kipling opens the great poem:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
It often is that second part that makes you finally break.
My Grandpa and father were already dead when, on her birthday, my grandma had a fall and remained on the floor for almost 24 hours before she was found. She never was to live in her house again. While she was in rehabilitation, my uncle picked out a room at an assisted living facility. Before my grandma was moved in, he also died. My mom was unemployed at the time and this got her way too involved in the situation. It was fucked up, and typing it up it's kind of humorous -- thinking of an enabler getting outwitted by someone with dementia. And, again, it was news to me that my mom was an enabler. I just never had enough demons or bad habits to invoke this tendency in her toward me.
As for Grandma, while she harmoniously fit into the Huddleston thing when she had her wits, her freedom, and her privileges, I cannot say it was a positive experience when she was far along with dementia. She was clutching, she was bitter, and she wanted to let me know over and over that my life would never get better -- it was like her dementia catch-phrase for a while there. But I could have handled all of that better without my mom's bullshit (and I could have handled mom's bullshit better without having to deal with grandma on Sundays).
I just could not escape. It hurt and hurt. Something had to give. And for a while, that something was my career.
Well, that's it, really. Short and sharp, I would say. And maybe only sharp because I hadn't had life tough enough to deal with bad stuff when it came up (that was a huge part of Grandma's problem, to be honest. It's hard to imagine a life better than hers until it was suddenly terrible). One year of trauma, then three years of healing with family stuff being the problem, and lastly one transition year of me trying to find my place. It doesn't bother me at all that it is a place similar to one I've been in before.
