/pokes dead blog
/ponders
What does one do, with something so defunct?
Facebook ruined everything.
Or maybe it was just life, moving along at its breakneck pace, or me, realizing that most of what I used to write was pretention trying to be profound, written with the full awareness that I was writing for an audience (and still am, I suppose, since if I were really doing this just for me, I'd pull out the hand-written journal gathering dust in my nightstand). I don't actually expect anyone to read this now, though. And that's fine.
It was fun, for a long time, facebook. I even printed a couple years of my feed into books, and they're fantastic encapsulations of in-the-moment thoughts, funny things the kids said, commentary on the big socio-political events of the day (often more pretentious garbage on my part; I hope this realization means I have grown wiser, but it's probably just perimenopause activating whatever hormone is responsible for knocking me to the Gen X side of the Xennial spectrum, wondering why I ever bothered to care that much). But it's not really that fun anymore. so many have left that used to interact, replaced with bots and ads and ragebait.
The last five years have been a mess. Everyone knows that, of course, but it's on a personal level, too.
The Artist suffered two more strokes in 2021. These, unlike the big one in '06, were miniature...undetected, unsuspected, beyond a day of odd behavior and mild symptoms completely unlike the first. With the result that I went for over a year just... wondering what had happened. Why my affectionate, brilliant, driven genius of a life partner suddenly became apathetic, unmotivated, and immune to all exhortations to engage with his family, logging off at the end of his work day to spend six consecutive hours binge-watching television, while I homeschooled children and tried to keep every housekeeping, budget, and maintenence ball in the air with zero help. I thought he was in a depression, hardly surprising during what was still the height of covid restrictions... the lack of meaningful work from the company, the absence of the energy and excitement of his colleagues... surely once the world recovered, so would he.
But it didn't happen, and didn't happen, and... Finally, his sister's observations brought details into clarity that I'd been too close to it to see, and off we went to a neurologist. The MRI was clear. We were told he could improve, IF he'd follow the steps outlined in the doctor's instructions: basic steps of good diet, healthy exercise, meaningful mental engagement, social activity. All the things, in short, that he lacked the executive function to carry out, since what little he had to begin with as an ADHD-creative had been completely wiped out by the brain injury.
Somewhere in the course of the next four years, I got tired of beating my head against the wall. He was either incapable or unwilling to change a thing. All my pleading just resulted in resentment on my part when it fell, fruitless, to the roadside. Our old life--all its passion, its single-minded communion, its liveliness and health--was gone.
And soon, so was the stability. A few months after remote work ended and all were called back to the office, his company...That Giant Entertainment Behemoth Which Must Not Be Named... terminated him in February of 24. Suddenly. Maliciously. He could, perhaps, have fought it with an appeal to the ADA, since all they cited as reasons were direct results of the strokes. But he had never told anyone about them, afraid it would be used against him by an upper management that already had a vendetta thanks to his lack of tact in calling out the social engineering agendas the brand is now infamous for. They finally found their excuse. Gone, after 34 years... no farewell party, no thanks for everything, no severence pay. Multiple lawyers saw that 500 lb gorilla's name in our query and threw up their hands.
There's not much a 60yo stroke survivor in a niche field can do to start over. So he retired. Took his pension early, and filed for disability, which we miraculously got on the first request, thank God.
I had sought a job the previous year just to get out of a house that increasingly felt too small between remote school and remote work. There wasn't much I qualified for, with a graphic design degree, after spending 16 years homemaking, childrearing, and drawing a non-profit digital comic book. Our church hired me as a secretary. It's part time and unbenefited, but it got us through the first terrifying months until his benefits kicked in. I freelance illustration at my office there, because otherwise I'd be sitting watching youtube once the bulletins were printed, and it has kept us solvent. They are good to me, and I do not take it for granted.
It's been as hard on the kids as on me; the boys were just entering their teens, just when boys especially need a dad to show them how to be men, and he just...checked out of their lives, with no explanation. There is no healing or "moving on" from endlessly encountering this teenager-like stranger in my husband's body; no end to the need to be patient, be strong, be the adult in the house because you are the only one that actually functions like one. There is just living with who he is now, and trying to find enough similarities to who he used to be to maintain points of connection. Trying to direct my anger and resentment toward what happened, instead of toward him. Reminding myself that if the positions were reversed, he would do the same for me, because that was the man he was. Wishing there was someone in my life who would take the reins, just for a day, so I could rest. I have not slept a full night in four years.
I have a few close friends who know how it has affected me. His family knows. He has zero social life now because he doesn't go anywhere, so few of our former friends have any clue.
For the first few months after the job loss, desperate to fine any good in it, I threw myself into a fantasy of finally moving out of state. I've hated living here for 20 years and we were always stuck because of his job--too specialized, too specific to transfer anywhere except to another area I would have liked even less. I spent months pinning properties on Zillow until the map looked like the Appalachians were bleeding. We decided we'd let the kids finish the school year and then pull up stakes.
Our daughter rebelled. At thirteen, your friends are your whole life, especially when the rug has been pulled out from under your feet at home. When Dad and I left for a scouting-the-landscape road trip to Virginia, she spiraled into an anxiety attack so severe she couldn't eat, and I had to fly back mid-journey to pick her up and bring her back with us. Over the rest of that year, many things fell into place. School successes that had seemed out of reach for the oldest son. Social stability and a resurrection of old passions that had seemed to die, for middle boy, whose sensitive spirit had been hit the hardest by all the changes. People in unlikely places stepping up to me with encouragement. Eventually, I recognized the work of God in all of it.
Stay, He said. Stay here.
I grudgingly obey, not without hope that once the kids are done with school and entering their next phase, I can resurrect the dream of returning to mountains. I cling to it, in fact, even knowing that by then one or the other of them will probably have put down semi-permanent stakes here, either via career or relationships. Middle boy already thinks he's found Ms. Right, and I approve of her with all my soul, but she's got too much family here to dream of leaving. Eldest son graduates this year and has zero clue what to do with himself, so he won't be moving out any time soon. My danger now is the temptation to cling to them, make them into my emotional supports because their dad no longer fills that role, and I recognize how unhealthy that would be for them, these nascent men just guessing their way forward.
I miss being near my own family. I miss cousins and aunts and uncles and my physicially and emotionally distant parents. I hate getting older, realizing it's already begun: the slow kicking away of every pillar of my childhood, and the regret for all the times I should have put my foot down and said, "no, this year we are going to travel to see MY people" instead of defaulting to the in-laws at everu holiday to avoid the guilt trips, so that my kids would have had a wider foundation on which to build their identities, and know where to turn if it all goes south.
And it may. His official diagnosis is vascular dementia, which has an average 5-year survival rate... not because the dementia is that severe, but because the vascular events that caused it are a ticking bomb, waiting to go off again and finish the job. He is doing nothing to prevent that possibility, and I can't force him. I'm already having to meet with lawyers about how to protect our assets from his gullibility, or if he winds up needing a level of care I cannot provide. I never thought I would be having that conversation in my 40s.
I'd be lying if I said I never cried for hours in the middle of the night. If I claimed not to know that I waste so much time online because it's an escape from a life that feels empty, compared to what it used to be.
I do a lot of going through the motions. Doing the things that must be done, for no other reason. Maybe it's enough. All my favorite books are period children's literature, classic YA fantasy and coming-of-age heroism, in which the main character slogs through life-altering hardships making the right choices not because s/he knows how it will all end but because they are the right ones. Maybe it's dumb and weird, as a grown adult, to think about Sara Crewe handing her bread to a starving waif or silently enduring being scolded and cuffed because she's pretending to be a princess. But somehow it still holds up, even though my own pretender has gotten rusty.
They knew something, those authors.
I guess I should start reading again. But for now, maybe writing is a good first step.
