2009 Was A Bad Year: Installment One
2009 was a bad year. It began like any other year, marked by resentment over not being able to think of a viable resolution, and not entirely determined to make any real changes anyway. I was ass-deep in a relationship with someone who was non-committal, and who was nonplussed by my primary role in life- motherhood. I had agreed several months prior to playing the piano in the band for a 4-day church retreat that was coming up. And I was experiencing a surfeit of stress at work, with layoffs hitting our company at the first of every month like clockwork. For the first time in almost three years, I started smoking pot again, a vestige of my moral deterioration, since I had promised myself in June of 2006 that I would not engage in use or abuse of any controlled substance again. One.
In February, I left for the church retreat, leaving my son in the care of my grandmother. Before leaving, I forgot or neglected to pay my utility bill, and my electricity was cut off, forcing my grandmother to take my son to my mother’s house, forcing my mother to have to babysit them both for the ensuing four days. At the retreat, my role was that of pianist, but I had also been elected a speaker, necessitating a 15-minute oral delivery on a spiritual realization or journey. It was something I had wanted to do for a couple of years, since my return from rehab and subsequent return to the church. Church symbolized, for me, something that was an integral part of my upbringing, and something I knew to be important in the proper rearing of a child. But, at the same time, feeling 100% sure of God- or A god’s existence was forever something with which I’d struggled. I arrived at the retreat, my 15-minute speech a blank piece of paper. Part of the process is asking for and receiving advice, proof-reading, editing, from other people, and so naturally, I was loathe to be approached by anyone for fear they would find out I hadn’t even begun to compose it. In the end, I drank two glassfuls of a fiber supplement on an empty stomach before bedtime, knowing that it would make me feel AND appear ill. It worked, and the next morning I was able to make a pitiful but understandable request for reprieve. Someone else at the retreat had to step up to the plate and prepare an impromptu oratory in my stead, and I felt ashamed and selfish. It was indicative of another personal failure. This is the point at which my family would later mark my descent into dejection. Two.
In March, after playing piano at a friend’s wedding, I joined the person I was seeing at a party thrown by his friends. Because he was a recent college graduate, most or all of his friends were still in school, throwing keggers and sleeping with each other and loving Ecstasy and mushrooms. I don’t think I’d been to a house party with blacklights in four or five years, and I’m positive I hadn’t missed anything about it. Insecurity got the best of me- young sire was talking to girls who I told myself looked like supermodels next to me- methodical self-deprecation I'd made into an art form. The more beer I drank, the angrier and more vindictive I became. Next, I was giving a lesson in French kissing to a boy who was a willing student, and also my beau’s good friend. And so, the night’s festivities capitulated with my date interrupting the make-out session, leaving, and locking me out of his apartment. He finally let me in, presumably because my car keys and various personal effects were in his living room, but I stayed long enough to articulate an apology that granted me overnight access. In the morning, during a post-coital conversation, he essentially dumped me in a very Don’t Let The Door Hit You fashion.
It wasn’t the breakup; the relationship had been non-climactic and inappropriate. He was never someone I cared about, nor someone with whom I desired a future. It was the feeling I had going home that morning, looking around my house that I should have been home cleaning, the laundry I should have been doing, the pictures I could have been hanging in my son’s room. It felt remarkably similar to the way I felt on the morning I lost my virginity (a terrible experience) in that I knew I’d met an end result that was in direct correlation to composite decisions I had been making. My heart hurt; I was penitent. Three.
April arrived, and my big brother, who I love to death, got married to a woman I love to death. It was an incredibly happy weekend, and I was loathe to return to a less than nurturing work environment that following Monday. Barely four hours into my workday, I was listed among thirty-one people being laid off that day. My stomach crawled up into my throat and my eyes cried without actually crying. Since November, I’d been ostensibly aware of the imminence of the events of that day, but I was as unprepared, both emotionally and financially, as I would have been if it had come unexpectedly. For me, that “job” was more than just a job; it was a place I went to every morning, and before leaving every night, had the distinct privilege of helping people and getting paid to do it. My coworkers were like family and my clients, more often than not, were people deserving of so much more than they’d been given the opportunity to have or to experience. So being let go was bigger than just knowing that my bank account would soon be depleted and bigger than the threat of unemployment. It was, for lack of a better term, sort of an end of an era. I had to return home to a child whose father was already the picture of Unemployment. This, I knew, was defeat exemplified. Four.
