This has been a long, hot summer. I have, or had, been stuck in the Re-Birth Canal with the lights out, just kind of sitting there pondering how much I should do to un-stick myself, or just wait and see what happens. I’ve been remembering a lot of early reading because of my predicaments: Persig, Watts, Casteneda (without the peyote of course) – forces of fate, deliberateness, pushing/pulling, cogs in wheels, not wanting to emphasize one way or the other as everything factored into everything else. There was a lot of momentum for me in my thoughts and words in the early summer. Some of it came as a routine evolved in our baby-filled household; I could write clearly and more freely and could sleep a bit more. But as the summer progressed it became hotter and hotter, and hotter still. New milestones emerged for baby and with it new routines and sporadic sleep. My physical family was in the Midwest dealing with life changes; my psychic family was undergoing metamorphosis as well. Furthermore, the economic blunder that has descended upon our country, our world, finally had descended upon us. As business owners we had several choices to make, all of which required waiting, creating a game of Tetrus out of our lives. I might have had more fun watching paint dry. But wait, I actually like watching paint dry. It’s the artist in me. I like to see what happens. But I use acrylics over oils. The results are quicker. I could feel isolation, sadness and depression, anxiety even, creeping up on me. I hadn’t quite anticipated this during Re-Birth, but I should have. I know better.
This summer in Arizona was particularly hot, even by native Arizonan standards. July was marked by many days around or over 110 degrees, challenging even the most resilient of desert cacti. When I became pregnant, I felt fortunate that I wasn’t going to spend my third trimester cooking my Easy Bake Oven in the searing heat. I’d heard from other friends how they spent as much time as possible floating in the pool during the hot summer months, wishing instead for ice baths, but it usually ceased to curb their extreme pregnancy symptoms. I learned the hard way: raising an infant during the summer in Arizona sucks. Too hot to take the baby outside, I felt isolated and alone, confined to the house suffering a summer version of extreme cabin fever. Many friends heard me say that I felt like Bill Murray in “Groundhog’s Day”: get up with baby, feed, change, play, read, all day, everyday, boobs included, always noting the time.
The pool was a diversion, but only when the east side of the house became shaded around four o’clock. The giant air-conditioned mall wasn’t really a great diversion or of great interest. Recently a girlfriend told me that there were only so many times she could buy things at the mall only to return them, just to stay out of the heat. I couldn’t even imagine packing up just to go anywhere. I cringed at the thought of boob sweat as soon as I walked out the door. I began resenting even living in Arizona. I thought of how wasteful we can become living in such a hot place – constant air conditioning, our water use and so on. I also became frustrated that we lived so far away from family who could offer to take the baby for a while, giving me a much needed break. It’s really about childcare. Just a break from the constant watchful eye would have been reprieve. But it wasn’t to be. It was what it was: I was raising a baby in this summer heat away from support. I did what I could to stay sane. Sleep was a huge factor.
A grounding force and humbling nemesis has been sleep deprivation. I still breastfeed Luna. Breast milk digests more quickly than formula and so she’s hungry a bit more often. It isn’t like she’s not sleeping. She is. She still takes three naps a day and sleeps 12 or 13 hours a night. It’s just that our schedules run in increments of one to four hours at a time, because I have to breastfeed her about five or six times a day. So sleep still comes mostly when I can get it, resulting in broken sleep. This is what I experienced all summer long. After a few days of that I become very, very grumpy. I know it, examine it, talk to my husband about it, take a nap and hope that I can feel rejuvenated upon awakening. This definitely did not help the emotional lows this summer, making it difficult to determine what was true: Was I really depressed or was my lack of sleep numbing my senses? I couldn’t tell and didn’t know, so I just decided to stick to the basics – sleep when I could, write when I could, exercise and cook when I felt like it, play with baby a lot, sing a lot, and keep talking to my husband about it. Communication, empathy and being easier on myself have been tremendous ointments, but there is a definite act of resurrection that comes with it.
So with this heat came dreams of leaving Arizona during the summers and maybe forever. We’d discussed it before, knowing our year-round commitment to Arizona would not last, but raising baby here had expedited our thinking. Our Midwest family had been going through tough changes – death, dying, grief on all levels, and there were happy times, too – and we looked forward to sharing baby. We planned several trips to Michigan. Despite the difficulty traveling with an infant, the change in weather was welcome and a relief. Grandmothers took baby on stroller rides while husband and I tip-toed away for a drink, or I simply showered freely. We spent time with all of the Great-Grandparents, giving my Grandfather a chance to meet the baby before he died. We traveled to Chicago, a place we’d lived before, to investigate possibilities of living there again, the city giving us what we needed as a family: stimulation, energy, culture, and proximity to the rest of the family. Yes, this is what we would do. It all seemed clear. But it wasn’t clear. None of it, except leaving for the summer, was clear, because we had other issues to tackle. Primarily, we were waiting for answers regarding my husband’s business – and greater universal answers — something about which we have mostly kept quiet until recently.
Failure. The death of something. Closing, shutting, can be humbling, braking, trying experiences.
My husband’s core business has been selling raw land online, particularly on eBay. It sounds kind of funny if you know him, or know anything about eBay or about real estate. It’s a completely unconventional form of investing, buying and selling, but it is very much alive. One can buy or sell purses, shoes, computers, and paper clips on eBay, and there is land for sale, too. Selling land is not my husband’s background. Rather, he’s a computer geek, a data junky, whose specialty is technological optimization – he makes things better using data and computers. It just so happened that he applied these skills to a business venture with his business partner, which included selling raw land virtually, and it worked for many years. We all worked hard, we played hard, we invested in our future and in our community. About a year ago, all of his hard work – many hours, weekends, sweat equity and investment – was becoming less and less fruitful as the economic downfall made its way toward us. We were beginning to wonder what was going to happen and seriously began contemplating next moves – mostly with anticipation, interest, nervousness and excitement. But we were also plagued by the unknown, by hard facts and, for me in part, a guilty conscience.
It was eerie. We could sense the tsunami effect of the Great Recession slowly but surely making its way toward the commercial end of the spectrum, and it was hitting my husband’s business on two fronts. From one side, echoing the residual effects of the home/bank lending mess, folks were having trouble finding ways to fund their land purchases – no more loans, no more credit, no more investing. Unless a person had cash, folks had to find other new or more creative ways to purchase land, directly impacting my husband’s business. From the other side, he owned a beautiful building in Old Town Scottsdale with four office suites, newly renovated by him and his business partner. As business after business closed and loans were cut off to business owners, fewer people were able to rent or stay in business, crippling my husband’s ability to pay for his own asset. Soon his building shared a common characteristic with neighboring buildings among the many Scottsdale blocks: a “For Sale or Lease” sign was posted in front of it. His building was one of the last to fall because they kept trying to make it work. But the area was a ghost town. With less money coming in and an investment that had now become an anchor, there was a huge burden.
Then there was the issue of our home, which, like his building as well as the homes of so many others in this country, was and is completely upside down. There is no equity left and it has significantly depreciated in value. Add to it the mortgage payments and the effort is worthless. Rumor has it that in the greater Phoenix area it will take at least five years for the situation to change. It became a question of good business sense, once we were able to let go of thinking about it emotionally, as to what we should do with these “assets.” Do we walk away from them or do we try all of the tricks that can help one get out of a home respectfully, such as a short sale or renting? How does my husband leave his business as positively as possible? What should we do as we plan for the next phase of life? All of these issues — the push/pull of “homes,” the crushing blows of defeat, the cogs in the wheel of life and a need to be quenched…and sleep – made for an increasingly tense summer, a loss of creative energy and my being stuck in the Re-Birth Canal.
As entrepreneurs we are inherently risk takers. It is not unlike us to move about, mentally and physically, chew on ideas, experience big highs and big lows. So dealing with all of this, toying with these notions of moving up and moving on, leaving and going – change – isn’t very difficult for us. However, I think it’s in the doses that left me sitting stone stupid, feeling flat, tired, stuck: depressed. It would seem that I’ve had mine, that we’ve had ours, in recent years and that surely this time of challenges has passed. But I know enough to remember that there is never just one or the other, just a high or just a low: there is always something being created. In times of peace a storm is always brewing. In times of despair, spring always, always comes.
So this mixed bag was upon us: a new baby, a debilitating heat, families far away and needing each other, suffering, and great loss, as well as opportunities and growth abounding. A first step in the decision-making process was dealing with my husband’s building. He and his partner put a lot of work into that space and it was a beauty. His staff used to occupy two of the suites among the four. Now it was just the two of them bringing in what they could and closing shop. But with fewer land sales, no renters able to fill the spaces and the building essentially without value, he and his business partner chose to walk away from it, which left the fate of the building and ours in the hands of the bank. If he suffered its loss he hardly let on. We know that the building will go up for auction in January. We will know then if he is responsible for anything else.
Then there was the decision to move and for what purpose, which I know began to cloud my judgment. Earlier this summer, our decision to move back to the Midwest was based on a need to be closer to family but also to be immersed in a city with a stronger pulse, especially geared toward my husband’s line of work. Chicago was at the top of the list. But after this long summer and considering everyone’s needs, we considered moving back to our hometown in Michigan for a year to be closer — literally as close as possible — to our families. This hiatus would enable everyone to be together, to help each other, and for me and my husband to take our time searching for the proper pad in Chicago as well as begin the next stage of our creative/work process. It seemed logical, right even. We were sure about the rental market there, and we began thinking about how we would move and when. A trip back to Michigan was required.
Michigan was busy. We looked for housing, we all tried to spend time together, and everyone tried to have some baby time. My Grandmother was a new widow. My Mother and stepfather were trying to figure out how their lives go with lung cancer in it. And there was only one house available. It was old – like mid-1800s old – beautiful but extremely musty and not move-in ready. We went back and forth on the house. We even considered temporarily sharing space with family just so we could start the ball rolling. That wasn’t right either. With no other options we moved forward with the plans to lease the old house, which enabled us to start thinking about the move. The plan was to return to Phoenix and pack; I’d return to Michigan early with baby to make the house ready for occupancy. In-laws would fly in to help us, we’d have a huge sale, we’d pack and purge. We could do this, surely.
We returned to Phoenix exhausted, but we were also becoming disillusioned. We also arrived to find a package from our mortgage bank with an offer we couldn’t refuse: a reduction of our mortgage payment that appropriately reflected the times and our significant financial loss. This would not have happened without the persistence of my husband and a very obliging bank. Furthermore, we heard virtually nothing from the realty company about the rental property in Michigan. And one more thing: the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. We found ourselves immersed in our little oasis in the desert clearly recognizing that we were trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, and that our home is where we are right now, at this moment during the glorious eight months out of the year.
The more we talked about it the less sense it made; we were trying to organize chaos. It wasn’t that it was simply hot in Phoenix or that I was sleep deprived. It’s that in these last couple of years the gods had a board meeting and decided that we were to have a heaping mess of shitty challenges placed before us. These challenges included new life, death and cancers, coping with grief, marriages, estrangement, troubled economies, evaluation and reevaluation, distance, time, patience, wondering, wanting and waiting. I don’t suppose it’s any different from many other families currently dealing with the added stressors of economy or anything else. I just happen to be talking about mine out of cathartic necessity and as it pertains to baby and sleep deprivation, depression and loss of creative fire.
At eighty-two degrees I could now take the baby outside, I could open the windows, I could smell the earth relax again, not cook. Our lives could continue on our terms, a fortunate result we know we are blessed to have. There was no figuring what to keep or sell, how to move all of our crap, or how to cope from afar. There was simply coping. My husband has been able to successfully close his businesses, which is really a blessing in disguise, for when the creative life calls we must answer as best we can, as much as we can. Without the push he may not have returned to his roots. He bought some time to truly think about next steps.
As for me, there is a book I read which talks about the Ego being on a short leash. Patience and my Ego had a test of endurance this summer. My Ego almost won. I imagine it like one of the “Loony Toons” cartoons, where Foghorn Leghorn spanks the dog with the big paddle and then runs away knowing that the dog is chained to the doghouse. But sometimes the dog gets loose and sneaks up behind Foghorn Leghorn and occasionally gets to kick his ass. That was my Ego this summer, the dog. It got loose momentarily. It caught up with guilt – the being so far away part – and they had their way with me, just long enough to make it really hard to see for awhile.
And I remembered this. I remembered this knowledge at the same time the fog lifted and answers also came our way (I’m all of a sudden remembering “The Holy Grail” when the clouds part and God speaks to Arthur). And I knew we were right where we were supposed to be. I stopped clenching my teeth, no more headaches, much better sleep, just because we were doing the right thing. We moved Luna into her own room finally; we rock to sleep and play with pink dumptrucks. I repotted some plants. We’re doing some painting and unpacking of old and new. We’re taking it easier. The weather is fabulous and we take Lu on stroller rides and Bjorn walks around the neighborhood, adult beverages in hand. I also am able to write again. The creative waters aren’t so murky now. In fact, they aren’t really murky at all, it’s simply a matter of finding and making time. There is joy once again as depression has lifted, about that I am sure. Sadness comes and goes, but I’ve lost and am losing important men in my life, and the women of my life are full-bore into life changes, and I miss the rest of the families everywhere; I just wish I could be there to hug them more often. I am far away, yes, but my husband and I have everything we need right here to get by and be fed. I feel as though my psychic family finally figured it out big time this time; I have been exorcised. Hopefully soon our families can figure out how to be closer in vicinity. In time. As a friend and I discussed recently, in the fall anything can happen – and it has. And in spring everything can happen. And it will.
And let there be no doubt: we also will get the hell out of Arizona for the summers from now on.
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