So I had my 30 day or quit follow up call. Sitch ends Wednesday.
I haven’t done much since that call besides sit and feel things. Had a couple conversations in which the person on the other end would never have guessed the other shoe dropped and it landed in an abyss that I’m not going to even look at (let alone stare at).
There’s a stair case and next step, but I can’t see either at the moment. And it’s okay. Knowing they are there is enough right now.
So…while I’ve been trying to manage my own head over, well, everything, something else has come up. Because, you know, there’s always something else.
Upcoming is younger’s wisdom teeth extraction; he has all four, and all four need to come out. He’s understandably anxious about it; anxiety has a way of unmasking other things.
To wit: we’re in the car heading from point A to point B. He’s reviewing what that week is going to look like; what foods he can and cannot eat. “Steak!” He exclaimed. “I won’t be able to eat steak!”
(Side note: steak is a rare treat, but the idea that he will not be able to consume it at will has him a little upset.)
I assure him we can do a celebratory steak when his mouth is healed—why not? Then his musings take on a sharp digression.
“So I can skip work that week.”
He has my full attention. I’ve noticed the last couple of weeks that he has come home from his job of two years quiet, a little surly, and deeply reflective. He suddenly is not talking about work at all, and that conversation brought him here screams for probing.
G doesn’t do well with screaming. I side-eye him waiting at the light. His jaw is set, and he’s staring ahead. The next couple of minutes are going to be tricky, and I need to choose my words carefully.
“So. Why do you want to skip work? You’ll have almost a week behind you by that point.” I’m trying to keep my tone inquisitive but neutral: any excitement will shut him down.
He shrugs. “The guys like to mess with me.”
I pause. “Do you mess with them back?”
“I try to be patient.”
Holy shit.
“Have you talked with your manager?”
He shrugs again. “She says they like me, they’re only fooling around.”
And this is where I take a deep breath to shut down the screaming in my own head. The calmness in my response shocks me, because I AM NOT CALM. I have spent the better part of the last decade learning to trust my own senses and feelings after a lifetime of being told that I “take things too personally,” or whoever was “just kidding around” or that someone “hopes I get the help I need,” for clearly, I am crazy for feeling what I feel.
I’ll be damned if either of my guys get stuck in that particular prison.
“That,” I reply, it seems a billion years later, “is unacceptable.”
He shrugs again.
“No, really. This is where you tell them to stop. And if they don’t, SHE needs to tell them to stop. And if she doesn’t,” I shrug, “there are lots of other places where you can work.”
“But they feed me.” Very matter of fact.
I laugh. So G. “But is it worth it, if they are making you feel a certain way, and it doesn’t stop?”
We leave it there for the moment.
He comes home from work yesterday, not happy, bandaged hand. Apparently one of the coworkers threw hands when G told him to stop and scratched him. He then apologized profusely and applied first aid. His manager wasn’t there.
He took pictures of his hand, and he’s going in this week to have a conversation about what happened.
And he’s going to figure out what next.
His brother, a hardened veteran of bullying, has lots of things to say about what G needs to do. G listens. And quietly tells brother that he needs to do things his own way.
He’s writing his own script. And he may or may not share it.
So that dropped.
In short, my remote status was revoked, and even though my 3-hour one way commute was taken under advisement (I was told), TPTB think it’s A) reasonable for me to do and B) think it’s reasonable I pay my own expenses for hotel etc.
Any reasonable person would think this unreasonable.
We’ll throw in my life circumstances, of which HR was well aware when they hired me, and it all adds up to a hard no pretty quickly.
Needless to say, my hard no was not appreciated.
So I find myself with the clock running quickly down to 3 weeks + 1 business day hence to get these particular affairs in order and figure out what’s next.
That particular white board is currently blank.
And while I have a long, long list of things here at home I can attend to, I’ve been at this working gig for 45 years, and the unknown of it is scary, although I’ve lived long enough to have been here before and figured something out.
You’d think by now it would be less scary.
You’d think.
Way back in the dark ages, I remember finding a tin of sardines in the cupboard. I don’t remember exactly when, but I’m pretty sure I knew at the time I was looking at a dad relic.
These are things that eventually disappeared over time. Only now, almost 50 years later, I’m remembering what he liked. And the memories are often random; I could make a list of the things, but that would lose the ‘how’ and maybe even the ‘why.’
Sardines lately have meant a portable meal, and I realize they aren’t for everyone. I packed several tins plus some fruit and microwaveable Indian food for my weekend up at Hawk Mountain. One rainy day kept us indoors and eating lunch at our desks, and the guy half of an older couple taking the course kept razzing me about my sardines. No idea why, except maybe he thought it was cool to loudly mock my lunch.
I didn’t care; I put him on ignore and so did everyone else.
It took one of my sorties last month to the job site to gel the sardine connection. I was in my hotel room feeling sorry for myself and preparing my dinner. I remembered the saltines I had saved from a meal out with soup and added those to the sardines…
…and suddenly I remembered this combination from way, way back, memories that lack the visual but have all the other senses, things that connect me back to My Person. I smiled before I drank my Belgium ale, thinking My Person would have gone for PBR in a frosty mug.
And suddenly a lot of the stuff I enjoy that most people would find weird makes sense. This is my wiring. And I find new ways to connect.
There’s so much stuff happening right now.
And it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. To coin a phrase.
How do I sum it all up? I guess I can’t, so I’ll do one thing at a time.
Work is in a weird holding pattern; my remote at convenience was revoked, and I refuse the three-hour one-way commute that comes with the two-day hybrid dictum, so I’m waiting and doing the thing while the powers that be figure out what to do with me and my ilk (because I am not the only one). I bring my A game til they shut me down.
Younger is on spring break. I refuse to look at his grades. School is his thing to manage, and I assume competence, for better or worse.
Elder is..,.doing his thing. Still stuck, but not exactly. Weight is coming down. But his head is in a weird space.
Keeping my head up, bringing good energy, trying to keep us all moving forward. Some days, it’s a struggle.
Sometimes change is so gradual that you don’t notice anything until it’s been and done, and every one else has moved on. And sometimes change is a flipped switch that turns everything you knew as ‘normal’ sideways.
Lately, we’ve had both flavors.
Elder suddenly is a sports fan. Did it blow up out of no where? I feel like it did, until I remember the Phillies’ improbable vertical climb out of the wild card slot into the World Series. No, he was in that, following all the teams, running a spreadsheet, weighing the odds with the best of them.
Football is a little more of a surprise.
He immersed himself in conversation at work and in study of the game. And just like that, he’s an expert, running his spreadsheet, prognosticating with the best of the Monday Morning Quarterbacks.
After a little spell of revisiting interests of his younger days, he’s suddenly back in his 20s, looking for his people to share his interests.
He’s looking ahead.
I haven’t seen him do this in a while.
Lots of hard parts here. I try to sit on my hands and keep quiet. Trying not to orchestrate. Trying not to ‘make stuff happen’ so that he can figure that out himself.
So hard not to jump in and ‘do.’
And trying not to expect anything, assume anything.
I don’t want to write about the adulting stuff. My adulting stuff. Boring AF.
I’m trying to figure out my own way while trying to keep my guys on track and on task.
But my older guy surprises and delights. In the last 6 months, he’s surging past the regressions of lockdown in a variety of ways. Okay, we haven’t gotten to FTE yet, but I realize he’s not there yet. However, his gigs have all contributed to his overall growth: at his theater job, he learned football and has a topic of conversation that’s relatable to, well, anyone really, but particularly those who bleed green.
At his bingo gig, he’s learning how to navigate other people’s crazy, bringing his compassion and other gifts to bear on some tricky social situations.
And he received an overwhelmingly positive review from his non profit job. His only Needs Improvement is an area that most people stumble on. He has a ton of opportunity to make good and better for his next review.
Younger guy is just awesome. He brought elder a surprise today just because he wanted to. He’s thoughtful with regard to his brother.
The vice is not always versa, but nobody’s perfect,
