Part 1
The Polly Anna Syndrome
I may very well be delusional. I have been asking myself if it were the case for about a month now. How is it I can be so happy in the face of so much difficulty? I am content, on a new path in my life and in love with the man I have been married to for 10 years. When I tell people what we are going through their eyes soften and they look saddened, I guess unemployment and bankruptcy can be depressing but for us it's been a second wind to a race we thought lost.
We started our family very early, I was 25 and my husband was 20. We have been working full time and paying the bills for the 12 years we've been together and 10 of them with children. It's been a stressful 10 years, always one step behind the dept, always wondering how it would all work out. We bought our house 6 years ago, a destroyed shell that the real state agent wouldn't even walk into. We turned it into a home, redoing it all ourselves every summer. We were all contaminated from the unseen mold that we scrubbed clean in make shift hazmat suits. Now the house has plummeted below what we paid for it and we lost every penny of the 50,000 investment (a.k.a DEBT) we put into it. We are also both unemployed, I lost my job 5 months ago and he lost his 2 months ago. It's a story that is so common today, the tragedy of collapse of a false sense of security. Through all this my husband and I have found each other again, have fallen in love, get to wake up together and linger in loves embrace after the kids get on the bus. I have finally stopped searching for an unfulfilling job since there are none for me to find. I have decided to pursue what I always dreamt of, writing. I was so terrified of this reality becoming mine that I always got the job that paid the bills. Now I am on unemployment but through bankruptcy I no longer have a mortgage and credit card bills that were charging me 29% interest. I tried to refinance with all these companies but they all shut the door in my face, giving me options that would put in the yoke of debt for life.
It all started about a year ago, I was working in a job I really loved, teaching teen immigrants English. The school was paying me far below what I deserved but I felt I was making a difference so we made due with less. These kids taught me a lesson that I believe is at the very base of my new found happiness. I became infinitely thankful. They lacked the simplest things that I had taken for granted for years, some had lived through abuse, rape and some of these teenagers had walked to New York from South America to meet their mothers or fathers. They lived hunger, solitude and pain on a daily basis. Most of them studied all day and then worked until midnight to afford a roof over their heads. They came to school exhausted but thankful to have a chance to work their way out of poverty, they were thankful to finally live in safer place and to have opportunities. Many lived in fear of being deported and some were. I began to understand that my upper middle class upbringing was a gift far beyond my own comprehension. Their faces were awestruck when I told them I had a car at 16, a credit card at 18 and free reign to go to any school I got into. My strained relationship with my parents seemed capricious and childish in contrast to meeting a parent at 16.
After a year in their tutelage I began to look around me with different eyes. I saw a roof over my head in a neighborhood were the doors could be left unlocked. I saw that my children had an excess of clothes and toys. We had two cars, computers, TVs and electronics that we cared little for. So many things we took for granted. I have lived among the poverty of South and Central America. I knew the daily fear of being assaulted in the streets, the roaming street gangs of school boys surrounding grown men whose eyes would widen in surprise, fear then resignation as they handed over their valuables to children. I knew of the houses surrounded by metal bars and jewelry stowed away and rarely used. Our families that we left behind took years to buy their first car and none of them owned a house unless it was inherited. The stories of my students were not so foreign to me, they reminded me of places were survival was life and many went a lifetime without.
I spent that summer reconciling with my life, asking forgiveness from those I hadn't thanked before. My parents, who had sweat through seven days a week of work as doctors to live in their million dollar neighborhood. They had known that want and had overcome it; they had grown up hungry and had a daughter with an eating disorder. I realized that these parents that I rebelled against and pointed a finger at, being as rude as to criticize them for "selling out" had never once abandoned me, they had filled in the gaps so that my children could go to private school on a public school salary. They had helped me get my husband through college then grad school. Through all this I didn't want them intruding and telling how to live my life. I asked them for forgiveness first and thanked them for everything they had done. I realized so totally that in the face of the stumbling economy I'd always have a roof, and I'd never be hungry.
I catalogued my life and began to feel thankful for each small wonder. I understood all those lessons in Zen I should have learned when I read the koans in my college years. What is Buddha Nature? asked the first Koan and the answer is "mu". Mu is the simplest of sounds, the sound of the buzz of a bug in your ear, the sound of a cow's exultation to the world, the sound of life. From that moment life became exultation and I decided that I was fortunate in an infinite number of ways.
As if to demand a test for my new found understanding I was given them. November 2009 my position was cut at school, I was given two weeks. They didn't fire me, which would mean I could get unemployment; instead they offered me a half day afternoon assignment. I had already taken a huge pay cut for this job, living with minimum and now even that was cut in half. Right as the news was talking about hundreds of thousands of layoff I was one of them. My parents stepped in and helped me as I had imagined they would that past summer. I found a leave replacement 4 months later. By May of this year I was totally unemployed and summer had arrived.
My relationship with my husband was tested, he confessed after 10 years of the infidelities he had perpetrated. I found in his tears my own place in the equation, my own fault in the sadness. Not like some beaten wife that thinks it's all her fault but a realization that I too had been selfish, I too had chosen to live my life separate from him for so many years. I was heartbroken on one side but relieved on the other. I understood so much about him, so much of his pain and sadness throughout our marriage, he had carried the weight of guilt so long it had made him sick and depressed. I was able to forgive, able to see him beyond what seemed like the "worse thing ever". We began repairing our marriage like gluing together a shattered plate. After 10 months of reparation I find myself more in love than when we met. Now I am not afraid of honesty, now I am not afraid of him wandering. It was as if facing those fears let me free myself from them.
When we finally realized we would go bankrupt, after the real-estate agent told us how much our house was worth I was momentarily heartbroken. Years of fixing the house, of putting every free moment, every dollar we had into it and it was all lost. We could stay here and wait or we could accept our fate and move on. I was terrified; I had images of being evicted and our things on the curb, my children crying. It turns out that the state of the economy is such that there will be no such scenario. The bank will let us live here, without paying, for more than a year. The credit card bills have vanished and now what seemed like a measly amount from unemployment covers all our expenses.
Here I am in the quiet house writing. Something I have dreamed of doing is now here. I have freed myself from my fears, freed myself from my debt and found myself sitting where I had wanted to be all those years of work and stress. Could I have done it without walking down that road, no I don't believe I could have. But again I am thankful. I am hopeful. I am.
