Sitting in a middle school digital literacy class last week, I took the 16-personalities quiz alongside the students. The results rattled me. Not so much the type I got (INFP, which I’d known since last fall in middle school health class), or the fact that the student I cover every afternoon also is an INFP (the rarest type). What rattled me was the warning about our lack of focus. Sometimes to the degree that we are wholly living in a world of dreams and fantasies, at the expense of what is real and probable.
And I thought about all the salmon I have in freezers in Colorado, not being sold, not being eaten, because I have not kept up with that business. I thought about the tax return from the fishing business recently back from our accountant, showing a loss for last season. About not having a crew for next season. I thought about the newspaper job that I unconsciously quit this winter, between missed deadlines and typos. And I thought about my book and this blog, the book half published on the blog but needing more revisions, still going for such long spans between posts of any kind here. Then there’re our friends who’ve had kids this winter, who we’ve hardly seen, though I’d sworn to myself to be there for my friends as they became new parents, since we didn’t have many friends do that for us.
And I felt like a loser. Like while my head’s been in the clouds, the tide has rushed out from under me, leaving me stuck in the mud, my bow not even pointed in a direction I’d planned, or that was exciting or useful.
I hadn’t dwelt that hard on my shortcomings since the last time I smoked weed, and then at least I could blame that feeling of failure on the drugs.
At the same time, more than ever, Mariah says she loves me so much, and she’s so lucky to have me, and I’m so great. Which made me afraid she was more delusional than me.
But when I shared my thoughts with her, she reminded me of the winter we’ve had. Until December we were still living with my parents as we looked for a house. Then Mariah had some serious mental health issues, and had to take medical leave from work. Then we found a house to buy, went under contract, and moved in to rent it until closing. The kids took on a the full preschool course load of illnesses: earaches, fevers, coughing until puking, plain old puking, pink-eye, now I have pink-eye. Towards the end of her medical leave, Mariah left for three weeks to visit her parents in Colorado. After returning home, the night before she was due to start work again, she got appendicitis and had to stay in the hospital for a few days—just when I’d hoped she’d be around more to help with the kids. The school announced they won’t be hiring Mariah back next year, so she’s been applying to other jobs (in town, remote, and out of state). Our son’s behavior got concerning enough that we had a professional observe him. She recommended 1-2-3 Magic, and it seems to be helping, but it’s one of those systems that has an adjustment phase when it gets worse before it gets better. We still haven’t closed on the house because the loan assumption department of 1st National Bank of Alaska is in New Jersey, and they keep requesting for more paperwork and insist on asking for it via snail mail. If the loan assumption doesn’t go through, we will have to forfeit thousands of dollars of earnest money, or get a new loan and have to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in interest. Between that and Mariah looking for a new job, we don’t know if we will stay in town or not.
I know it could be worse. But it’s been a bumpy ride, and bumps make balls bounce and fall and roll away. Still, we are far from empty-handed. We are carrying quite a bit, and carrying on.