Trying hard not to be a fuck-up
We have a tendency to be fuck-ups in my family. Mom would like to think it comes from Dad's side of the family where there's a long line of teenage pregnancies, a dearth of diplomas, a lack of basic health- and money-related life skills, and an abiding fondness for self-medication. Well, that's my paternal grandmother's people anyway. My paternal grandfather is something of a mystery because he died--drowned in the Missouri river trying to save a buddy who'd apparently reached the "mightier than the current" stage of drunk while they were partying on the riverbank--before his 15 year-old pregnant girlfriend, my grandma, could give birth to my father. I'm not sure what grandpa's people were like, but the evidence alone just screams fuck-up, doesn't it?
I've had a lot of familial encounters of the fuck-up kind as of late. My mom flew into Council Blufs week before last to see her people and then to come stay with me for the week. She stayed with her niece, L. whose eldest daughter B. is a class A fuck-up. Mom's people are generally successes and therefore have no background in dealing with her, besides vague recollections that my sisters and I went wild after high school. At the age of 19, B. has been so infantilized by the dual messages of a Nazarene upbringing and junky One Tree 9021-OC culture that she can't even be a functional fuck-up, one that at least can scrape up beer money and get a shady apartment and drive a Council Bluffs Piece of Shit Special. She's one of those high-dollar, name-brand purse, trustafarian without the trust fund kind of Fuck-Ups, one of those new breeds that I totally don't get. When I went to pick Mom up from Council Bluffs, B. was upstairs raging around her house and a bunch of her stuff was strewn around the driveway like she'd tossed them out the window. L. just looked defeated. I offered to go kick the Fuck-Up's ass for her and L. actually seemed to consider my offer for a long second before sighing and shaking her head. The light died in L.'s eyes as she told us goodbye and turned to go face B. and her bullshit yet again.
Mom spent the week here and we talked. A lot. Mostly about the past and the kids and the states of the union Miller and Lorenz. Mom turned 55 this year and is still working retail a few days a week. She had kids young and went back to college for an associate's degree in business when I was about 10. She did well in school but couldn't seem to quite pull it together to have a viable career, what with my dad being crazy and my sisters and I squabbling over extremely finite resources like prison inmates until one by one, we stormed out of the house at the age of 18. I was the only one of us who managed to graduate from high school. She has regrets, I have regrets, but there's no fixing a lot of those other than trying to do better by my kids.
Then last weekend, my aunt Culline (nope, not a typo. Just ask my aunts Therese and Jode) turned 50 last weekend and her husband, my uncle Casey (the only husband besides Corey who has managed to stay married to a Miller woman for an appreciable length of time) threw her a big ole party at their favorite bar, Big T's, in their one-square-mile-sized town of Tabor, IA. The occasion brought out a lot of people I haven't seen in ages, all the relatives who weren't on the outs or planning rival parties for the following night (seriously, my cousin Skylar who, by the way, has never actually spoken to me voluntarily, had her graduation kegger scheduled for Sunday night and expected all and sundry, even those of us with long drives home and jobs on Monday morning, to attend).
Now besides my dad and my aunt Culline, both of whom have had steady jobs since they were teenagers, the Millers are fuck-ups in a different way: they are allowed to fuck up as long as they want, allowed to live at home and make all the bad choices they can survive. The theory goes that eventually the fuck-ups tucker themselves out eventually, calm down and get steady jobs. Seems to work for them. They may be clannish and backwards but they can at least wipe their own asses, so to speak. They're really fun at parties. Sure, they regularly shoot themselves in the foot, but they hobble to work the next morning. Usually. So I've got bunches of directionless cousins wandering around, mostly worried about money in six dollar increments because that's how much a pitcher of Bud Lite goes for at Big T's.
My sister Megan drove up with my dad from Tennessee for the festivities and to retrieve Mom in the process. Megan's living back at home now at the age of 31. She and her long-time boyfriend split up a couple of years ago and she was left with a bunch of debt, a crippled old car not worth fixing that she only recently got paid off, and a house she couldn't afford or maintain on her server income. She's had to rent it out and is trying to figure out a way to sell it in the crummy housing market. Her job is demanding even though it doesn't pay much, and when she's off, all she wants to do is forget work until two seconds before she has to show up the next day. She just can't get ahead even living with my folks. After we staggered away from the party, during the sobering up phase of the wee morning hours, we had a long talk about how trapped she felt and it just broke my heart not to be able to sweep in and rescue her. A couple of grand would totally fix.
So that leaves me. My triplets are going to be ten years old this summer and I have to pick something to be when I grow up. Something viable. Something less follow my dreams and more make money to make dreams happen. I've got a couple of years to go to school for something before the triplets hit middle school--you would not believe how much more expensive maintenance on a 6th grader is compared to a 5th grader--so my goal is to be doing some full time work by the fall of 2012 (if the world doesn't end, which, admittedly, would solve all my problems, but seems like kind of a bummer.)
I've been watching all these direction-less women in my life kind of wandering around and have decided that I'm not having that. The best thing I can see myself doing in the next two years is a nursing program at the local community college. The nurses I know are by-and-large happy with what they do despite the hard work, and it seems like if I could get over my wee blood issues (namely, feeling faint at the sight of too much of it spilling out of me or my kids), I'd be great at it. I'm so not squeamish about any other bodily functions, though. And you know I've got a great bedside manner.
I want to have a thing I do so I don't have to worry about what I'm going to be when I grow up anymore. Seriously, the question is driving me insane.
I want to do good.
I want to make good money so CDL doesn't have to worry so much about finances and so I can help my family.
I don't want to spend any more time in school than I have to for I hates it, precious.
I don't want a desk job--my ADD won't let me sit still that long.
What do we think? Advice?
I've had a lot of familial encounters of the fuck-up kind as of late. My mom flew into Council Blufs week before last to see her people and then to come stay with me for the week. She stayed with her niece, L. whose eldest daughter B. is a class A fuck-up. Mom's people are generally successes and therefore have no background in dealing with her, besides vague recollections that my sisters and I went wild after high school. At the age of 19, B. has been so infantilized by the dual messages of a Nazarene upbringing and junky One Tree 9021-OC culture that she can't even be a functional fuck-up, one that at least can scrape up beer money and get a shady apartment and drive a Council Bluffs Piece of Shit Special. She's one of those high-dollar, name-brand purse, trustafarian without the trust fund kind of Fuck-Ups, one of those new breeds that I totally don't get. When I went to pick Mom up from Council Bluffs, B. was upstairs raging around her house and a bunch of her stuff was strewn around the driveway like she'd tossed them out the window. L. just looked defeated. I offered to go kick the Fuck-Up's ass for her and L. actually seemed to consider my offer for a long second before sighing and shaking her head. The light died in L.'s eyes as she told us goodbye and turned to go face B. and her bullshit yet again.
Mom spent the week here and we talked. A lot. Mostly about the past and the kids and the states of the union Miller and Lorenz. Mom turned 55 this year and is still working retail a few days a week. She had kids young and went back to college for an associate's degree in business when I was about 10. She did well in school but couldn't seem to quite pull it together to have a viable career, what with my dad being crazy and my sisters and I squabbling over extremely finite resources like prison inmates until one by one, we stormed out of the house at the age of 18. I was the only one of us who managed to graduate from high school. She has regrets, I have regrets, but there's no fixing a lot of those other than trying to do better by my kids.
Then last weekend, my aunt Culline (nope, not a typo. Just ask my aunts Therese and Jode) turned 50 last weekend and her husband, my uncle Casey (the only husband besides Corey who has managed to stay married to a Miller woman for an appreciable length of time) threw her a big ole party at their favorite bar, Big T's, in their one-square-mile-sized town of Tabor, IA. The occasion brought out a lot of people I haven't seen in ages, all the relatives who weren't on the outs or planning rival parties for the following night (seriously, my cousin Skylar who, by the way, has never actually spoken to me voluntarily, had her graduation kegger scheduled for Sunday night and expected all and sundry, even those of us with long drives home and jobs on Monday morning, to attend).
Now besides my dad and my aunt Culline, both of whom have had steady jobs since they were teenagers, the Millers are fuck-ups in a different way: they are allowed to fuck up as long as they want, allowed to live at home and make all the bad choices they can survive. The theory goes that eventually the fuck-ups tucker themselves out eventually, calm down and get steady jobs. Seems to work for them. They may be clannish and backwards but they can at least wipe their own asses, so to speak. They're really fun at parties. Sure, they regularly shoot themselves in the foot, but they hobble to work the next morning. Usually. So I've got bunches of directionless cousins wandering around, mostly worried about money in six dollar increments because that's how much a pitcher of Bud Lite goes for at Big T's.
My sister Megan drove up with my dad from Tennessee for the festivities and to retrieve Mom in the process. Megan's living back at home now at the age of 31. She and her long-time boyfriend split up a couple of years ago and she was left with a bunch of debt, a crippled old car not worth fixing that she only recently got paid off, and a house she couldn't afford or maintain on her server income. She's had to rent it out and is trying to figure out a way to sell it in the crummy housing market. Her job is demanding even though it doesn't pay much, and when she's off, all she wants to do is forget work until two seconds before she has to show up the next day. She just can't get ahead even living with my folks. After we staggered away from the party, during the sobering up phase of the wee morning hours, we had a long talk about how trapped she felt and it just broke my heart not to be able to sweep in and rescue her. A couple of grand would totally fix.
So that leaves me. My triplets are going to be ten years old this summer and I have to pick something to be when I grow up. Something viable. Something less follow my dreams and more make money to make dreams happen. I've got a couple of years to go to school for something before the triplets hit middle school--you would not believe how much more expensive maintenance on a 6th grader is compared to a 5th grader--so my goal is to be doing some full time work by the fall of 2012 (if the world doesn't end, which, admittedly, would solve all my problems, but seems like kind of a bummer.)
I've been watching all these direction-less women in my life kind of wandering around and have decided that I'm not having that. The best thing I can see myself doing in the next two years is a nursing program at the local community college. The nurses I know are by-and-large happy with what they do despite the hard work, and it seems like if I could get over my wee blood issues (namely, feeling faint at the sight of too much of it spilling out of me or my kids), I'd be great at it. I'm so not squeamish about any other bodily functions, though. And you know I've got a great bedside manner.
I want to have a thing I do so I don't have to worry about what I'm going to be when I grow up anymore. Seriously, the question is driving me insane.
I want to do good.
I want to make good money so CDL doesn't have to worry so much about finances and so I can help my family.
I don't want to spend any more time in school than I have to for I hates it, precious.
I don't want a desk job--my ADD won't let me sit still that long.
What do we think? Advice?