twosetsofheadphones

When I was younger, between ten and eleven years old, my mom had a boyfriend whom we’ll call Pitt. Pitt was the second in a stream of several who would be in our lives until I eventually left home. Pitt was kind of a generic dude (and honestly, probably the best out of those she’d dated)… his story isn’t super important for this. Pitt came with a daughter four years younger than me and a fancy stereo system. I was at the age where I was starting to get into music more than my parents’ collection of records and tapes, comprised mostly of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Diamond, and Hooked on Classics. The stereo system had a CD player and CDs, (yacht rock and easy listening, of course) which were very exciting. Pitt also had a series of random tapes which were mostly unlabeled.

My dad’s best friend’s daughter (we referred to each other as cousins though we weren’t at all related; we’ll call her Anne) was essentially my nanny in the summer at this point. Anne was very into popular music and for a few years would be my primary source of “new” stuff. So one day during summer vacation, we sat in the room where the stereo lived and checked out the tapes. They weren’t very interesting, except for one. This tape was some kind of self-help program, and we’d picked it up somewhere in the middle. I’m guessing now it was a gratitude meditation program, and a woman’s voice calmly thanked everyday household things. “Thank you, refrigerator,” was the one I remember. We gave up on it quickly, and I remember my ten-year-old self thinking it was absolutely pointless to be thanking a refrigerator for anything - I mean, it was an appliance that we paid for that kept our food cool.

Understand at this point I didn’t know how to cook, really, and I wouldn’t learn more than how to prepare TV dinners, Micro Magic burgers and fries, or some kind of noodle dish from a box that only required the addition of milk, water or butter for several more years. I’d tried to learn before my dad passed away, but I was always either shooed out of the kitchen or, when I was younger, seated at a yellow plastic stool in front of a yellow plastic table to play with Play-Doh instead. So I really didn’t have the appreciation for all the steps that go into even the most basic steps of human maintenance beyond brushing my teeth. bathing and other bathroom stuff. Laundry would leave my room and come back clean (I’d learn to do my own within a year or two), I had my microwave dinners and Bachelor Chow boxed foods. My mom would occasionally order Domino’s Pizza, take us to a crappy diner in our town, or, as I like to say, when the moon was blue, the tide was right, and the turtles were spawning - only then would she actually cook.

People have said I was privileged because I “didn’t have to do anything.” Is it really a privilege if your parent shoos you out of the way because they truly don’t know what to do with you? That it is easier to do it yourself than teach the child to perform the tasks they’d eventually need to become self-sufficient? I asked for chores, because my friends had chores and doing chores = allowance. I entered adulthood very clueless about A LOT of things as a result. I honestly never thought I’d make it past eighteen - not for any reason other than I had no idea how to take care of myself beyond the most basic of things.

We’ll fast-forward here until about 2010. I’ve been on my own for a while at this point, self-sufficient only because I either taught myself or took classes. Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up came out around this time, and not wanting to pay for the book or wait for an indeterminate amount of time for it to become available at the library, I plopped myself in a chair in a bookstore and read it, cover to cover. This book INCENSED me. I was overweight (still am, but more so then), and here’s this lady with the audacity to tell me that everything in my home should “spark joy.”

Bitch, I’m FAT. Literally NOTHING in my closet sparks joy.

2010 was also a time when most of the larger-sized options out there/readily available were as follows:
- Obnoxiously Bright, Low-Cut and Tight-Fitting
- Old Lady Pastels and Polyesters
- 1970s Scratchy Couch
- Black, White, Gray and Denim

I chose the latter. I’m a pretty plain person and invisibility is my superpower. On the outside I’m kinda beige, personified. I’ve written about my struggles with “fashion” and being invisible elsewhere before and at some point I’ll re-address those topics. But in light of all these things, you can imagine that I’m not exactly thrilled about touching every single article of clothing, rolling my socks together into balls instead of securing them in pairs, thanking each item for its service along the way. I did go home and clean out my closet (in fact, this is something I do roughly twice a year), but I was angry about it, remembering that stupid self-help tape that encouraged the listener to thank its refrigerator.

Fast-forward some more. I have my first child and have to learn how to be a parent on my own. I never really babysat because all my parents’ friends' kids were grown by the time I came around, and my siblings were much older and didn’t live with us. Yet another thing I had to figure out on my own. Somewhere in here I figured out I deal with anxiety while trying to treat my depression. Tried a medication and suddenly I was somewhat confident. While that was an eye-opener, it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. There’s a Nathan W. Pyle cartoon where one of the characters says, “I don’t know how to use my life.” That resonated - and still resonates - deeply for me.

The internet tries to feed me all sorts of things regarding finding my purpose. I should try gratitude journaling, meditation and a host of other things. I bring this up to my psych practitioner at the time, who basically laughs and says, “that works for /some/ people…” but knew that this wasn’t going to be the practice for me. I am grateful and thankful for everything in my life that allows me to live the way I do. But it’s a background process, not a situation where I need to go thank my fridge whenever I open it. The way you’re grateful to have full use of your limbs and digits but even more so when something hurts and you can’t use it for a time. It’s a background process until it isn’t.

I try meditation, but struggle intensely. This doesn’t become a thing I can even sit still long enough to do until many years later. My brain is loud, ALL THE TIME. I regularly liken it to a Pachinko machine, or an old computer with a non-SSD hard drive when it spins up and begins making noise. It is excessively difficult to quiet my head.

I thank people regularly for doing things for me, both personally and professionally. At this time I’m in an industry that’s pretty toxic, particularly to women and those with families. I notice when people demand things with no offer of anything in trade - not even a thank you. I notice when the vendors call me “baby” and then they wonder why I don’t give them any work. I treat people the way I want to be treated, but I continue to be treated by others like I’m their servant, whipping post, scapegoat. I do not feel gratitude very often as more than a background process. I’m thankful for the income, I’m thankful for confirming at this point that I’m DEFINITELY the person you want on your side in an emergency.

I leave this industry when I get the chance and vow to never return. I need to take better care of myself. That means not commuting one to two hours each way, not surrounding myself by toxic people, so on and so forth.

Years pass. Fast-forward to now. A lot has happened that isn’t particularly worth mentioning for the scope of this piece. i stayed home for six years, returned to work in fits and starts, and am again a reluctant stay-at-home parent. I’m sure I’d feel differently about it if the circumstances were different. Being a stay-at-home parent is not something I excel at, but something I did out of necessity. One of many sacrifices I will never be thanked for.

After a particularly relentlessly difficult year-and-change (we’ll say eighteen months, since that’s about right, at the time I’m writing this piece), I found myself musing and ruminating on gratitude, and how I’m truly feeling it - not as merely a background process - for the first time. This isn’t a come-to-Jesus piece or anything like that. I was thinking about the past year as a whole in terms of a recap. I don’t really send holiday cards or write holiday recap letters because most years, particularly post-pandemic, would read as follows:

“R continued to work from home and really only left the house for a handful of work trips, daily gym visits and to go to the grocery store. T taught knitting and worried about the kids. She spent most of her time driving the kids to and from two different schools twenty minutes away from each other. She continued baking bread. 13 was bullied out of school so we transferred her to another school where she just about failed out. The school pushed her through anyway. We enrolled her in an online private school for 2024-2025 which seems to be going better (and reduces T’s driving substantially). 13 was diagnosed with autism and her ADHD was confirmed. 10 continues to thrive in his last year of elementary school. We think he finally has a friend. Sadie the Dog is four years old and continues to shred the toys from her monthly BarkBox subscription. She enjoys barking at squirrels.” There are no awards, no sports or extracurriculars, no fancy vacations, no parties, no nothing. We. Don’t. Do. Much.

But the last eighteen months have been particularly transformative. I’ve been to hell and back, dealing with a number of family illnesses, switching my role from Parent to Full-Time Caregiver for 13 as she navigates diabetes, autism, ADHD, trauma, and mental illness. I took a couple of classes to further my knowledge and experience in baking. I received encouragement for what I think was the first time ever.

I had a few conversations with different people that really were the verbal equivalent of someone grabbing me by the shoulders and forcibly turning me away from the path I was headed toward, away from the finality of Really Poor Choices. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly be able to convey the gratitude I feel for those folks who might not even know the true extent their words have helped me. One gave me confidence, connection, visibility, and reason. Another set me on a path toward community. Two others provided validation.

I want for almost nothing material. Most of my psychological needs are, at least, met.

As the year wraps up, I’m realizing that despite not being able to convey the true level of gratitude I have for these folks in a meaningful way, I’m expressing it in helping others by way of encouragement, being a mostly impartial ear or a source of unhinged memery. And honestly? Maybe that’s where I need to be these days.