Looking Back
Is that a squash in your patch or are you just happy to see me?(That turned out to sound dirtier than I intended.)
The last time we were this poor was when we lived in our Sutter Street apartment in San Francisco. I was pretty thin and stylish back then, but not on meds and must admit to having been a pretty moody chain-smoking gin swilling writer type. Yes, I was writing all the time; very serious work like poetry. I was submitting work to publications and had a very well highlighted-bookmarked-dogeared copy of "Poetry Market". I'm not sure how we ever afforded gin but I suppose part of it was due to the fact that we ate a lot of potatoes.
Anyway, I remember looking out of our window from which I could see the city lights flicker on in the early evening, while typing very important works of creative nonfiction (I didn't know that that's what it was called back then). I remember thinking how amazing it would be to own a shop and a house. It's the same common fantasy that almost everyone has. You're either dreaming of having your own little shop or you're dreaming of starting your own quaint bed and breakfast. I would ask myself why I bothered writing because I was never going to be published anyway, why not start a little shop and be cool shop owners?
I also imagined how it would feel to live in a house without cockroaches and mice and not be surrounded by people we didn't know and were reasonably certain we didn't want to know judging by the noises coming from the adjoining walls. All of these fantasies seemed so impossible then. It's great stuff to chat about at the pub over Guinness. We are great dreamers. We are colorful people.
Back then, fourteen and a half centuries years ago, we had everything to work towards. We were two bundles of pure unrealized potential. Philip wanted to be the next Disney. He said this to me one day while we were lying in bed imagining what our future might look like. I remember being a little surprised since he knew NOTHING about computer art. He was a fine artist. It's amazing to remember these times because it illustrates how far we have come. Although Philip has yet to become the next Disney (and I think he's changed course a little since then) he taught himself all the things he needed to know in order to land himself the kind of jobs that could teach him the rest.
I never did get published. Bukowski kept getting published in all the poetry zines I was trying to get into. Damn him. It's possible, I will admit, that that's because he was a better poet than I will ever be. I ended up publishing my own little zine. One printing, one issue. I made fifty of them and it was all typed by me, illustrated by me, copied at Kinko's by me, and handed out to all kinds of unwitting victims, by me. I included a little index card with a postage stamp on it in each copy asking the readers to please send me their critiques, their thoughts, and their opinions about my little publication. I called my printing company "Soapbox".
What young hopefuls we were. We never would have made enough money to save up to buy a house. We bought a house by benefiting from my family's tendency to fall out with each other. My Grandfather, without meaning to, made it possible for us to buy our first home. Because we did so well with our home choices we were able to fund the store adventure with proceeds from our last house. But still, not without going into debt, because of decisions made blindly.
So here we are. We still have equity in the house, though whether anyone will refinance it for us to help us out of this mess is questionable. Yesterday I felt like we had landed right where we were fourteen years ago. Just starting out. I mean, Philip is once again earning what he was way back then. As though he never had a job that paid him almost $80,000 a year. I have been frozen in time by staying home all these years. I never did earn more than $10 per hour and it seems that most of what I'm qualified to do will earn me $8.00. You can't blame me for feeling like we've had all our progress erased.
But if I'm going to be honest here, which I try to do, I have to admit that there are a lot of material differences between now and then. We do still, for now, own our home. That's an asset we didn't have back then. If need be, we can sell it and go back to renting. I can't tell you how desperately I want to avoid that, but at least we have that to fall back on. We had no assets fourteen years ago. I said I still haven't been published, and that's not really true. No, no one has gotten excited about my fiction or my poetry, because that's not what I'm particularly good at writing. But I've been publishing this blog for a year and can't deny that some people have become regular readers. That's not nothing.
But in addition to that, there's my little spot in the apron book coming out in the future. Even though it doesn't pay much, it's quite an honor and it was super fun to participate. I'll always have that to be happy about. Plus, that's more legitimate than self publishing. You know it is. To get picked out of a bunch of talent to be included in someone else's project is more impressive than to write a blog every single day and press "publish" with your pinkie.
Philip may be earning what he was fourteen years ago, but he's working with a very cool company with the potential to earn much more in the future. That's something he didn't have all those years ago. Not only that, he got an illustration published in one of his favorite bicycle magazines. So he's been published too.
We also have a kid. In spite of the fact that I don't think I'm a particularly good mom, I do my very best with it. I can't exactly change who I am for my kid's sake. I'm never going to be a woman who is really jazzed by caring for children. I love my kid. I love that we are a family. But I don't sit around feeling deep satisfaction with motherhood. I feel like it's the trickiest hardest thing I've ever chosen to do. The biggest difference having a child makes on revisiting this whole poor gig is that now I have to worry about providing for an extra person. It makes it much more emotional.
You know what I love about my kid though? He's a real sweetie sometimes. I have tried to keep our troubles from Max over the years because children shouldn't have to worry about the same things their parents are worried about. So I try not to cry in front of him. I failed miserably yesterday. Mostly he didn't notice because he was on the play station all day long, but near the end he saw me crying and heard me telling Philip what our options were and he came up to me and said:
"Mama, you can have all my money if you want. I have a lot of money saved. I have hundreds of pennies. You can have it all mama."
Jesus, it's in moments like that when you really get to enjoy the innate sweetness of children. Mine is as delicious as they come.
Anyway, I remember looking out of our window from which I could see the city lights flicker on in the early evening, while typing very important works of creative nonfiction (I didn't know that that's what it was called back then). I remember thinking how amazing it would be to own a shop and a house. It's the same common fantasy that almost everyone has. You're either dreaming of having your own little shop or you're dreaming of starting your own quaint bed and breakfast. I would ask myself why I bothered writing because I was never going to be published anyway, why not start a little shop and be cool shop owners?
I also imagined how it would feel to live in a house without cockroaches and mice and not be surrounded by people we didn't know and were reasonably certain we didn't want to know judging by the noises coming from the adjoining walls. All of these fantasies seemed so impossible then. It's great stuff to chat about at the pub over Guinness. We are great dreamers. We are colorful people.
Back then, fourteen and a half
I never did get published. Bukowski kept getting published in all the poetry zines I was trying to get into. Damn him. It's possible, I will admit, that that's because he was a better poet than I will ever be. I ended up publishing my own little zine. One printing, one issue. I made fifty of them and it was all typed by me, illustrated by me, copied at Kinko's by me, and handed out to all kinds of unwitting victims, by me. I included a little index card with a postage stamp on it in each copy asking the readers to please send me their critiques, their thoughts, and their opinions about my little publication. I called my printing company "Soapbox".
What young hopefuls we were. We never would have made enough money to save up to buy a house. We bought a house by benefiting from my family's tendency to fall out with each other. My Grandfather, without meaning to, made it possible for us to buy our first home. Because we did so well with our home choices we were able to fund the store adventure with proceeds from our last house. But still, not without going into debt, because of decisions made blindly.
So here we are. We still have equity in the house, though whether anyone will refinance it for us to help us out of this mess is questionable. Yesterday I felt like we had landed right where we were fourteen years ago. Just starting out. I mean, Philip is once again earning what he was way back then. As though he never had a job that paid him almost $80,000 a year. I have been frozen in time by staying home all these years. I never did earn more than $10 per hour and it seems that most of what I'm qualified to do will earn me $8.00. You can't blame me for feeling like we've had all our progress erased.
But if I'm going to be honest here, which I try to do, I have to admit that there are a lot of material differences between now and then. We do still, for now, own our home. That's an asset we didn't have back then. If need be, we can sell it and go back to renting. I can't tell you how desperately I want to avoid that, but at least we have that to fall back on. We had no assets fourteen years ago. I said I still haven't been published, and that's not really true. No, no one has gotten excited about my fiction or my poetry, because that's not what I'm particularly good at writing. But I've been publishing this blog for a year and can't deny that some people have become regular readers. That's not nothing.
But in addition to that, there's my little spot in the apron book coming out in the future. Even though it doesn't pay much, it's quite an honor and it was super fun to participate. I'll always have that to be happy about. Plus, that's more legitimate than self publishing. You know it is. To get picked out of a bunch of talent to be included in someone else's project is more impressive than to write a blog every single day and press "publish" with your pinkie.
Philip may be earning what he was fourteen years ago, but he's working with a very cool company with the potential to earn much more in the future. That's something he didn't have all those years ago. Not only that, he got an illustration published in one of his favorite bicycle magazines. So he's been published too.
We also have a kid. In spite of the fact that I don't think I'm a particularly good mom, I do my very best with it. I can't exactly change who I am for my kid's sake. I'm never going to be a woman who is really jazzed by caring for children. I love my kid. I love that we are a family. But I don't sit around feeling deep satisfaction with motherhood. I feel like it's the trickiest hardest thing I've ever chosen to do. The biggest difference having a child makes on revisiting this whole poor gig is that now I have to worry about providing for an extra person. It makes it much more emotional.
You know what I love about my kid though? He's a real sweetie sometimes. I have tried to keep our troubles from Max over the years because children shouldn't have to worry about the same things their parents are worried about. So I try not to cry in front of him. I failed miserably yesterday. Mostly he didn't notice because he was on the play station all day long, but near the end he saw me crying and heard me telling Philip what our options were and he came up to me and said:
"Mama, you can have all my money if you want. I have a lot of money saved. I have hundreds of pennies. You can have it all mama."
Jesus, it's in moments like that when you really get to enjoy the innate sweetness of children. Mine is as delicious as they come.