Winds of change

Since my husband's father has passed things have stayed uncomfortably in limbo with some minor readjustments. Per his mother's request we have swapped houses. We still live on the same property, just in their old house and her in ours. She spends most of the year at her new condo in Long Island visiting with his sister, so that is okay with me too. For some reason, when his father died, I just assumed that we would be free of these ties to this property and be able to relocate and start fresh at our house in Arkansas. So much so that when I was laid off at the beginning of this year, I was also searching for work there as well.

Yes, you read it right, I finally got laid off. The party's over. This past Christmas, I had convinced my boss, through his wife, that instead of giving a holiday bonus, as there was no money to do so, to close the office for the week between Christmas and New Years. This gave me a much needed rest, as we had just spent all the past weekends for two months moving the contents of my in-laws house into ours and vice-versa and we were living out of our bedroom until we finished. And it gave me time, time to paint and clean and clean and clean.

A word to the wise, encourage your parents to purge their own belongings before you wind up doing it for them. That's all I'm going to say about that, after moving what seemed like one hundred tiny tables and countless sets of dishware and too many old appliances to count, some in duplicate and triplicate. My mother-in-law has, I said has because she refused to part with any, three crock pots, two of the same size. I have lived next door for almost nine years and she has never made anything in any crock pot and really barely cooks at all. Thus I digress and as previously promised I will not say any more on this matter as I feel as though this is something everyone eventually realizes about their own parents.

The week between Christmas and New Years was especially important, it was what I thought was the last bit of free time I would have before my parents and brother and sister-in-law were coming for their annual visit, so I wanted the house to look as nice and clutter free as possible as they were all supposed to stay overnight. We worked diligently, taping and priming, rolling and edging and were able to finish most of the main living room area of the house aside from one large wall that stretched the living and dining rooms.

It was the Friday afternoon after coming back from the holiday vacation and at the end of the day my boss strolled by my office and asked me to come in and talk to him when I had a chance. There have been other times when he said this to me and my heart skipped a beat, thinking I was in trouble for this or that, or that this was finally it, he was going to fire me, but I didn't feel that way today. I guess the week off had renewed my patience and left me revitalized with a 'can-do' attitude. In the beginning of December, I made up my mind to stop worrying about getting fired and just worry about doing my job, and that helped. Once you commit to a decision, the weight of the decision itself seems to melt away a little at a time. So to me, after vacation it was business as usual.

It was the end of the day so I had already begun wrapping up what I was doing and when I finished I went in his office and sat on one of the stools in front of his desk like I usually do. Then I looked at his face and knew there wasn't good news. He told me that he had to let me go and that he had let go of Gary earlier that afternoon. I said, and I actually said this, "That's okay.", because I truly felt that he felt worse about it than I did. I have a sympathetic bone and it was aching for him, reading the stress on his face and the sadness in his eyes from being faced with the very real possibility of losing everything, not just his dreams, today I saw him as a man, not my boss, a man with a wife and a baby and not a lot of hope for their future.

Why do I do this to myself? Here I am, just got laid off, my husband does not work regularly, so there is a lot of financial pressure on me, and I am sitting in my newly ex-ed boss' office trying to console him! We talked about it for a while, the inevitability of it, the crash in the housing market, etc. Then he said if I could give him a lift to his house he'd be happy to give me some pot and we could smoke from his vaporizer if I wanted. I figured that since this was his last offer to me I would take him up on it. I drove him to his 1.5 million dollar house and followed him upstairs to his 'study' and we talked for a long while more. We talked about the economy, about both of our financial situations, about my concern for him and a little bit about staying friends. I promised to do anything I could to help. He explained to me that his brother would be floating the business for him for a year and paying his father's salary.

I went in on Monday to collect my belongings and give his wife some instruction, as she was assuming my position. This didn't take long because I had been preparing myself for this day. I only had some pictures on the wall and personal items in the drawers. She wasn't really interested in my instructions so I hung around and met my girlfriend who worked in the building for lunch to break the news to her. She was more upset than I, and I was really going to miss seeing her much more than the stupid job. And like that, in a day, it was over.
His father never said goodbye, thanks or kiss my ass, and that too, was okay with me. I have never felt the urge nor obligation to exchange false sentiments. Probably because you can read my face like an open book - with bold print, so ingenuinity is pointless and sometimes insulting to the recipient.