Life, unmapped
If I try to remember who I was when I met my life partner, I have a vague sense that I thought life should be lived with contentment in one’s spot. I thought we would choose a career, and we would have babies, and we would buy new cars and go to potlucks. It was how I grew up. My parents did those things, so it was how I expected my own life to go.
Except I fell in love (if one can call the heady rush of a first romance actual love) with a boy who had never gone to the same school two years in a row. One who had his family ripped apart by his mom’s cancer death when he was too young to effectively process the fragility of mortality, which left him spending the rest of his life facing his own death; the shadowy stalking figure whispering to him that life is fleeting, and joy more so.
At first, when we bought a tiny house together in a nowhere town on the high plains with an $11,000 loan from my grandparents, we reveled in being independent for the first time. He got a job hauling pig feed to the many factory farms in the farming community where he had found me as he was passing through. I got a job as a nurse aid in the local community health center- a hospital with eight beds and two emergency room bays, and a long term care facility with forty beds, all filled with the curled bodies and weathered faces of those who had spent their own lifetimes in the small prairie town, and now, in their dementia, saw the wild plains outside their windows, and in each other, all the grievances built over years of being neighbors.
He lasted a year before he suggested we move, and at the thought of not spending our entire lives in a sort of prairie town stasis, I felt a frisson of excitement course through me. I had never truly considered that my life’s course was not mapped out, that I could control it, that the entire world was open to me.
He suggested the mountains. A ski resort. He had spent some time there as a kid, and wanted to share it with me.
And so we did. We sold the little house and moved to a mountain town, and while he did what he does, which is to be responsible and find a job and support us, I worked as little as possible, contributed only as much as I needed to, and spent every moment I could outside, on snowboard, on skis and mountain bike and road bike, running and hiking and climbing, until I was as lean and tan as my farmgirl body would ever be. Somehow, my joy sustained him and he seemed unfazed by our unfair distribution of work and play.
Until it didn’t. Somehow, he forgot about enjoyment and slowly focused more and more on money. As he made money, we spent it on things he hoped would help him gain greater enjoyment in his shorter and shorter amounts of time off. We bought a camper so we wouldn’t have to pack and unpack our campsite when we camped, allowing us to spend more time relaxing when he got a rare day off. He bought a downhill bike so he could ride a chairlift up a mountain and have the thrill of flying down mountain trails without the long, slow climb uphill climb. He bought a snowmobile so backcountry skiing did not involve hiking miles into the snow covered wildness surrounding us. And when not even those things provided the enjoyment he sought, because he couldn’t leave work behind for long enough to use them for more than a quick few hours between phone calls, he became pale, and his hair greyed at the the temples, his weight crept up, and his joy flatlined.
Without us knowing exactly when it was first proposed, the idea of leaving slowly grew on us until we found ourselves speaking of it out loud. Let’s go to an island, we said. Somewhere equatorial. Somewhere the cold doesn’t seep into our bones. Somewhere the nights are balmy and the winter days have the same warm breeze these mountain summers caress us with.
It was then the reality of our spending habits forced itself on us. We had things, but we had no money for more than a year off from our jobs. I remember the conversation, me leaning over a balcony railing as he sat below. “Maybe we need to really pay our dues”, I said. “Maybe we need to move some place we can live for next to nothing and work hard for about five years, and we would have enough money saved up to move somewhere tropical and take our time finding work you enjoy.”
He called an acquaintance in my prairie hometown and spent all our savings purchasing a business there the next day, and we left the mountains. It was then the idea began forming that we should use this odd interval of joyless, earnest, goal oriented entrepreneurship to procreate. We will have my parents close by to help us, we reasoned. By the time we leave, our babies won’t be babies anymore. We were never sure, when I was so enthusiastically covering mountain miles every day, that kids were something we wanted, but faced with several years of prairie boredom, I suddenly realized it was time to garden and cook and raise chickens and have babies.
Not that it was easy. Turns out, my uterus doesn’t especially appreciate being host to tiny human parasites, and consistently does its best to evict them before they have a chance to turn into much more than bloody blobs. Jabbing large amounts of progesterone into my hip with a diabolically long needle helped keep two of them in there until they turned into helpless little humanoids, and about the time we were ready to start trying for the second one, our business went bust, due to a drought and a lot of competition. So we sold it, and we spent an entire summer rambling through the Rocky Mountains, living in a camper, waking to the sounds of rushing water, stumbling out the flimsy door in the mornings to startled deer and dewy wildflowers. We soaked in hot springs and traded caring for our toddler and riding our mountain bikes, and somewhere in there, I got accidentally pregnant, then miscarried, and my hormone-addled brain convinced me I needed an on-purpose baby in there as soon as possible. So a month later, I assured my other half I wouldn’t get pregnant again the month after a miscarriage, crossed my fingers for luck and jumped him without protection. He still thinks kid number two was an accident. Eight and a half months later, he held our two year old, who was oddly pale and was not walking because he had fallen out of a swing five weeks earlier and had broken his leg, and tried to look everywhere except at the mess between my legs as my body went feral and expelled his second son.
Nine days later, ish got real and the two year old’s broken leg was revealed to be merely a symptom of something far worse- cancer. We had never known a kid with cancer. It wasn’t on our radar. Overnight, we found ourselves having conversations about clinical trials and chemo side effects, and within a month, he was unrecognizable- bald and swollen to twice his normal size, skin peeling, sores seeping.
We had finished our summer of wonder and gotten a real job, in the only place that offered high enough pay to continue pursuing our dream of a little house on a beach someday in exchange for our souls- the oilfield. We’ll work for the devil, we told ourselves, because someone else will do it if we don’t, and we will save every penny. But no sooner did cancer slam us to the ground than oil prices went down and the oilfield spat us out like the soggy shell of a chewed-up sunflower seed. It wasn’t even that we minded so much- the hours had been brutal. I had spent days and nights alone in a cold, minimally furnished little rental house, and I was over it after weeks of rocking through contractions, in painful but pointless prodromal labor while he drove a truck over the rutted roads, hauling sand to drill sites, then spending nights sleeping in the middle of nowhere, to be on location when another load was needed.
When the cancer had gutted our finances and there was no more work to be had in an oilfield boom town that was suddenly full of unemployed families living in mansions that had sprung up overnight, we admitted defeat. We applied for Medicaid and WIC and accepted a relative’s offer to start a donation page for us, and lived off the generosity of others as a hospital room became our new home.
Slowly, we climbed out. My other half, his hair undeniably graying, his face aging in front of me, bought a paint sprayer and began searching for work, winning bids for house painting jobs by being cheaper than the cheapest competition. As the baby learned to walk and the two year old went into remission, we swallowed our pride and called our ski resort employer, asking if our old job was available. They offered us a lesser position, and we were happy to take them up on it, excited that being a grunt, instead of management as we had been before, would come with less stress. We moved into a trailer park, an ugly strip of manufactured boxes nestled beneath million dollar hilltop homes with majestic views of the continental divide.
Yesterday, I called a friend who lives on Maui. We talked about cabin fever. Mine, not hers. The wind blew snow flurries past the eaves of the trailer house as we talked, the cold seeping into my bones. “Why don’t you move out here?” she asked. “I’m sure you could find work, and you could rent the cottage on our property.”
I felt a frisson of excitement at the long-forgotten thought that our future isn’t planned out. “Life is fleeting, and joy more so”, I heard the lurking spectre that has stalked us through the halls of the pediatric oncology ward for over three years now whisper. The last dose of poison will course through our child’s veins in a few months, after which, only time will tell if he will skip away cancer-free, or if he will lived dogged by relapse and secondary cancers caused by over three years of constant chemo. He will start kindergarten soon, which gives us pause. It is important to us that he grow up with friends, not moving away every time he adjusts to a new group of peers. We want stability for our kids. But if we knew more bad were headed our way, we’d forget school, and we’d give him a childhood; mountain summers, winters on the beach. With their dad’s willingness to work hard as a remodel contractor, there is work to be found almost anywhere we have friends to drop word into local grapevines. I could homeschool them as we bounced from one adventure to the next. Even though we are no further ahead financially than we were six years ago, we are beginning to realize maybe we don’t need to be. Screw the notion that we need to pay our dues before demanding life be what we want it to be. Million dollar views are free. Trails don’t care if the shoes that pass over them are tattered and old or new and expensive. It’s time to stop waiting, stop paying dues that will never be enough, and show these kids of ours that life is fleeting, but joy doesn’t have to be.
