It's been a long time since I've blogged. It's not that I haven't had things going on. It's that I've had too much going on, and all of a pretty personal nature.
It was last March when my life began to unravel in earnest. A series of events made it undeniable that I had to proceed with my divorce. The business was failing. I was so stressed that I did a terrible job in my 2nd semester of law school.
Now, it's still not over. I still haven't transitioned from where things were to where they're going to be. However, I've made a lot of solid steps forward. The divorce is final. I'm on my way to finishing up with the financial collapse. I am still in the same house. That's a small blessing. However, I won't be here much longer. Probably sometime in the next year, I'll have to find a new place to live.
My life, last March and prior, was pretty good, really. I was living separately from my wife, but other than that, our houses were close together. My son seemed to be doing well. Now, she moved further away. It's not that convenient for him to just walk over. I have shared custody, but with working out of town, I only have him every other weekend and every Wednesday evening.
The business really had been dying since March of 2011. I'm honestly surprised it hung on as long as it did. That provided nonstop stress for me. Through 2010, I was able to convince myself that it would come back. 2011, though, was when it was clear that unless something major happened, that the business was either going to be barely profitable, or could not be saved.
I have to constantly remind myself that things could be much worse. On average, I havemy son one less day per week. It's not the end of the world, but I feel the loss.
More than anything, I try not to look back. I made the decisions I made, and I live with the consequences. At no point did I have anything but the best of intentions. Things just didn't work out for my business and that pretty much dragged the rest of my life down with it.
Still, the divorce is final, now. So, that's a small step forward, I guess. I do miss owning my own business, but I don't miss losing everything I have trying to keep it afloat. It was something I always wanted to try. I had good times and bad, but it's over, now.
I don't miss the money or the stuff. What I miss is being able to stay at home on a weekday morning and let my son sleep in until 8:15 and running him to school at 9:00. I miss being here when he got off the bus if I wanted to. That's what I miss. I try to remind myself that the way I see him now, although not as good as what it was, is pretty much the way most working people see their kids.
The weather was very, very nice today. I'll be glad of the Spring. The end of the Winter coincides with the beginning of me building a life again. Just having a nice warm day really lifted my spirits.
I still have a lot of uncertainty in my life over the next year or two. However, closing up the wreckage of my old life is a project. Finishing it up will be a relief. It has to happen for me to be able to move forward.
Now that things are clearing up a bit, I've had some time to grieve over my grandmother's passing last May. I'm so glad I got to see her a couple of times in the month before she went. Sometimes I wonder what's the greater part of grief: losing the person, or losing the commonalities you had with that person.
My grandmother raised me. So, there are vast swaths of my childhood where she was essentially the only living person who was there. So, now that she's gone, it feels like, to some degree, that part of me is gone, too. The last person who shared it with me has passed.
There's probably a little midlife crisis wrapped up in there as well. Mine came a little late, but I'm starting to feel the weight of my years. Grandma was just a couple years older than me when I came to live with her and grandpa. Her tales of her childhood, to me, are as quaint as tales of my childhood must seem to my son. That's how far removed the modern day is from the 60s and 70s.
I really wasn't that sad at the moment grandma passed away. I was sad, but not as sad as I should have been for somebody who had been so important in my life. Everything else in my life was being turned upside down. I knew that it would hit me eventually, and it has really started.
I need to get back to Tallmadge to visit my aunts and uncles, especially the McAlarneys, but it's a really long drive and my week is already full with my 300 mile round-trips to Dayton and back.
My son is going to wrap up 6th grade in a few months, here. At that point, I'm down to just 6 more years until he's off to college. If he goes to OSU, Miami or U Cinci, he will only be an hour or so from me in Dayton. I won't have to drive around quite so much.
If I could have just one wish, it'd be for a local job where I don't have to be away from him so much. Given how little the people in power care about anybody in this country who isn't on Wall Street, though, I don't see that happening. Nobody cares about working people in this country. We've all been sold out.
So, I just keep doing the best I can. Keep trying to look forward. There's no sense in mourning for what's lost for long after the initial shock. You just do what you can and move forward.
