Auspicious & Trepidacious
Jan. 3rd, 2022 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogNo, that's not a new law firm I'm joining, but it marks how this third day of a New Year is being observed.
The ordinary and ordinarily stressful are still all around. I got a call from a judge before even leaving the house this morning, and a demand that I've been awaiting in another case for weeks that took up much of the rest of the day. On the bright side, I finally found a connection for Nine Lives cat fud, which Zoey much prefers to the fancier feastier stuff, and the day has been full of football happiness and weirdness- about the Bills' win, but way more about a former Bills-jilter taking up all of the sportsball pages yesterday:
But today is out of that realm of ordinary for two reasons:
First, Eleanor handed in her Wegmans resignation today. I saw the text, full of regret that she could no longer physically do a job she mostly loved. It ends her 13-plus years with the company and closer to a half a century where she has almost always been working- from my earliest recollection of her stories of pumping gas, to all sorts of gigs mostly in the backstage areas of Sibleys, to recruiting to financial to outdoor contracting, but, in recent years, mostly retail of various kinds. She's transitioned over the past year from a 30-hour weekly commitment to Wegmans when she needed that minimum to stay on their medical, to 20-ish before her Social Security kicked in, to no more than two days a week of under five hours each. Even those became too much for her hands, no matter how much her heart wanted the interactions with customers and coworkers. The disability pay was next to nothing at the end and would have run out soon anyway, so now's the time to make the adjustments. The financial one is probably the smallest, but the emotional and psychological transitions to REALLY RETIRED will no doubt be difficult.
----
Today also marks thirty years since our daughter came into the world. It has weighed heavily on me in recent days that we are not in a place where we can celebrate that milestone with her in a meaningful way even from a distance. I've begun a novel's worth of paragraphs in my head to try to work out how we've gotten to where we are, none of them doing the job. Plus, we're pretty clear that long drawn-out letters are not going to work for her, either. So hopefully I will find a way to get a few pithy important points to her on this important occasion:
We love you.
We are proud of all you have done and are doing.
We know you need to work on things yourself for your own mind and betterment.
So do we. And we are. Mom and I are closer than ever, doing more together even as we do less in the crazy outside world.
We are both in our own forms of recovery after ending years of dependence on alcohol to take away pains. We don't need it or miss it. We came to that point each for ourselves, not because of any one incident or intervention or anyone getting us to that point other than each of us ourselves.
None of that changes anything that may have come before, but nothing really can. There's only today and a lifetime of tomorrows, and we want them to be better for all of us.
Happy birthday, and Happy New Year.
The ordinary and ordinarily stressful are still all around. I got a call from a judge before even leaving the house this morning, and a demand that I've been awaiting in another case for weeks that took up much of the rest of the day. On the bright side, I finally found a connection for Nine Lives cat fud, which Zoey much prefers to the fancier feastier stuff, and the day has been full of football happiness and weirdness- about the Bills' win, but way more about a former Bills-jilter taking up all of the sportsball pages yesterday:
But today is out of that realm of ordinary for two reasons:
First, Eleanor handed in her Wegmans resignation today. I saw the text, full of regret that she could no longer physically do a job she mostly loved. It ends her 13-plus years with the company and closer to a half a century where she has almost always been working- from my earliest recollection of her stories of pumping gas, to all sorts of gigs mostly in the backstage areas of Sibleys, to recruiting to financial to outdoor contracting, but, in recent years, mostly retail of various kinds. She's transitioned over the past year from a 30-hour weekly commitment to Wegmans when she needed that minimum to stay on their medical, to 20-ish before her Social Security kicked in, to no more than two days a week of under five hours each. Even those became too much for her hands, no matter how much her heart wanted the interactions with customers and coworkers. The disability pay was next to nothing at the end and would have run out soon anyway, so now's the time to make the adjustments. The financial one is probably the smallest, but the emotional and psychological transitions to REALLY RETIRED will no doubt be difficult.
----
Today also marks thirty years since our daughter came into the world. It has weighed heavily on me in recent days that we are not in a place where we can celebrate that milestone with her in a meaningful way even from a distance. I've begun a novel's worth of paragraphs in my head to try to work out how we've gotten to where we are, none of them doing the job. Plus, we're pretty clear that long drawn-out letters are not going to work for her, either. So hopefully I will find a way to get a few pithy important points to her on this important occasion:
We love you.
We are proud of all you have done and are doing.
We know you need to work on things yourself for your own mind and betterment.
So do we. And we are. Mom and I are closer than ever, doing more together even as we do less in the crazy outside world.
We are both in our own forms of recovery after ending years of dependence on alcohol to take away pains. We don't need it or miss it. We came to that point each for ourselves, not because of any one incident or intervention or anyone getting us to that point other than each of us ourselves.
None of that changes anything that may have come before, but nothing really can. There's only today and a lifetime of tomorrows, and we want them to be better for all of us.
Happy birthday, and Happy New Year.
Aw...
Date: 2022-01-05 09:58 pm (UTC)