The mess of life
“You want everything in life to be neat and orderly…But it can’t be…Sometimes, life just gets messy.”
I’d been studying at a friend’s house that afternoon, preparing for an upcoming test in our clinical chemistry class. We were well into our yearlong lab internship at the Bridgeport hospital, reviewing, of all things “neat and orderly,” the intricate calculations for serial dilutions. It was a topic so exacting, out of necessity, because it involved immensely small concentrations of a substance in each test tube. That meant if there was one tiny error at the beginning, it would grow to be a huge one over the course of the dilutions, and that would destroy the accuracy of any test result. Since these tests involved human lives, there was no room for mistakes.
After hours of hammering away at sample problems, we both felt ready. Her mom invited me to stay for supper, and I gladly accepted. My friend lived at home during her internship, since it was right near the hospital, and I loved going over there. Her mom was such a joy to be around, and I always felt cared for by my friend and her whole family.
As we prepared for supper, we were discussing something about life and how unpredictable things could be. Given the chaos I lived in at home, my approach at that point was to try and control everything in my power…which wasn’t much. But still, anything I could tightly control the outcome of was one less stressor, given the anxiety of dealing with my father.
I don’t remember what it was I wished I could control at that moment. But I clearly still remember her response. She shook her head at me incredulously and said, “You want everything in life to be neat and orderly…But it can’t be…Sometimes, life just gets messy.”
Doesn’t it.
Grandma and Grandpa
I’d been living with my father’s parents for the last several months. An interesting “full circle” if I thought about it. My father escaped that house in his youth. Now I was back there. It was an eye-opening revelation into the world my father grew up in. His one piece of advice to me before I moved there was, “Whatever you do, pick the routine you need for your day, and stick to it. Don’t let her tell you what to do.”
While they really did mean well, and while I am sure it wasn’t easy for two older people to suddenly host their adult grandchild five days a week, it wasn’t easy on me either.
Sure, my grandfather had given up drinking by that point. He just stopped cold turkey one day and replaced it with housecleaning. Now he just complained all the time about how my grandmother was always dropping things on the floor. And then, when he left the room, she would say to me, “I just throw things on the floor…it gives him something to do.” So I guess it was an improvement over Dad’s childhood. But it was a tough household. Especially my grandmother.
Like a shark around blood
Her moods could be VERY unpredictable. There was usually yelling, and she sometimes made comments about my mother. I could never tell when something might set her off. Then she would surprise me by letting me bring food into the living room — something that had NEVER been allowed all the years we’d visited her.
There were times she would be in a “softer” mood, remembering things from the past. She talked about one brother she really loved who was killed in the war, and sometimes pulled out of a box of items he’d sent her. Other times, she would take me on a ride to the “East Side,” to see where they used to live decades ago.
She’d point out the house they lived in back in the old days. At that point, it was a burned-out drug house in a neighborhood we probably shouldn’t have been in even during the day. Then she’d spot a plant in someone’s front yard and decide she wanted it. So I’d have to “strongly dissuade” her from ripping it out and throwing it in her car trunk, by gently pointing out that if she did, we were both probably going to die…to which she’d reply with some wistfulness that showed she was still considering it: “Yeah..you’re probably right…but it would look nice in my yard.”
And there were comments she’d make now and then about various relatives, secrets, and her older brother, whom I could tell she hated. And I think, with very good reason. One time, she let slip that his daughter had been staying with her, but then there had been some “problem,” so she had to send the girl back home. That caught my attention, both for the fact that someone thought it was necessary to separate Grandma’s brother from his daughter. And then there was the memory of Dad talking about some relative he missed out on “getting some” from. So family secrets were just bursting out of the woodwork in that house.
I sensed the pain in her — an alcoholic father, abusive oldest brother, sick mother who wasn’t around, and being passed around to various relatives at times. But she was a tough-as-nails older woman. She worked in a factory, and she and her lady friends there were a rough bunch. You didn’t cross them. And as much as my grandmother wanted to be loved and appreciated, if you showed any softness, she was like a shark around blood. She couldn’t take in kindness, and she could be emotionally manipulative as hell. I felt for her, but I had to be equally tough around her so she would respect my boundaries.
Stick to a routine
My grandfather was generally, by comparison, much more placid than Grandma, though that isn’t saying much. His idea of complimenting Grandma on her cooking was to tell her, “You didn’t make the meat as tough as you usually do,” which would result in a yelling argument. He’d be mad she didn’t like his “compliment,” and she would yell about never being appreciated. They were together for decades, but I honestly don’t know if it was love or just obligation. I heard from another relative that they’d had to get married.
Various relatives would stop by periodically to see how I was doing…probably surprised I’d willingly agreed to live there. I sometimes wondered if they all had a wager on how long I’d last living there. But the truth was, it was the only way I could afford to finish my last year of college, and I would have lived in hell to finish my degree. And yes, sometimes it was.
So I followed my father’s advice to set my routine and stick to it. I left early in the morning and spent the day at the hospital. Came home the same time every night. And spent the rest of the night after supper upstairs in my room doing my homework, journaling, or reading.
I’d feel the loneliness and ache of that household. My “Moments of Respite” there were occasional times getting together with friends from the hospital, or lying in bed at night listening to the clicking sounds of freight trains on the tracks nearby. I loved that sound.
Escaping TO home
To be frank, in spite of how bad my home situation was, I actually looked forward to getting away from my grandparents’ house. I even drove home one Friday in a raging snowstorm just to get away.
During my last month or two of the internship, I actually started commuting from home. Even though I’d have to leave at 5:30 in the morning to be at the hospital by 7 for work, I didn’t care. And I just told my grandparents I had to do that because I was also working at the UCONN lab in Farmington, so I had to be at home. Hard work was something they understood and encouraged. And it was partly true because I was working some weekends in Farmington by then.
In thinking about how I actually wanted to go home versus stay with my grandparents on weekends, I remembered a quote from Daria Burke’s memoir, Of My Own Making. And as an aside, it is a really excellent memoir with so many accurate insights. I highly recommend it to anyone.
But Ms. Burke spoke about the odd drive of kids and teens to still long for a parent, even when they are abusive. She noted: “The greatest nuisance of human existence might be that we are hardwired to seek out and trust the familiar, even when the familiar isn’t safe or good for us.” Dad wasn’t good or safe, but dealing with his manipulations was more familiar to me than dealing with Grandma’s.
Killers, alcohol, and extra “grandmothers”
During the week, I tried to make the best of it. I’d meet my grandfather in the kitchen for the 8 p.m., Eggo Waffle, “recess breaks” from my homework. Or there was reading the tacky New York Daily News paper that he would bring home, especially during that summer’s coverage of the New York City serial killer, The Son of Sam. Again, always the reminder of how dangerous the world could be.
Occasionally, my hospital classmates and I would go out to a bar after hours, something I admit was not a good idea given the risks of driving home. But those outings gave some relief to the stress…again, not necessarily a healthy coping mechanism.
One time I convinced a friend to go out for a drink in the afternoon, again, that relief from stress, but her discomfort with that as a habit probably helped steer me from developing an alcohol problem. It also helped that I just didn’t have much money. But I remember the sense of loneliness and despair underneath that moment.
In spite of all the dysfunction, being there for all those months did give me an opportunity to get to know some of the extended family on that side, from aunts and uncles to various in-laws of my grandparents. Some of my grandmother’s friends loved that I enjoyed meeting them. My presence seemed to be a novelty to them, and it was like I suddenly had “extra grandmothers.”
My father, the jealous lover?
The one odd moment, though, was during an anniversary celebration for one of the relatives there. All the various family members attended, including my parents. At one point, I walked over to chat with one of my father’s brothers, and when I walked back to my parents, my father was enraged. It was such an over-the-top, frankly weird reaction. Why would he have been so upset that I was talking to his brother? He was behaving like a mix of protective father and jealous lover… More recently, I’ve wondered which brother of his was the one hitting on the young relative all those years ago in his house.
The job…not the dream
School itself was, for the most part, really absorbing. I loved the medical theory behind all the various lab tests and machines. And there was no question that this was setting me up for a job. In fact, toward the very end of my internship, I had secured a full-time position at that UCONN Farmington microbiology lab, to start right after graduation.
But the actual work itself, with the exception of microbiology, I actually feared. I did not feel drawn to most of the departments to actually do the work. I will admit that my soul still longed to be a writer or an English teacher, and it sometimes showed as slacking off on my classwork. It was hard to force a constant level of focus when the lab was the paying job, but it wasn’t the dream I had wanted.
At times, the program coordinator, who had taken a risk on me by giving me the internship slot, observed that I was not working hard enough and would call me on it. I knew she was right. While I was doing what I had to do to get a job and survive, my heart was elsewhere.
Then add in the exhaustion of working so hard to get into the Medical Technology program, taking all the summer classes, living with my grandparents, and enduring all the abuse, there were times I just had nothing left. My energy level would ebb and flow between high output and crashes. I just did the best I could.
One of the best things about that year came toward the end of the internship. Because I had the Farmington job nailed down, I bought a car. And not just any car, but my dream car — a brand-new, silver Camaro that my mother referred to as the silver bullet. I believe she said it was because she could hear it whistling down the road from how fast I was driving it. While it wasn’t a big engine or stick-shift model, still, it looked great. And it was my choice to fit in with my earlier loves of that 1966 Ford Mustang, or Terry Doyle’s 1968 Mercury Cougar. It was MY sports car.
Graduation
While I loved all my classmates and the hospital there, graduation finally arrived. I passed all the exams with flying colors, which meant I had just one more hurdle to clear — the national registry. But that was still a few months off. For the moment, I was excited about graduating from the program and also about the celebration idea my friends were planning for after the ceremony.
I had passed on attending the main University of Connecticut graduation ceremony. That was thousands of people crammed onto campus, while you walked and got an empty certificate holder — they mailed your degree a month or so later. So why bother? It had no meaning to me.
But the hospital’s ceremony was all of my classmates, and even some from the previous graduating class, as well as the hospital’s lab staff. It was intimate, fun, and that one had meaning for me. My ultimate achievement after so much struggle. I had graduated from college AND had a job!
Reality coming
Following the ceremony, the plan was for all of the students to go out the next night to a fancy French restaurant in the nearby town of Westport. I was beyond excited.
And Dad said, “No.” He wanted me to go home to Torrington that night after the ceremony. His logic was something like Why did I need to celebrate with people I’d never see again? It was that “get-rid-of-the-pen-pal” moment all over again.
For once, before I could say anything, Mom intervened. I got to stay with my friends.
The restaurant was glorious. Each of us was attended to by multiple waiters while serving us exotic foods like Escargot, Frog’s Legs Provencal, and so many others. It was a moment of pure freedom and joy, the savoring of all the years of struggle. And a glimpse of a hoped-for future.
But it was more like the eve of a hard reality coming…financially, emotionally, and socially. And whatever hopes I had for an end to the abuse were about to come crashing down.
Soul Mosaic 
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