So most of our big life changes are always due to J's career. We'd already moved twice before for his job, when we bought our "dream house" in 2016. (I thought we'd already bought what for me was our "dream house" back in 2007 but that only lasted three years because we moved for a promotion.) This new house seemed even more perfect as it was in his hometown, one he'd been gone from for almost 30 years. His parents and other family members still lived there, and they were extremely happy to have us living so close.
When we moved into the house finally in 2017, J had been working on the road and traveling full time for the company for two years. I've already posted a lot about that. He would leave super early Monday mornings- sometimes Sunday nights- and get home late on Fridays or maybe Saturday mornings. Every week. There was no working from home, his job was a physical one that required him to be at different locations all over the US in person. He started the travel in early 2015, about two years after I had "retired" from the same company due to health reasons. It was a wonderful opportunity and a substantial raise, both in salary and bonus and even stock options. I won't rehash all of the early days of it, I spent many posts talking about the issues of suddenly being home alone for days on end, not enjoying or using my free time wisely and productively. So when we moved four hours north into that new little house up on top of a hill, we thought life didn't get much better than that. We'd had a huge estate sale to downsize and sold our old home within a few months, so the transition was uneventful. We now had 8 gorgeously landscaped private acres with a sweeping view, halfway up a hill so steep, sometimes my SUV couldn't get up the driveway. The house was immaculate in every way, inside and out, and they'd just put in an absolutely breathtaking addition of a magnificent sun room. I mean, completely stunning, I can't find enough adjectives to describe it. I couldn't believe they would want to leave it, but they were moving out of state to a mountain cabin for their retirement. Both owners were engineers and the husband's hobby was plants and trees, and he had loaded up every space around the house and yard with everything flowery and colorful. It was all quite dazzling to the eye, but if you've ever read my previous posts, you know that gardening has always been a challenge for me physically. Even though I love the idea of it! The maintenance of these beautiful gardens and flower beds quickly became overwhelming and I couldn't keep up at all. It fell to J of course, and because he had such a very limited time at home, it wasn't maintained the way it needed to be. Even though this was a much smaller house and easier for me to keep clean inside, the weeds unfailingly glared at us both, mocking. It would only get worse over time.
Because of the grueling travel schedule, when J was home he was always exhausted and in an ill mood. He tried to keep up his energy to do and go on the weekends because he knew that I wanted to, after being cooped up alone in the house all week. We would go out to eat, or the movies, estate sales, shopping, on long country drives. He also had to try and keep up with yard work and just normal chores around the house during his few moments at home each week. Plus he was still doing his online shop and making signs in the workshop there. With the move his travels now took even longer- before we had lived near one of the largest airports in the country and he always had direct flights. Now his travels always included one or two connecting flights with layovers, making his departures even earlier, his returns home even later. So he was becoming more and more worn out from it and home even less, and was undeniably burned out from the job. Yes we had crazy amazing magical perks from his travel rewards. Flying first class from coast to coast with his Diamond status, free hotel rooms with his Ambassador Elite level- even a lush room at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking Central Park one NYC visit- and always free luxury rental cars like BMW's and Audi's. Things we would/could never never ever actually "pay" for out of pocket. Dreamy stuff that most of our friends and family could only see on TV shows. We never felt guilty or ashamed for savoring these experiences, these rewards and points were simply growing quietly in the background as he did his job every day, every week. Why shouldn't we use them to enjoy "our" time together?? He was eating- and drinking- at nice restaurants with the company paying. On his extremely rare off times at work he would be able to sometimes do fun things like take in a ballgame or go to a museum in whatever city he was working in. He was accumulating rewards points for us faster than we could use them on our personal trips. Even as I write this, years later, we still have almost 700,000 points for a major hotel chain. Every week he would bring home a gift for me, sometimes just a cute find from a local downtown gift store, sometimes extravagant items from the duty free shops at airports. Other than the fact that he was never home, it was all very glamorous. Until it wasn't. I enjoyed the perks by doing nothing, except trying to survive without my husband for most of the time. It was becoming a steep price and J's health was starting to suffer both physically and mentally. It was nice to think of those rewards and experiences as "freebies" but really, they weren't free at all. J was grinding away his whole entire being for it, I was depressed and lonely while he was earning it.
I understand spouses all over the world have jobs that require them to be gone for long periods of time. Military obviously. Doctors, pilots, power crews, forest firefighters, guys on fishing boats and cargo ships and oil rigs, long haul truck drivers, hell even rock stars or athletes on the road. J was just doing the same, working for the corporate office as a consultant or "fixer" as it were. His job required him to go into divisions across the country that were struggling, to find out why and try to help them, or temporarily fill in for their vacant upper management positions if needed. Mostly he was seen (and treated) as an outsider and interloper, by people who worked for the same company as he did, doing the same jobs he'd done for many years and knew like the back of his hand. It became a heavy burden to be so openly unwanted by colleagues and during those years on the road he made very few friends or lasting contacts. People dreaded him coming, and were happy to see him go. He did grow one or two relationships from that job, but not many. He felt very alone in his work world and mostly unappreciated, when all he wanted to do was help out the company he was so dedicated to. He received little thanks (even from his boss), and a lot of resentment, and it started to weigh him down emotionally. That and being away from home of course, despite staying in comfortable suites (not our messy house) and eating great food (not my terrible cooking). We bought our little house on the hill with all the acres and big front porch, with the idea that we would stay there a long long time, maybe even forever. But J realized that in order to keep it, he had to continue to work on the road full time. Forever. We had a house that we loved, only he wasn't really living there. And I was sitting around alone not enjoying it, just waiting for the weekends, desperate for him to come home when I would basically bombard him with all my to-do lists. Two quick days where he would be so tired he would fall asleep in the living room and sometimes sleep away Saturday afternoons, while I tiptoed around, sad and still lonely even though he was right there in front of me. Keeping that lovely perfect house was destroying our life and our relationship.
2017 was a particularly crazy year, the first year we lived there. Right after we moved into the house, like literally, a promotion came open. The one he/we had always wanted and hoped for and dreamed of, for well over a decade. The one that would take us back to the town where we had originally met and started our life together, where he had lived for almost 18 years and I had lived for 15. The town where we lived when we were married and worked together and bought our first "dream" home. The town where both our best friends still lived, the town we always wanted to return to and live in one day again. Here, finally, was the lifetime opportunity we'd been waiting on for so long. And here we sat thinking about it, in our gorgeous barely lived in new home in another state. We were gutted at this horrendous timing and the decision in front of us- we had always wanted to permanently "go back" there again one day, yet we didn't want to give up this amazing property we were just settling into. We talked about how we could pull it off, with J maybe taking an apartment there and coming home every other weekend or so. And how long would that last? He'd be gone from home even more than with the travel job. Of course at that time one of our cats had major cancer and was on all sorts of
pills and chemo that had to be given every day, several times a day (I'll post about that one day). I
could in no way travel to stay with him for visits. Financially what would happen, trying to pay for two households? How would he help with necessary chores and yard work at the house, things I couldn't do myself, if he was gone for 2-3 weeks at a time? Hiring someone was just more of our money going out that could be going into our retirement funds, stretching out his remaining working years even longer. How could we balance the scales to even out the dream job versus the dream house, and having them both?? The job would be 250 miles away, not an incredible distance yet it felt completely like foreign shores when we tried to see the logistics of him going back and forth a reasonable amount. We wanted to take the new job. We wanted to keep the new house.
So try as we might to reach for the stars and have everything we ever wanted, we couldn't see how to make this work based on reality and not emotions, so he passed on the opportunity. Even though his boss at the time encouraged him to put in for the promotion, convinced he would absolutely get it. In the meantime, his travel job had him stuck in the NYC area for the entirety of the 2017 calendar year, flying home and back every weekend, dealing with the traffic and shenanigans up there. And worse than that he was mostly having to work nights yet come home and try to exist on a daytime weekend schedule with me, which proved to be nearly impossible. He was utterly miserable, and it was a very soul-crushing assignment with colleagues who actively were working against him because they didn't want him there helping (which meant sometimes making indifferent people do their jobs instead of drifting along pointlessly). Normally his assignments would be a few weeks, then he'd move on to new place for another few weeks, or sometimes return to places for a short second round. If it was an assignment he hated, he knew there was an end in sight very soon, and he could hang on just a little bit longer knowing that he'd be gone shortly. This time NYC was going on and on and on and ON with no end date and he felt hopeless, at a breaking point. So hopeless in fact that in the fall, when we took our always much loved yearly vacation to the coast to our happy place, he was so on edge and unhappy and full of angst that he didn't want to do anything but sit and watch TV and mope. And hate life. He was completely shut down. And in fact we (he) suddenly checked out two days early (!!!) and we came home. Cutting a beloved vacation short? We'd never ever done that before. I was clearly livid, but all he could do was think about how work was making him so low and so despondent that it ruined our time at the beach. When we got home he made it clear to his boss that he'd had enough- not of the job, but of the NYC assignment. It had been over ten months there and he felt that he had to get out of that place. His boss asked him to stay through until the end of the year, and then he promised he would get J into a new assignment.
The new assignments finally came, and rotated so that he wasn't stuck in one place for too long. And his boss was so appreciative- and quite very apologetic- that J got a substantially "extra" extra bonus for putting up with NYC for an entire year. And even though the new assignments weren't as painful as NYC, he was still away from home. And still working an always shifting schedule of days for a few weeks, then nights for a few weeks, then days again. Sometimes he would even be going to different time zones each week, needing his body to adjust at home on the weekends before heading back to it. Always traveling, always being gone, barely having 48 hours at home every week. 48 hours that he pretty much slept through because his body was so so so exhausted and getting worse, his mental gas tank was so dry. His desire to do anything was nonexistent, his ability to find any joy in finally being home was gone. All he could do was try to stay awake and watch the clock tick down until his next flight out, barely going though the motions for the few of our Saturday escapades he could manage to find the energy for. I was left on the sidelines to just basically put up with it, to accept it as our current and likely future life now. He'd passed on the fantasy promotion so we could live in this home, and the irony of us never being together there was not lost. He powered through 2018, flying off here and there, touching down briefly at his home base with time enough for me to do his laundry and get him packed up again. Because our previous home had been paid off when we sold it, this house was now also paid off, as was my car so our financial burdens were a little lighter at this point. We both knew as hard as this job was, it had allowed us to attain that achievement of not having a mortgage- twice. And those years we were gobbling up the perks of the travel rewards, taking extravagant vacations and cruises and casino jaunts, enjoying the most enticing and addictive fringe benefits of the job. It was always amazing but that certainly wasn't enough to make up for our empty real life, and was it really worth it to pretend to live that fabulous high life for a few weeks out of the year? By 2019 he felt so bereft that he was simply an empty shell visiting me, sitting then quickly napping in the recliner in "my" house on the weekends. At least that's how it felt to me. That house was becoming his albatross.
Then came the summer of 2019....and on to Part Two....
MISS GEE
(The incredible front porch view from our 2017 dream house)
