Year Meme

[mamculuna]

OK, my year as assigned by oursin is

Good year to give me--a year my life changed. When the year started, I was in a hard place--working as an adjunct in a community college. It was getting clear than if we had a full-time, insurance and benefits job in the family it would be me, and that summer a full-time job came open. And somebody else was hired. What I know now is that the chance of an adjunct getting a fulltime job is something like one in a hundred (at best), but then I was really devastated. But having two kids under six and a husband who was just getting started as a carpenter, and no other skills, there was nothing to do but keep on working as an adjunct. That fall, I taught something like 27 hours a week (credit hours, in the class room--and most of it was composition--for something like $8 an hour). I went with a friend to New York over the Thanksgiving break (we saw Chorus Line and Pilobolus, and I got strep throat) and on the way home stopped in Chapel Hill, sick and exhausted--and got a call that another full-time teacher had quit and I was going to be hired, without having to go through the whole process again. That's essentially the same job I worked at, in various roles, until I retired.

I could have gone in so many different directions that year. I could have left here and gone back to California (as my children's father did, a couple of years later). I could have taught in high school, and maybe never gone on to graduate school.I could have quit teaching and gotten into a different field altogether. My life, and my children's lives, and both my husbands' lives--everybody's life would have gone in a different direction if I'd made a couple of different choices. We had some friends then, another couple with a kid the age of my sons--we spent a lot of time together, cooking and camping and listening to music and playing with the kids. A perfect time--and then they said they were getting divorced and leaving town. I didn't see it coming. Just like I didn't let myself look at what was happening to me and my husband.

I wrote poetry that year, and had the best writing group I've ever been part of. We spun off each other's energy and images like fireworks. I went back to the university and asked them to let me revalidate my old (14 years old) coursework for my MA and retake comps, which amazingly they did. I took an independent study with a Joyce scholar and reread Ulysses and Conrad and Woolf, and meanwhile on my own I read Gravity's Rainbow (eventually wrote MA thesis on it).

My kids were turning from little kids in nursery school to bigger kids in public kindergarten. I think that was the year I started reading Tolkien to them as a bedtime story (by the end of LotR, my older son could read it himself), and the year my husband built a wooden bed that was also a car. It was one of the last years when my father could still drive and garden and really live his life. Wish now I'd known then that I should have stopped and spent more time with him and with the kids.

I ran for miles --I could still run for miles then (pretty soon my tendons objected). Early in the morning, with Mary who is still my dear friend. I swam even more miles--there was still a lake then, with snapping turtles and weeds, but a lake. I took my kids in the ocean and they began to be brave enough that I had to call them back toward the shore.

Pulled in so many directions, so much happening. I don't think I could have lived that year twice!




Want a year to remember, all your own? Tell me the cut-off date for your memories, and I'll give you a year.

Comments

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

This is really quite a fascinating meme. Little snapshots of my friends' lives giving me a peek into their past.
Trying to remember what I was doing in 1977.
Okay,give me a date between 1969 and whenever...I started life as an adult after 1968.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

OK, for you, the year is 1986.

I'm really loving this meme, too.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I could go for another year.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

How about 1993? I don't think you did that one yet, though I might have missed something.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

You ran, too? So interesting. I ran when I was young, as well. I liked it though I was no athlete. I had to quit because I constantly had foot problems. Look at me now and you'd think I never ran a step in my life. ;o)

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I got into my forties my feet and ankles starting hurting if I ran more than a mile. I think partly it was the shoes they made back then--I probably could have run for longer if they'd had the shoes they have now. But I still have to buy very cushioned (which means expensive, and frequently replaced) running shoes just to be able to walk a few times a week (but I do walk about 4 miles at a stretch on asphalt, so it's worth it!)

Swimming's the thing I really miss--all the lakes near here have become parts of expensive gated communities, so we're left with pools, and I truly hate chlorine.

[fraydecat.livejournal.com]

my memory sucks...but I will try. I was born in 1965.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

So maybe 1985? And no one will know if you forget something!

[(Anonymous)]

This thing makes me sad. I don't really remember much about my 20th year. I was a girl in trouble. Living with a dealer, who didn't love me. I hung out with people that were much older than me. Most of them were musicians, artists and small time pot dealers. I was miserable because the man I lived with didn't love me, and proclaimed his deep abiding love for a woman who wouldn't give him the time of day. I was living on the edge, with creative people all around me who spent too much money, partied too much and flirted with being busted ALL the time.
There were a few incidents I shouldn't have lived through. I blew a hole in a wall with a gun I was playing with when I was high; I took so many pills one time I shouldn't have survived. I don't even know what I took. All these extremes took place within about a two week period. It was the end of my relationship with the man I lived with and I guess it manifested in my basically trying to kill myself.
What's funny is I didn't have a drug "problem". I smoked a little pot, and for a while did coke, but not much or often. I drank rarely. Yet, when I saw the end coming of me and Michael I started smoking base for about a week with another dealer, and then I took about four Mandrex(?)one day, and was out for over 24 hours. Poor liver. Poor girl.
It took me years of therapy to realize that I had been suicidal at some point in my life. I guess that would be the year.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Oh, my--that does sound hard. For me, taking a look back at the destructive times (I'm trying to write about the year when I was 27, but in many ways behaved like 12) is painful, but it also helps me to see that I finally did learn something.

Glad you survived that time--and sounds like you've found a better way to live, now.

[fraydecat.livejournal.com]

You know, I didn't mean to log in anonymously, but thought it was funny that it turned out that way. Did I play the game right? Was I supposed to post something happy and sunshiny?

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

No, as you can see from my 1977 and 1969, happy and shiny is not required! One option is to answer in a comment, as you did. But if you think other people in your friend's list might want to read what you wrote, you can post in your own LJ and explain what the meme is and offer to give them a year if they want it. But people are doing it both ways---and thanks for sharing that very honest and painful memory.