RouletteWeekend

Now, back to the excessive moving (see yesterday’s blog for the beginning). I lived in the trailer for a couple of years. I think at some point, I helped my mom get a trailer in the same park and my two younger siblings moved in with her. Thinking back, maybe it wasn’t the best move, but it was the one that happened as far as I can remember. Like I said, lots of my past is like missing boards on a wooden privacy fence. Or actually, maybe the memories are the missing boards and the wooden slats that are still there are the lost memories, because I seem to have way more of those. The missing parts. I had a therapist once tell me that I needed to just leave the memories where they are when I asked him if he could use hypnosis to help me remember. He said sometimes the trauma buries itself so deep down that if we brought it to the surface instead of being able to breathe again, it might do the opposite and suffocate us with our grief, unable to process and get past it. And since he was the professional, and I was the one sitting on the leather sofa with all the problems, I decided that maybe he was right and so, I’ve left the fence alone. No need to try and fix it if it’s just going to come collapsing down on me and make life darker.

When things did get dark, or hard, or stressful, I ran. I still do. Like I’ve said before, change is one of my character flaws. I love it when it’s big. I hate it when it’s small. I can start my life over again with no problem, but I can’t work for spineless CEO who just can’t do the next right thing. It doesn’t really make any sense the things that trigger me and the things that excite me. I guess after 50 years I should be able to put a finger on it, be able to explain why things get me all riled up and why other things roll right off. Maybe I quit therapy too soon, but I still can’t explain it.

But the moving? I think I can explain the moving. I think part of it was learned behavior. I remember moving quite a few times as a kid. I don’t remember the moves so much as the new places to live. As an adult, with my own children, I moved quite a lot. Too much really. Part of it was always wanting something more. I didn’t think I was running from as much as I tried to convince myself I was running to. First, it was moving back to Pennsylvania from Tennessee. I thought I missed home. So moved back to PA. Then I felt bad that my daughter’s family was in TN so I would come back. Then I would move back to PA until finally, they took me to court and gave me an ultimatum which was basically move back to Tennessee or lose my kid for extensive periods of time including every other holiday, which I did for a while, but in the end, I hated Erie and after having my third son, by a third guy who didn’t give two fucks about his kid, I decided that maybe it was time to go back to Tennessee for good.

After moving back, though, I still moved quite a bit. I lived in an apartment next to the school the kids went to for a while and then I think I bought a house that I couldn’t afford, but the lender lied and said I made more money than I did. Then I lost that house when the market crashed in 2008 and I moved into another apartment that I paid for from some weird settlement they gave me to get out of the house that I hadn’t been paying on for months because I truly could not afford the mortgage and food at the same time. After I left the apartment, I rented a very cheap house in a very poor neighborhood, which suited me fine because the rent for the house was cheaper than my rent for an apartment. That house was next to my mom’s house that she eventually got. It was a novel idea until she would call me when a strange car was in the driveway to see who was visiting me.

I didn’t stay very long in that house before I found another one right up the street but too far for my mom to know what and who I was doing. I had a dog by then, Athena, the German Shepherd. After I moved, I found Zeus, a rottweiller, who moved in with us and I became a dog person.

When I left that house, I rented a friend’s house for a few years until I was able to buy it. I was finally setting down something like roots. A place where I could always come back to. A place to call home. Something that maybe I would leave to my kids when I was dead.

After the kids moved out, though, the thought of being stuck in one place for any longer than I needed to started to feel suffocating to me. I had all these plans that I was counting down to when my youngest turned 18. Of course, I had no plans on how to pay for these plans. I also had no plans of meeting someone and falling in love. I think I did always have a plan of making my way to a beach, so I sold the house that I thought I loved and packed up a U-Haul and moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

I have no regrets about leaving Knoxville. I do think if I had it to do all over again, this might not be the place I would have picked. I love our house. I love our neighbors. And I love the beach. But the area in general lacks art, culture, history. It’s here, but you have to really seek it out. There is no downtown, not a proper one. They say they are working on it and for a few months I worked with the organization who claimed they were helping to revitalize downtown, but in the end, it just seemed like the CEO was more worried about keeping his very large salary, saying the things that people wanted him to say, but not actually doing the right thing or doing what he said he was going to.

One of my other character flaws is expecting people to do what they say they are going to do when they say they are going to do it and I’m not good at making excuses for people when they shit the bed and don’t do it.

But, back to the moving. I’m here now and the housing market is crazy and believe me, I know, because Will is a realtor and we talk about housing prices all the time. Back then, I guess things weren’t so crazy, but for the most part, I’ve always had hourly jobs and only worked 40 hours a week. Only a couple times in my life have I even worked more than one job at a time because I wanted to be home with my kids as much as a single parent could be. So I never really had savings.

I’ve wracked my brain over the years wondering how I ever paid for a new place after leaving an old place and it still hasn’t quite come back to me yet. I have no clue. And I was the worst tenant. When I would leave, it’s not like I would take everything with me either. Sometimes, I would just pack what I could fit in the car with the kids and leave everything. Every single thing. I just didn’t care. I would just start over if I had to. I preferred it that way.

Maybe that’s why I’m not really attached to “things.” Or maybe there was something in my childhood that prevented me from getting too attached to things and it’s just always been easy to leave them behind.

If I remember, I’ll let you know.

Until tomorrow….