On Steppingstones

Examine any element of your life and start a sentence with, “It all began when…”

In Marilyn Frasca’s “Drawing a Life,” a one-quarter program at The Evergreen State College she continued teaching after her retirement (“I never dreamed I’d live to be sixty-five,” she said. She was pleasantly surprised when the social security checks started rolling in), we practiced Ira Progoff’s Intensive Journal Workshop methods. One foundation of this system, a three-ring binder with sections that feed back into one another to create a dialogue, are the steppingstones. Examine any element of your life and start a sentence with, “It all began when…”

This all began on May 5, when Kaden met me at Whistle Punk Brewing on a rainy Friday afternoon. He must have known right away that I hadn’t seen the email as he asked, “Did you see the email?” It was from our landlords, telling us they were selling our house.

Since September 2021, we’ve lived in a weird 1912 house split into a duplex, with no tenants on the other side, while the absentee landlords waited for an insurance settlement to remodel that kitchen, destroyed by a flood from a mis-serviced dishwasher. We were on the street-facing side, with the glorious old porch, entrance through our kitchen, with our stereo set up beneath the steep, narrow staircase to the high-ceilinged, open room we sleep in. We received word exactly a month before my MFA thesis defense, a week after Kaden defended his PhD dissertation and three weeks before his revisions were due. We were doing the most important things we’d ever done in our lives. The timing could not possibly have been worse.

This is the Google Maps streetview of our house before we lived there. It had fewer trees by the time we got there. By the middle finger, we knew it was the right place for us.

I am a person who freaks out. I am a person who dissects and mulls and my most frequent emotions are guilt and regret. I make decisions by examining every possible imagined outcome and talking to a ton of different people about it, telling stories in different ways, following every path until it is blocked, and eventually the outcome seems inevitable.

After my initial meltdown that this is how people become unhoused – the landlord selling your house while you are unemployed and no longer a student – which is true – I realized that I had not-so-secretly, yet shamefully, dreamed of owning a home for a very long time. But I hadn’t done anything, anything ever, to put myself in a position to do so. Until the threat of the place I lived being taken away from me, I had pushed aside my longing, because Kaden didn’t want the responsibility of home ownership. I never, ever wanted to be in that position again. So I took some time, in the days while my committee was reading my thesis, and applied for two jobs in the Community Colleges of Spokane system. I interviewed for one the same week as my thesis defense.

I didn’t get it, and I was greatly relieved, because I wasn’t ready to go back to work full time. In fact, I had sworn repeatedly throughout my MFA that I would never work full time again. Yet, I was unexpectedly inspired by the people who interviewed me. It convinced me that an administrative position in higher education was what I really wanted to do.

In the meantime, all the house-for-sale shit had gone down, and it was invasive and disturbing and although it’s a part of this story, I don’t want to go there. I learned I am a private person, something I did not know about myself. I graduated, and all of our family came to visit from out of town.

We were in Leavenworth a couple weeks later when I received a call inviting me to interview for the second position I had applied for. I didn’t get that job either, but the dean of tech ed called me personally and said she thought the school really needed someone with my skills, and encouraged me to keep applying, and mentioned a couple of positions that were closing soon. I did apply for those, as well as one other, and three positions at Gonzaga. Back in April, before we knew they were selling our house, I had applied for a half-time job with the Writers’ Center at my university, but they were taking turns doing summer vacations, so my interview wasn’t scheduled until the end of July.

In mid-July, our new landlord moved into the other unit, and everything was fine. We decided we would stay.

I did four interviews over the course of seven days.

On the morning of the third interview, Kaden came to me on the porch, where I was working on my short story collection, and said “Ummmmmmmmmm I was invited to apply for a one-year visiting lecturer position at Smith College. But it starts at the beginning of September.”

While I waited to hear back, and Kaden prepared his application materials for Smith, I got COVID. I have no idea where I got it from. No one around me had it. No one around me even got it, including Kaden, who also didn’t get it the first time I had COVID. And we weren’t even trying to stay apart, either time. He must be superimmune. We spent the week I was recovering walking around the neighborhood and talking hypotheticals. What if I got the job that was kinda my dream job, and Kaden got the job in Massachusetts?

I was not offered the Automotive Instructional Technician job (it was a stretch, but fun to imagine!). The tech ed dean called me again and said again that she was sure there was a place for me at the college. I was offered the Writers’ Center job at my university. Then I was offered my kinda dream job, a system support job in Admissions and Registration at the community college. I cancelled two additional interviews I hadn’t done yet.

I had been so many different selves since I began applying for jobs at the end of May. I didn’t know who to honor, to listen to, who deserved what. I turned down the half time job, with flexible hours, and took the one that’s living wage, full time with benefits. At the Writers’ Center, I might have developed skills that could lead to a teaching career; in this role, I’ll develop skills that will allow me to work in higher ed admin.

All my desires and values are in direct contradiction to one another.

On Monday, I started my new job. I have my own office. It has no windows, but it has a mini fridge. On Wednesday, Kaden was offered the job at Smith. It’s only a year, only eight months really. He leaves in less than two weeks. I can’t stop crying. There have been so many times during the last twenty years we’ve lived together that I would have loved to spend eight months living alone – in fact, he lived with me only on weekends from April 2015 to April 2016. But that isn’t what I want now. I love living with Kaden, in Spokane, in this weird old house.

I’ll never know if this was the best choice, but all along we’ve been making decisions based on the information we had at the time, which changed rapidly this summer. My dream was to not work at all for the year following my MFA, then I thought I could work work half-time, and finish my book(s). I have no doubt that I will be able to write while working full time – lord knows I’ve done it before – but I threw away my dream of un/der employment for my dream of maybe owning a home that can’t be sold out from under me some day. I applied for jobs when I thought Kaden was going to have one adjunct class an hour and a half away. We had dollar signs in our eyes and getting all those interviews (8 out of 10!) was a big ego trip for me. Validation, legitimization, that someone would let me do good work outside of retail.

I don’t even know how to think about money. All I know is the situation we find ourselves in began when we found out they were selling our house, where I’m staying, and Kaden is leaving.