I had another post for today but first I’m sitting here with the Election doing what it’s doing and I’m wondering how we live in a country that would rather put a Hateful Incompetent Blustering Serial Liar in the highest office of the land over literally anyone else you could think of? A person who has made a campaign promising to deport citizens based on their religion, who considers many citizens of this country including women, disabled people, people of color, LGBTA, veterans, and immigrants as less than dirt to be trod on? When he incites violence against those who disagreed with him, invoked the Second Amendment in reference to his opponent – how are we to expect anything different from him if he’s then installed in the Oval? How precisely is he meant to lead and represent this country when his view of the nation is one that would be better off if most of us were gone?
Some of us have kids to whom we’ll have to explain how a bully and a predator was elected to the highest office in the land. How a man can brag about sexual assault and have multiple accusers of sexual assault and still be elected President. Some of us have daughters to whom we’ll have to explain how no matter how experienced you are, no matter how much blood, sweat or tears you’ve invested in the process and your career, a blustering man with literally no credentials or perceived competence can still win over you. Honestly, none of this was new, it’s just that much more obvious now.
I already knew I’d have to explain this to JuggerBaby someday but I had held to this frail hope that it could be in the past tense when ze was old enough to understand.
Add to the list of explanations: why are they telling us to “go home”? Because that’s nothing new either, but it’ll happen more frequently after the election, just as it was becoming more obvious during the campaign.
I was thinking earlier today, is this how it felt in Germany after the elections? A sense of foreboding, and impending doom, and wondering how many of your friends you can shelter from the coming storm? How long you can hold out?
The blistering racism, festering sexism, and ever-present xenophobia that’s pocked this country had me prepared for a close race, but I had held out hope, based on all the good, decent, and kind people I know here, that it wouldn’t come out in favor of hatred and bullying. This didn’t even come down to warring conservative versus liberal values and agendas. For me, this was about basic human decency and he didn’t even meet the minimum bar for that.
It’s not been called yet but I’m worried for the many who are even more vulnerable than I.
I don’t feel it yet, but I can say that I hope that when we wake up, it won’t be as bad as all that. That it isn’t the beginning of the long slide. I hope.
Nov 9 update: The person I couldn’t believe was the Republican nominee is the President-Elect now. It’s an outcome I knew was to be feared and the repercussions will range far and wide. It’s too early to try and hope again, today’s a day for resting, regrouping, and then we’ll pick up again. We’ll stand up to protect ourselves, defend those who need help, and be the best possible people we can be. That’s our job. And in two years, we need to do what we can to change the fact that all three branches of government are held by one party. The checks and balances can’t work when there’s no aisle to reach across.
November 2, 2016
Grief is a jerk.
It hides in memories you’d think wouldn’t have any power, bursting out and getting its ick on you when you were just trying to get on with your day.
I was singing the alphabet to JuggerBaby, in two languages, when it occurs to me that ze responds to only a few Secondary Language commands. Ze doesn’t grasp much of the language itself and it’s because ze doesn’t hear very much of it. I started speaking solely in Secondary Language for all of bath time and ze was uncharacteristically quiet, clearly not able to respond or unsure how to respond affirmatively or negatively. In English, ze is going great guns with the YES YES YES and NO NO NO. In other languages, ze cocks zir head and wanders off, or sits silently.
It triggered a pang, and then a panic. I was immersed in my Secondary Language because my family were immigrants and they knew that I’d learn English just fine at school but it’d be hard to keep in touch with our culture if we didn’t speak the language everyday. Even now, living where we are, I so rarely have anyone to speak to in Secondary Language that it feels like a foreign language to me. I don’t naturally switch like I once did. This was Mom’s legacy – it was her labor of love to make sure I could read and write simple and basic words, and puzzle out the rest based on my speaking fluency. And now I’m losing much of that. And I feel like I’m losing her again. And like JuggerBaby is losing zir grandma in yet another way.
I was taught to read and write and speak because none of my grandparents spoke English. They were all in their 70s when they immigrated, an entirely new language wasn’t happening. But this next generation? They’re being raised by parents one step removed from the old culture and customs. We grew up exposed to it, but we didn’t carry on with it. And so, particularly without grandparents to ground us all in the efforts of keeping that language and cultural memory close, it feels like a struggle just to hold on to what we have. It’s slipping away.
***
There’s a white coat tucked in the back of my closet. I’ve never worn it. I never will wear it. It’s a massive thing that I’d never fit, even when pregnant.
That should be reason enough for it to be removed in this clearing up project.
Why hasn’t it been? Because of Mom. She bought it for me from a yard sale when she was in the throes of dementia. Just like she had done when I was a kid.
She was trying so hard to be Mom again, to take care of me when she couldn’t even manage to get through the day in her own mind. She was trying to find her way back to me, maybe subconsciously reminding me how she once provided for me instead of the other way around. I remember accepting it from her, knowing I’d never wear it, knowing she just wanted to be my mom again, bleeding inside from anger at losing her and not knowing how to help either of us.
It’s this last gift and remnant of her thinking of me, this physical symbol of my not being a better daughter when she needed me most. And I need to clear out everything that’s not useful but with this one coat, I keep getting ambushed by this towering wall of guilt.
She’s been gone five years this month. I still don’t know what to do with it.
October 31, 2016
This was one of my annual goals for 2016.
We’ve been setting aside money for JuggerBaby’s care and education since 2014 but I hadn’t committed to a specific savings vehicle outside of our savings account. I wasn’t ready to think about it in the first half of the year because the first half of the year totally sucked but I finally started getting stuff done in the fall, including picking and funding a 529 plan. (That felt GREAT.)
I finally sat down to do some more research after my first halfhearted attempt last fall.
California’s 529 plan, the ScholarShare College Savings Plan, was the logical first place to start.
They allow earnings grow income-tax deferred, and the money is also free from federal income tax when it’s used to pay for qualified higher education expenses, but all the plans do. What they don’t offer are any tax incentives to keep the money in the state, and they hold their funds in TIAA-CREF which I don’t much like, so I went looking elsewhere.
Since any other state’s tax incentives do me no good as a California resident, I just targeted companies that I like: Fidelity and Vanguard.
Nevada’s Trust is administered by the Board of Trustees of the College Savings Plans of Nevada, and the plans themselves are held in the Vanguard 529 College Savings Plan with 3 age-based plans and 19 other choices. I don’t much care about the 19 other choices at this point, the money just needs to go into an aggressive investing mix right now, so the age based plans are what I care about.
Vanguard works with UGift which means that anyone who wants to contribute can just enter the code that I give them and quickly set up a bank transfer without any confidential information changing hands. I don’t want your bank information and you’re not getting JuggerBaby’s SSN, period. That’s non-negotiable.
Sidebar: some thought was given to whether it made sense to hold a plan in our names or in the gifter’s name, based on the concern that when assets are considered for college funding, assets in our or JuggerBaby’s names are counted as primary assets.
Our assets at this point in time wouldn’t disqualify JuggerBaby entirely from receiving grants, but in 17 years? If I’m doing my job, and I will, then our total assets would be sufficient that JB wouldn’t qualify for any need-based aid. If either one of us is gone, we’d have life insurance to supply some of the contributions. And frankly, one of the selling points for people planning to open 529 plans in their names instead of the beneficiaries is that they can change the beneficiary at any time. I’m not banking on JB’s future with assets in someone else’s name. I’m not saying a gifter would take back the money, but as long as that money isn’t in zir or our names, then it’s not really ours, is it?
That brings us back to the technicality that if you want to open a 529 plan in someone’s name, you need their SSN. And with the amount of identity theft and fraud out there, I’m not taking that risk in any way shape or form. JB’s SSN stays with us and whatever financial institution that I enter it into when I’ve vetted them, that’s it. I’m not widening that net of risk.
Ok, back to the program. Fidelity administers New Hampshire, Arizona, Delaware, and Massachussetts’ plans, and also has a good secure way for people to gift to the beneficiary.
PiC and I both have enough assets at both Fidelity and Vanguard to be a little more than your run of the mill investors and so we have some advantages at both, but what it came down to were the fees. Vanguard charges 0.19% on their age-based portfolios. Fidelity charges two sets of fees: a program management fee, plus investment management fees and other expenses in each of the mutual funds. It’s different for each of the four states and is a mess to figure out. But they start at 0.88%.
That’s pretty much no contest!
Vanguard, as ever, is my friend and so I’m moving cash to JuggerBaby’s account there to let it flourish and grow. But I’ll wait until after October to add more money to it, since it’s been a rather rough period in the markets.
Now we just have to get on with raising a kid, making sure ze wants to attend college, and is adequately prepared to make the most of it. I paid my own way through college but the days of being able to do that on your own are probably limited with all the rising costs of school and living.
I don’t want zir to get a free ride through life, far from it, but I don’t want zir to be crippled by the burden of many student loans if it can be avoided. At the same time, it’s possible that ze will have good reason not to want to attend college for one reason or another. If that’s the case, I’d need to consider how we might redirect these funds.
:: How did you pay for college? If you have kids or niblings, are you saving for their possible future education? How would you spend $50,000 in educational funds?
October 28, 2016
I love food, and I love cooking for my family now so by somewhat popular vote, I’m sharing some of our family-approved meals here with you, on Fridays.
How I generally try to cook: 3-5 ingredients per dish; use fresh ingredients if possible; time from prep to table goal is 1 hour or less. I aim to serve a starch, veggies, and some protein. Sometimes dessert if I’m feeling incredibly motivated but that’s pretty rare.
It’s cool weather again so I’ve hauled out the Le Crueset for a stovetop to oven dinner. I’ve never made a classic shepherd’s pie, so don’t be surprised if this all looks a bit weird to you. The important thing is that the family will happily eat it.
Our little Le Crueset is one of my favorite kitchen staples. I wouldn’t have splurged on it but it was affordable some years back with a combination of coupons, gift cards, and not being picky about colors. Cherry seems to be the current unpopular color, and therefore cheaper, right now but I can never tell why certain colors are more or less popular than others. I can’t imagine picking white cookware, though, not the way I cook. I don’t need my cookware to advertise my cooking mishaps, thank you very much.
Ingredients:
1 lb of ground turkey
2 diced zucchini
1/2 diced tomato
1/2 cup frozen sweet corn
1/4 cup frozen shelled edamame
1 tbsp onion powder
1/2 tbsp garlic salt
2 potatoes and 2 cups of beef broth to make mashed potatoes topping
I started the mashed potatoes in a medium pot first. I boil my diced potatoes in broth for extra flavor so I can skip the butter and milk or cream. Nothing against them but I prefer to save those fat calories for something really delicious, like butter filled pastries. Mmmm…..
While that was bubbling away, I start to saute the ground turkey with the spices, experimenting with not using black pepper to see how that changes the flavor, over medium heat in the Le Crueset. While that’s cooking, I cut up my vegetables, deciding against adding carrots and onions because that’s ten more minutes of sous chefing on my feet. Once they’re ready, in go the vegetables, including the frozen ones, and everything is cooked through in about ten more minutes.
The heat gets shut off while the potatoes finish cooking through, and I wash all the dishes that were waiting in my spare five minutes. That done, the potatoes are ready to be smashed with a wooden spoon, added to the Le Crueset, and topped with a sprinkling of cheese. Ten minutes at 350 degrees in the oven finishes it off while I prep some broccoli to steam on the side – if JuggerBaby rejects some of the shepherd’s pie veggies, ze will nom on the steamed broccoli. If ze doesn’t, then the broccoli goes into zir lunch for tomorrow.
Total time from prep to serving: 1 hour.
:: What’s your favorite filling combination for a shepherd’s pie?
October 26, 2016
A story of denial
Does everyone have a price? I thought yes. Then, no. Then changed my mind again.
I wanted to believe the answer was no. I needed to understand the answer was yes.
Integrity and moral fiber become inherent, I used to think. They are part of consistently learning to be, and making the choice to be, a good person. To choose to do the right thing whether or not it was easy.
Suffice to say, that I could still believe into my mid-30s despite all my experiences that prove otherwise suggests a bedrock of faith I didn’t know I had until it crumbled.
But the story doesn’t start there.
It started with my first lessons in the school of hard knocks, toiling to save my family from financial ruin. I was 17 when I learned we were more than broke. We were in debt, deeply in debt, and my parents saw no way out of the quicksand they had built our lives on. Credit cards were used to make ends meet, too often. It wasn’t frivolous but it was absolutely foolish. When their siblings needed cash, or a parent needed a replacement something, they turned to my parents. Saying no is not an option for that generation, so they found a way. Half a lifetime of solving other people’s crises left them carrying six figures of debt on credit cards and personal and business loans.
Making mistakes didn’t make them bad people. My parents deserved my help because they always helped others. For a decade I made it my life to help them back, but I also learned from their mistakes. I helped them but I saved.
At first it was paltry. I was literally saving pennies. Nickels and dimes were salted away. I scrimped and skipped meals, worked overtime, saved like my life depended on it.
In a way, it did. More than my life, this was my Hope.
After more double shifts and sleepless nights than I care to remember, I invested my painstakingly hoarded nest egg. It grew a little bit and I reinvested it repeatedly.
18 months ago, the investment matured at $15,000, and I asked my father to pick up the cash. I hadn’t decided but was almost certain it would pay for JuggerBaby’s daycare so that’s what I told him the money was needed for. No immediate rush, then, I said, but I would absolutely need it by fall.
He’d been my loan courier for the interest payments in previous year but, this time, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up from him for two months. Two long months where I ignored my sense of misgiving over his characteristic silences, chiding myself for being worried, chalking it up to a hard-won sense of skepticism gone haywire.
By this summer, I had been put off several time. He was busy, they kept missing each other when he dropped in to pick up the payment. All normal, plausible, reasonable except it felt a little off. Nothing I could pinpoint but my instinct’s honed on decades of accurately identifying my brother’s lies. They had long outnumbered his truths, his half truths, and I’d become an expert at gauging when he was trying to con me.
I had never wanted to learn the art of detecting deceit in another family member.
An old friend always says, “your instincts are your best friend,” and I should have known when I was deliberately ignoring mine that they weren’t wrong.
They weren’t. But I wasn’t either.
I wasn’t prepared to accept another betrayal. I was trying to avoid it by pretending I didn’t sense the wrongness, the lie underneath, by giving him every opportunity to make it right. To make a clean breast of it and pay me the respect of treating me like an adult. Just a regular adult he cares about, never mind the fact that I’d sacrificed my life and health for his comfort and safety.
But denying your instincts always kicks your ass. My nightmares of fighting with my family started again. For years, they were so common PiC had mastered the art of soothing me without even waking himself. I’d wake screaming at my brother as we grappled over yet another bad decision.
Prepared to deal or not, once those nightmares started again, I knew I had to confront the situation head on.
A story of anger
So I did. And I saw the man who taught me to have integrity, to build a life by helping others and doing no harm, crumple under direct questioning. He had taken that money and used it to invest in a venture that was “expected to pay out within 6 weeks but…”
I watched as his face, once beloved, revealed that I could no longer trust anyone in my family. He regretted betraying my trust, he said, but the betrayal went far deeper than he understood.
Having made the colossally bad decision to take my money, my baby’s money, he then lied to me. Kept lying until he was backed into a corner.
The kindest possible interpretation is that he’s still grieving, that he’s eaten up by the shame and guilt of dependency, and the only way he knows how to deal with it is to try and make the most of any opportunity. Even if it wasn’t an opportunity that was offered. Even when it was clearly not his to take.
Some part of me still wants to be kind because any harsher interpretation is harsh for me too. But it’s been five years since Mom died. Three years since we had the incredibly hard conversation about our feelings of guilt and hurt and trying to mend things. Seventeen years since I first picked up this work of supporting my family and we had our first fights about honesty and making the household work.
He’s had time. He’s had enough chances to learn to work with me, and has proven in the starkest possible way that another chance is just another costly disappointment.
He promised to pay it all back when the money came back but in past year he’s called me once, and only because he thought he was returning a missed call and then to ask when we’re coming to visit. No updates on what’s going on, no calls to see how we’re doing. Not a word about receiving an email full of pictures of an (I’m not biased at all) incredibly cute grandchild growing up fast. Nothing.
That money, in other words, is lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.
What does this all mean? How do you go forward when you admit this is the state of affairs?
In practical terms, not much. I won’t put him out on the street by stopping his rent payments, I won’t punish him by stopping his utility payments. I’m not able to assess the cost of his betrayal and theft as equal to that of his right to live like a human with basic needs.
But it has cost him my love, my regard, and my trust.
The hardest realization is that I’ll never trust him alone with his grandchild. I once believed he would protect me at all costs and have now learned that we’re not even worth $15,000. I was his own child, his only daughter, his sole support, and he’s abused my good will and manipulated me under the umbrella of good intentions for years.
He’s rationalized it all as his way of helping me. He was working hard to make sure that I didn’t have to pay more than I already do to subsidize my sibling. So it naturally makes sense that he would take the money intended for my child’s care, daycare that is necessary for my health and for my income which he relies on, as seed money, then cover up his actions with lies.
That was his “better course of action.” Not: communicating clearly with me about his needs or his plans. Not asking if he could use it as capital. Just taking it and lying til the cows came home.
Well, the cow has come home and guess what? Asking forgiveness MIGHT be easier than asking for permission but what they don’t tell you is that you may never get forgiveness.
Knowing that he’d already easily rationalized the very wrong and harmful act of stealing from me and then lying to me about it until caught, what else can he rationalize? This wasn’t the first lie, but it has to be the last before the price is too high and too painful to be counted in dollars.
I’d been quietly resentful before that he hasn’t once lifted a finger to engage with his only grandchild. On arranged visits, he’s a drop-in. He’s a visitor to the proceedings, he’s played with zir maybe twice and that’s because PiC has been even more persistent than I in making sure ze gets Grandpa time.
After all this?
There’s simply no way I could ever trust zir in his care. I suppose it’s a good thing he never offered to help with zir, not even to watch zir for five minutes so I could scarf down a meal, so we haven’t developed the habit of relying on him. In my family, non-parents always lend a hand to the parents of little ones, grandparents above all. I have personally done it for more years than I can count, for everyone’s kids. He’s done it countless times for other relatives but I see that the most special consideration I get is that he’ll show up. Good thing, I guess.
He was an icon, in my eyes. A figure of storied proportions. His sacrifices to make a better life, his hard work, his ethics. I imbibed those with my mother’s home-cooked meals and tutelage. And now he’s made himself all but a stranger.
I’ve wept.
There are still some tears in the days to come, when a fond memory feels shattered, when I can’t remember the word for “meatball” in our native language and I can’t bring myself to dial his number.
I’m still angry with him. I may forgive someday but today is not that day. Tomorrow isn’t either. Even if it ever happens, I still won’t forget.
I don’t doubt he was sorry to be telling me the truth when he was forced to, but how much was regret over being caught and how much for the wrongdoing? History suggests mostly the former, less of the latter.
Years ago, a blogger aptly named Grace said she heard the voice of a hurt daughter wondering why she wasn’t good enough. It seems Grace read me more correctly than I knew.
I know now that I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to believe in his good intentions. But his good intentions always came with a price and I was always the only one to who paid them. So here I am admitting: I am hurt. I do wonder why my father doesn’t love me enough, never loved me enough, to work with me or to put me and my well-being even equal to that of my Sibling’s when he was still clearly capable but unwilling to take care of himself.
Six years ago, I couldn’t conceive of the notion that my parent could value me so little. That he could see me as nothing more than a way to pay the bills. Today, I’m seeing that it’s not only possible, it’s been the truth for a long time.
I regret the loss of faith. I regret the loss of history. I regret that ze won’t be able to learn our family oral history the way I did from the man who remembers so much of it because he can’t spend an hour in our company. I hate that ze won’t have a living loving grandfather worth knowing.
I hate that when people joke that they still lean on their fathers like JuggerBaby now flops against zir father with complete faith, I feel a pang of envy. I hate that when a dear friend got married and his bride introduced me to her beaming, over the moon father, I felt loss.
Where was my father for all that? For the joy, the support, the fatherly bond? I worshiped him. I still remember before so clearly. At five years old, I was brewing his morning coffee and sitting with him while he drank it before he left for work. I brewed his nightly pot of tea, offering the first pour to our ancestors with lighted incense as is our custom, every night. I carefully washed it and the tea cups afterward, setting them out to dry for the next day. He combed my hair for me, just like his!, before school every morning of first grade. When Mom and I clashed, I could always turn to him for support over books, over clothes, over anything.
When did he stop loving me?
I won’t ask why. I don’t want to know. Maybe I don’t want to know when it happened, either.
A story of acceptance
I refuse to let this diminish me. I refuse to let this make me feel like I’m less than worthy. With or without him I am a person, whole and complete, and I will not be made less because my father forgot I have value.
Just as I learned from his mistakes in money, I’ll learn from his mistakes as a person and as a parent. I know now that not having money can do terrible things to a person, no matter who they were before, and while I cannot save my father from himself, perhaps I can save my chosen family from making the same mistakes.
For better or worse, I am my father’s daughter and inherited many of his traits. But I am not him, just like I’m not my mother, either. I have a choice and can choose to do things differently for my future.
I think it’s clear that I have done that, in finding a way to fulfill what I see to be my responsibilities and still preserve and protect my own family’s future. It’s not as easy as it would be if I were unfettered but I make it work.
More than one friend has asked me: would you ever cut him off?
The reality is he’s 70 years old, he’s unlikely to get hired anywhere, and he has minimal Social Security. He can afford his food and his gas, but clearly not more than one utility bill at a time. It would be inhumane to cut him off when I do have the means to support him, but I will be looking at ways to reduce the burden on our finances by pushing him to move to senior housing. This has been a challenge because he won’t throw out my sibling, the Parasitic Trainwreck (mixing my metaphors to give a clearer picture of his character), and I’m not sure what senior housing would allow for the presence of a person like him.
But for now, it’s enough that I’m able to face this squarely.
Then I’ll fix it. Like I always do.
