Giving Up Stuff

Every year, my resolution is to quit more things.

I gave up being a blonde. I started being a blonde as a result of a well water accident in 2001. We had poured bleach down our well to clean it and must have used too much bleach. After I took a shower,   the water stripped all the color out of my hair. I was between jobs at the time, so trying a radically different look as an experiment was not disruptive. I didn't have to endure a day of shocked looks or comments. I just became blonde after that. But this year I decided it was making me look tired, so I gradually went back to my brown hair.

I gave up the newspaper. First I cut back to just Sunday. Then I got rid of Sunday, too, because it was like homework to feel like I was getting my money's worth. Then I even stopped looking at the paper at work. I am inundated with what's happening in the world through the Internet and social media.

Without the Sunday paper, I had fewer coupons. Then no coupons. So I stopped cutting out coupons. Sure, I pay full price for toilet paper now, but I also don't buy new products I don't really need just because I have a coupon.

I am pretty close to giving up Christmas. I finally told my family that I was not buying any of them gifts. They have everything they need. I don't enjoy shopping, especially when everyone has to have a gift at the same time, during a season when the stores are crowded, the weather is cold, and it gets dark so early. Why isn't Christmas in April when Jesus was actually born? Also, we did absolutely no decorating this year. None. Not even the little window tree came out. Which is great because this weekend I don't have to pack up any decorations.

There might be other things I gave up for good this year, but these are the big ones. I am at that age now where I can say with all sincerity that,"I am too old for this crap," and not put up with annoying people, insane coworkers, pointless family traditions, and a host of other things that people do just to be polite. Unlike those gay cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," I do know how to quit you.

The Christmas Ficus

I am not a plant person. To me, tending plants is like working in a nursing home. Your charges take a great deal of care and special attention, but will never get to the point where they can get along without you. And then they die.

One year for my birthday, a well-meaning relative gave me three very large house plants. I put the plants out on the sun porch where they took up all the space, and we had our first emergency immediately. One of my cats chewed up some of the leaves. She spent the evening throwing up. We went to the internet, researched plants that made cats sick, and sure enough, we had a cat-killing plant. It went outside. It was followed by the other two the next day.
 

I assumed they would whither and die over the summer, and that would be the end of it, but God watered them and they flourished.

Since my husband’s family had given us the plants, he took responsibility for keeping them alive, despite my ambivalence. He repotted the ficus and it grew twice as high over the summer. He bought more pots and potting soil for the other two, but lost interest in the project. So now I had thriving plants in the yard, and a sun porch cluttered with unused pots and potting soil.

I felt resentment toward pots and plants.

At the end of the summer, the plant-gifter came over to visit and we lied about how much we were enjoying the plants and how well they were doing outside. But, I confessed, with winter coming, they’d have to move back inside and one was a cat-killing plant. The plant-gifter volunteered to take that one home and return it in the spring. I prayed she would offer the same deal for the others, but she left with just the cat-killer. I prayed she would forget to return it in the spring, and that prayer was answered. I never asked about it.

Then my husband’s grandfather died, and his office sent over a plant to console us. We were back to three large plants again, the ficus, some leafy thing, and the dead grandfather plant.

The weather turned cold and the plants began to look endangered. Time to take them to the dump! Right?

No, my husband brought them all inside. His family had given us two of them, and the other was his comfort plant for losing a grandfather, he said. So they all sat on the dining room table, the only available space near a window, leaving no room for anything else, and still not getting enough sun since the dining room faced north. In the evening, we turned on desk lights to shine on the plants. They all perked up.

Will this ever end?

A cricket rode in on one of the plants, and periodically it chirped, getting the cats all excited. One evening when we were out, the cats went on a Cricket Mission from God and attacked the plants. We came home to dirt all over the dining room. Despite the attack, the plants thrived.

To make some room on the dining room table, we moved the ficus to in front of the fireplace. We did not have a fire in the fireplace that winter because it would ignite the ficus. We did not have a Christmas tree that year because the only place to put one was taken by the ficus. So we hung some tinsel on the ficus and made do.

It's the Rep You Get, Not the Rules

Persistence sometimes pays off.

Once I noticed my credit card had charged me a $39 late payment charge. My checkbook confirmed I had written a check and it had cleared, but a day after my payment due date, even though I had mailed it seven days before it was due to a Richmond address just two zip codes away.

This wasn't the first time the post office had failed me. Once, a freelance check took 16 days to travel across town. I checked the postmark. Another check took 33 days to travel from Los Alamos, New Mexico to me in Virginia. Pricewaterhouse Cooper once took a survey and rated my postal district "the worst place in the continental United States for mail service."

So I called my credit card, Capital One, which is in my town, and explained to the customer service rep that I felt I had done my part. I had mailed my payment at least five days in advance, as directed on the bill, and it wasn't my fault the post office took from Monday to the following Saturday to carry my payment across town.

She said it didn't matter what the postmark on my envelope was, or when I mailed the check. All that mattered was what day it got there, and it got there late, and not one day, but two days after it was due. I had no answer for that, and she wasn't cutting me any slack, so I hung up. But when I looked at my statement again, she was wrong about one thing. I had missed the due date by one day, not two.

This was still not a winning argument by her standards-late is late-but for some reason I decided to call back anyway and tell her she had that part wrong. I knew I wouldn't get the same woman, so it's a mystery why I called. I was just mad. I got a man this time, and before I could even go through the whole saga again, he offered to remove the late fee.

Well, how nice! Apparently the rule about late fees only apply to people who don't call repeatedly until they get a cooperative rep...or a man. I have theories about what kind of customer service reps are more likely to cut you some slack, but we won't go into that.

Back in the early 1990s, I used to work in the customer service department of Signet Bank, and it was within our power to overturn bounced check charges if we felt the customer had a justifiable complaint. Some reps, like me, felt most excuses were just that, excuses. I only overturned the charges for elderly women on fixed incomes who had gotten confused. Other representatives were more liberal. They believed in keeping the customers happy. They didn't want to argue. They wanted everyone to literally have a nice day. So they removed all bounced check charges all the time, for any reason. All you had to do was call and they made them go away.

So these customers got used to having their overdraft charges erased like magic, and didn't worry about bouncing more checks. There was no penalty. That is until they got a rep like me on the phone who wouldn't budge, especially when their history of massive check bouncing came up on my screen. Then they were furious. I frequently didn't have a nice day at that job. The angry customers only had to go one step over my head to a supervisor, who would then overturn the charges for them. One frequent bouncer finally managed to even get me fired for not overturning her charges. I never understood why the supervisors backed her after all our training about using the power to overturn charges sparingly. And it wasn't a nice firing either. It was one of those deals that while you're in the office being fired, a flunkie is packing up your desk in a cardboard box and then two big men escort you out of the building and hand you your box and tell you never to show up again.

Why did we even bother to charge for bounced checks then? The only ones paying the fees were people too timid to complain. The meek may inherit the earth, but until then, they're paying all the late charges.

So the lesson here, which I was reminded of when my late fee was miraculously erased, is to just keep calling until you get what you want, especially if right is on your side. Thank the rep, hang up, and call again. And again. And again. Even if you're in the wrong, you can be righteously indignant and eventually you'll get a customer service rep who will fix you up because they don't want to talk to problem customers or get fired, or it's their passive aggressive way of getting back at their company, or whatever. Of course it's not fair, but as Jimmy Carter once said, life is not fair.

Living with Alcoholism

“He died last November,” the little boy said through the storm door. He was home alone and didn’t want to say anything more to the strange woman who had knocked, asking if he knew where the man who lived next door went.

Every year when the new phone book came, I looked him up. One year there was no listing, so I drove over to the last known address and started knocking on doors. That’s how I learned my ex-husband of 17 years had died.

And I felt nothing. We had been separated for 10 years and there had been no contact for the last eight. They say you only remember the good things, but none of those memories came, just the bad ones. And when a tear finally came, it was a tear for me. Selfish to the end, he would have said.

My husband had a drinking problem. Even now I find it difficult to say he was an alcoholic. He so vehemently denied it. He did not hit me. He was not a violent drunk. He did not drink and drive. He did not embarrass himself in public. He did not miss work because of his drinking—much.

He just missed having a life. He was a secret drinker. When I first met him, he did not have a telephone even though he could afford one. Telephones enabled people to call him at home and catch him drunk. He did not drink in bars. He did not drink with friends. We didn’t have friends, because a secret drinker cannot start drinking until they leave.

I associate him with sounds, the click of the cigarette lighter as he lit up as soon as he woke up, the pop of a pull tab as the first beer was opened as soon as he came home. Then another beer, another cigarette, another beer. Pop, click, pop, click.

He did not drink for pleasure, but for purpose, as if there was some emotional pain he had to anesthetize. But his life was no more miserable than anyone else’s. His father died when he was young. There was a first failed marriage. He had given up music and the military, two vocations he claimed he liked, for a tedious job on the night shift, which gave him all day to recover from his drinking the night before. There was happiness to be found, but he didn’t look for it. It would have interfered with his drinking.

He bought the cheapest beer the 7-Eleven had, Milwaukee Best, a six-pack at a time. Sometimes that would be enough to get through the night. Sometimes a second trip was necessary. Sometimes tall cans were called for. He could not buy a case at a time because if he bought a case, he would drink a case at one sitting. We could not have a bottle of vodka or whiskey in the house for special occasions because it would not be there in the morning. It would be empty, and he’d still be in his recliner, too stunned to go to bed, his head hanging, his fly open because the mechanics of pulling up the zipper became too intricate.

But he could quit anytime, he said, so he didn’t have a problem. And he did quit, several times. And started again.

When I was very young and first married to him, I believed what he said. It wasn’t until after I left that I finally understood the disaster we had lived. He had me believe the drinking was my fault. I had come to our marriage with a child, placing the burden of having to pay for another man’s child on him. I did not make an adequate income. Even his failure to progress in his job was somehow my fault. His bosses didn’t like me.

When I accidentally put a dent in his new car, he called in sick and drank 18 tall beers in one sitting. I had destroyed all the joy he had in his new car, he said, and that joy could never be regained. He left the dent in the car as a rebuke to me.

He embraced any and every excuse to justify his drinking. The responsibility, the guilt, belonged to everyone but him. His mother liked his brother best. His first wife made him quit the military. A co-worker was promoted over him. His car was not the best and newest at the stoplight.

I was younger than he was, and he never took me seriously. When I became upset about the toll his drinking and smoking was taking on his health, it became a field of battle between us. I was the enemy, not the concerned wife.

And just as serious as the physical toll was the emotional price. There was no affection extended to my son or me since it was vital to the drinking scenario that we remain the root cause of it. We did little as a family. Days off were spent sleeping it off, and the waking hours spent in front of the television, putting the liquor back in.

It wasn’t until after it was over that I realized the psychological damage we had sustained from living such a dry existence in his wet world. I had no sense of confidence or worth. I gave my son a biological father who had run off and a stepfather who withheld love, praise and approval.

I kept a fill-in-the-blanks father’s day card my son wrote when he was 13. At the time we thought it was funny, but looking at it now is heart-breaking and tragic. “I think my dad knows how to sleep better than anyone in the whole world,” he filled in the blank. “I think he likes to spend his time worrying most of all.” The best thing they did together, he filled in was “watch TV.”

For what his dad does to make him feel better, he wrote, “Nothing. He never makes me feel better.” Under why he liked to hug him, he wrote, “I never hug him.” On another page, he honestly recorded that he didn’t want to grow up to be like his stepdad. This strange card ended, “Happy Father’s Day.”

Even after I finally left the marriage, I felt like I was at fault, that I owed him something for not hanging in until the end, and I continued to do his banking, pay his bills, buy his groceries and do his laundry. When he called me to ask if it was 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.— a disorientation he felt when he was on vacation and the drinking, sleeping, working patterns dissolved—I called an ambulance. They found more than 120 empty beer cans in his kitchen and a man who did not know who the current President of the United States was. It cost $14,000 in IV fluids to sober him up in the hospital, just in time to discover he was about to die of an abdominal aneurysm. He had masked the pain with beer.

As they loaded him into the ambulance that day, he yelled, “I’ll get you for this,” to me. I had brought strangers into his apartment and revealed his secret drinking. Never mind that I had saved his life. His work place found out, although I suspect they knew.

He was put into rehab and counseling after that, and his therapist must have told him he needed to get control of his own life, pay his own bills, do his own shopping, wash his own clothes. I did not hear from him again except through a lawyer who served me with divorce papers, and took my son and me out of his will. The lawyer talked to me like I was dirt.

Despite all this, you’d have a hard time finding anyone to say my husband was a bad guy. People he worked with liked him. He was easy going and quiet. As he often reminded me, he never hit me. He went to work and earned a living, supported his family. He provided us with a house, food, and clothes. Even now I feel like I am the bad one to say anything unkind. I am the traitor.

I thoroughly bought into the disease of alcoholism. If I had been a better wife, if I had been prettier, if I had made more money, or had a better personality, he would have stopped drinking for me. That’s what they want you to think. That he didn’t means I failed. I could not save him.

I know now none of that was true. I know I wasted many years of my own life living in the shadow of his drinking, and I sacrificed my only child to it by not looking for something better for both of us. But even that realization is accepting the blame. It always comes back to me. I am the guilty one.  And he would have drank to that.