Oh no, it is the day of the annual birthday portrait pictures, and I haven't slept in a week. My eyeballs feel like they're made of fire and sandpaper.
I will update with decent photos later. Today we get work toilet selfies.
bad outtake for authenticity
45 was a transition year. I started prying open the escape hatch, spending all my money and PTO on travel, tasting the air in different places, looking for home. I focused on getting better at painting, trying to level up with classes and workshops and research, making lists, forming plans. Now I am closing the book on the first 45 years, and opening up the next.
There are a lot of balls in the air, and I feel very close to ducking and letting them all fall on my head, but I will NOT. I can make this happen. Tickets are bought. Airbnb is booked for a few nights in St. John's while we buy a truck. Rental cottage is being secured for 2 months while we close on a house. Realtor is in a flurry of communication with the broker, the broker is in a flurry of communication with the lenders, the lenders are acting like it's soooo hard to do international sales even though it's totally normal. A lawyer still has to get involved in all this. I can't get my brain to stop lighting up and scrolling like an arrival/departure sign at the airport as it adjusts to all the moving pieces of information. Once I finalize the contract for the rental, I'll have an address, and once I have an address I can get insurance set up for the hypothetical truck, and register for MCP numbers, and get Zenny into school. I keep remembering things to do and panicking, then talking myself back through it all step by step. I feel like the rug is going to get pulled out from under me at any moment, that my dreams will be dashed, or that I'll get there and my piece of shit truck will break down and we'll freeze to death on the side of the road, or that the caretaker at the cottage will be an ax murderer (he's not, he's the cousin of my friend's boss, but YOU NEVER KNOW).
I need sleep.
First, though: dinner at my favorite restaurant, and a cake made by my mother. Am I ready for Thanksgiving? No, I am not. But there is a bird in the fridge and potatoes in the cupboard, so we'll figure it out.
While my boss went on a tangent during our staff meeting last week, I checked my phone for upcoming appointments and saw that I had new email. I hesitated, because I was expecting to hear back about the job in Newfoundland, but I wasn’t sure I wanted bad news at that exact moment. I put my phone away.
…Maybe those emails were just delivery notices and gallery stuff, though. I opened my phone back up. There it was: an unread message from my interviewer in Newfoundland. I scrutinized the partial sentence visible under her name. It said ‘Hi Holly, hope all is well in Hawaii! I…’ Hmm. That could go either way. If it was a gentle rejection, I would be back at square one and feeling depressed. If it was an offer, I would be at the start of something huge and feeling big feelings. I put my phone down again.
Picked it up a moment later. Nobody starts a rejection letter with a first name and an exclamation mark, I decided, and tapped on the message. Tim must have seen my face do something, because he suddenly changed the subject, jumped ahead to Round Robin, and asked if I had anything to announce. He was smiling, but it felt like being pounced on by your mother-in-law at a family dinner after turning down a glass of wine. Announce? To the entire staff? With a face like a boiled ham? Definitely not. I turned my phone face-down and talked about the young homeless guy who had been masturbating through his pocket while asking me to explain WWII fascism a few days earlier (“So, what is fascism? Is that, like… Italy? Hey, can I ask, how old are you?”).
It was considerate of my contact to send me the offer at the end of a Friday, to give me the weekend to panic and discuss with family before formulating a reply. I sent my acceptance the same day anyway.
Adding to this, two days earlier, Zenny was discovered to be hiding three failing classes and a long list of unfinished assignments. She has only had a phone - with parental controls - since she started middle school a few months ago, and it immediately became a huge problem. She began hiding it, pretending to do homework with it in her lap, and shutting herself into her room to FaceTime with her friends all evening. She stopped reading books and drawing, too distracted. We talked about it, timed the apps to shut off at bedtime, and tried to interest her in books she'd enjoy, but it wasn't going well. With this new crash in her grades, I took the device away, checked her messages, and found a group chat with her friends that was filled with swearing, racism, anti-school/parents rants, and borderline-too-sexual anime images. The worst texts were coming from one girl in particular, while the rest of the group tried to ignore her comments and continue conversations about Halloween costumes and k-pop around her thread spamming. I care a lot about children, but this girl needs help I am not able to give, and I can't have my own kid hanging around with someone who calls Black Santa the ‘N’ word (a lot of local kids think they get a pass on using the word because they’re not white, while still using it with the hard-R to insult Black people). I was really angry to see zero pushback from her or her other friends. I have hammered this into my kids for years: when someone says something gross in front of you, you need to say something. Anything. ‘That’s not okay”, “that’s messed up”, or just "NO", at MINIMUM. If edgelord teens don’t get called out by their peers, they become asshole adults.
We locked the phone down until it was basically just a brick that nags her with texts from immediate family, and we’re sitting with her to make sure she gets caught up on all her work. She's already doing better, reading books and making crafts again, but the friend group at school is still a problem, and in the course of helping her catch up I was alarmed by how stupid her homework is. They are giving her lower-elementary work, with coloring sheets and things like "Join these two sentences with the word 'and' or 'but'." In Honors English. No wonder she thinks homework is a waste of time.
So I'm taking her with me. Initially, I was going to let her finish the school year while I got everything set up, but I decided that she can sleep on an air mattress and eat ramen as well as I can. Once decided, it was a big relief - I didn't want to leave her in the first place. I imagined spending the winter alone, cold and scared at night in an empty house, questioning all my life choices and dreaming about not being able to find my babies. She's excited to go, and I have just a slight pang of guilt about dropping a kid from Hawaii into freezing slush and darkness. It'll build character.
Leif is staying; he's graduating and going to university in a few months anyway, and he has a great girlfriend with a great mom who likes to feed him. He hugged me when I got sad about the thought of leaving him, and said he was glad I was going for it and taking a big chance. Also, he looks forward to getting my car. Gavin is just happy to have another place to visit - he's busy with university and not worried at all.
This is going to be a build-your-plane-on-the-way-down kind of situation. I am preparing to hit the ground like a guillemot.
Don't worry, they're supposed to do that
Meanwhile, the man and I are still approaching this as a 'healing separation', because I'm giving him time to accept that I'm gone and get right with himself. Now that everything is in motion, he's starting to see this as an opportunity, and getting excited. Yesterday he said, "This can be good! We'll use the time apart to work on ourselves and focus on our own goals. I'll finish my tattoo coursework, do the blood-born pathogen training, and get certified. And then when you're all financially stable over there - like in the next 6 or 18 months or whatever - I can just quit my job and move out there with you!"
orly?
I put a few paintings up for sale on my website (hollybraffet.com). We are going to arrive with nothing but two suitcases, so it's time to try to scrape up whatever money we can. We are going to be really broke for a long time, but I will apply for grants and write books and sell art! It’s better to risk it all and fail than not try at all.
I was not feeling it this Halloween. We didn't have time to carve the pumpkin. Leif went to a sleepover. Gavin and cousin Chris took Zenny trick-or-treating. Mom and aunt handed out candy. I sat on the couch drinking a Guinness and trying not to be a grumpy asshole. The neighborhood was struggling this year; more porch lights off, fewer inflatable decorations, hardly any chocolate in the buckets. My mother handed out cold sodas, and the kids (and parents) were screaming with excitement because they were dying of thirst after walking so much longer in hot costumes to get treats.
So I kind of dropped the ball on this holiday, but the kids didn't really notice. Now there is a giant pumpkin sitting on my dining room table that I have to break down into pies. I wish I had a cute talking porcupine to feed it to. Or a trebuchet.
Other things are happening.
The art show opened (another honorable mention for me - “your art is so old-fashioned!”), and I took my turn sitting at the gallery for a couple afternoons while tourists and influencers hustled through without really looking at any of the paintings. Most of them just visit Ho'omaluhia to pose on top of rented Jeeps or jump up and down in fancy outfits. We are weird little animals.
This is the painting that won Best in Show, by the way:
On Saturday I presented my Scotland grant project to the Caledonia Society for their annual banquet. It went really well, except that Mike told me it was informal and then everyone showed up in dresses and kilts while I was standing there in jeans and gold sneakers. Most of the audience was not interested in art history and how pigments are made, but they laughed when I showed them Pug Dogs Through History as an example of how art is documentation; we would never know pugs had faces up until the 1900s without paintings to prove it.
They liked my finished paintings, and I blew the opportunity to scoop up commissions because I forgot to bring my new business cards. I need a manager.
Burying the lede - one of the jobs I interviewed for has advanced me to reference checks/criminal history clearance, and I finally had to tell my boss what I'm up to. They haven’t made an offer yet, but it is feeling very real now. This might actually happen.
First thoughts: SCARY
Second thoughts: lots of things are scary: being accepted into university is scary; moving is scary; getting a new job is scary; having babies is scary. You did all those things before you had a fully cooked prefrontal cortex; you can do this now.
Third thoughts: you needed an undeveloped brain to do those things. NOW when you end up frozen and destitute it’ll just be because you’re dumb.
Third thoughts, as I have mentioned, are assholes.
Anyway, I have a realtor scheduled to do video walkthroughs for potential houses in case they actually offer me the job. “It’s really rural,” the realtor warned. I laughed in Trailer Trash. My dude, they have a Walmart.
My mother is supportive, but in a pragmatically negative kind of way. “Oh, yuck, cold. They get polar bears, you know.” WHAT. I did not see any polar bears growing up in St John’s. I checked, and yes, Newfoundland does get polar bears. But they don’t live there. They ride down on icebergs, hop off, eat a bunch of puffins, and then go home. How? Nobody knows. They just “migrate”. Unless they’re chasing people around or getting into trash - then they get tranquilized and relocated to Labrador. There are fewer than 100 that are too lazy to leave, so the odds of getting mauled by a polar bear are way less than getting trampled by a moose. No problem.
I’m getting complacent, though. It’s hard to maintain anger for years, and you’re not as desperate to escape when the door finally cracks opens. Stay angry, Braffet.
