Shared Pain

"No fim, tudo dá certo. Se não deu, ainda não chegou ao fim."  
"In the end, everything will be okay. If it's not okay...it's not yet the end."
--Fernando Sabino

Another long one coming, to make up for the hiatus. Trust me, folks, you want to read at least part of this one.

As I am sure you have noticed, the blog posts have dried up around here.  That should be changing -- somewhat -- from here on out, but I will make you no promises and tell you no lies. The state is called "flux", and I'm starting to wonder if "flux" is the original f-word.

Let's start with the good parts.

THE JOB

I have a full time job. I now work for Big Blue. No, not that Big Blue. I mean the retail one. Wally World. The largest retailer on the planet. 2.4 million strong.
Let me tell you this on short notice: they got to be where they are for a reason. I'll tell you this, too: what appears corny and cult-like to outsiders (an employee cheer, seriously?) is both genuine and surprisingly powerful once you've done it a few times.

It's like doing an Om. Have you ever done an Om, in a group? Not the kind of thing people tend to do if they want to keep any semblance of street cred, right? And yet it's the oldest sacred sound we know of, symbolizing All That Is, the original divine vibration. And if you go into it with even the slightest of open minds, you will come out of a group Om with a changed consciousness. Trust me on that. How changed depends on the spiritual energies you and everyone else bring into it.

The Wal-Mart cheer is like that, in a way. It takes individuals and makes of them a team; it then takes that team and charges it with positive energy. That's something I have really internalized about my new workplace. It is exceptionally positive.

I have worked in retail most of  my life. Everywhere I have worked features a backroom in which language that would make a stevedore blush is thrown around carelessly, almost as random syllables.
Not at Wal-Mart. Just one f-bomb can get you written up--even if it's not directed at anyone in particular.  Respect for the individual is one of this company's core values and from what I've seen, unlike many companies, they actually walk their talk. The group I work with on nights is top-notch, and so are my departmental day-mates.

The biggest culture shock has to do with breaks.

I worked for ten years in a place where breaks, like "overtime pay" and "employee recognition",  were pipe-dreams. Oh, yes, you are supposed to take your breaks, but you're also supposed to get your work done, and most times there is more work to be done than there are people to do it. Work or breaks. Shirking one will get you in trouble; shirking the other won't. Which one is which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

I worked for three years at another place that was only slightly less dismissive about rest periods. I grew to loathe sitting down when there was work to be done. I'd rather work right through and get off half an hour early, if that's an option.

At Wal-Mart, it isn't. You will be "coached", written up, and theoretically fired if you don't take your breaks, every least minute of every last one of them. Even more of a challenge for me is that on nights those breaks are supposed to happen promptly at one, three and five a.m. Dairy and Frozen call the breaks, as they're the ones with the perishable product on the floor, but woe be unto us if we're more than, say, three or four minutes late calling "three o'clock lunchtime".

I am not a clockwatcher. I start looking at the time when I sense it's getting on time to go home--several times I've overshot by fifteen minutes or half an hour. Having to force myself not just to look at the time, but plan my night around arbitrary stoppages...let's just say I'm still getting used to it.

They have a computer system that puts everybody else's to utter shame.  When all is going well, not only can a handheld ordering unit tell you what is in the building, it can also tell you exactly how much is exactly where. I mean on which shelf in the back room, cooler, or freezer. And never mind scratching the surface...I'm still hovering over the surface of what the system can do.

When all is going well. As with any computer system, the garbage in, garbage out principle applies. I hope to show my new employer what a dedicated data sanitation engineer I am.

One thing I do know is that the chances for advancement are practically limitless. Two of the four assistant managers who interviewed me were hired on less than four years ago, one of them part-time. Name one other retail company where that kind of progression is not only possible, but almost routine.

It's straight nights, which is not what I would have preferred. Three reasons there:

•  one, I am a natural lark;
•  two, generally, Eva's on an opposite schedule;
•  three, nights tend to harshly compromise a social life.

 But

• the lark can be subdued over time. I am halfway there now: I have no trouble being up all night. In a week I will be able to sleep during the day, hopefully without the prescription-grade sleeping pills I still need.
• actually, when Eva works afternoons as she normally does, I see just as much or even more of her when I work nights as opposed to days. I normally go to bed around ten or eleven a.m, which is when she leaves for work, and I am up before she gets home. It means each of us has the bed to ourselves...sometimes sacrifices need to be made.
• As I seem to keep saying, I have an absolutely astounding group of friends. I've had breakfast dates and evening get-togethers and neither I nor my social life feels compromised at all.

My schedule is Thursday night through Monday night, leaving me off Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I just wrote the final exam for my Tuesday class, which is a nice little segue into

THE CLASSES

I am nine weeks away from a Certificate of Fluency in French from Conestoga College.

This probably doesn't mean what you think it means, and it certainly doesn't mean what I think it should mean. By my definition, were I actually fluent in French, I would be able to rewrite this blog en français without missing a beat.

Not even close. Most of the sentences I have written here would take me a solid chunk of time to translate and I'd need a dictionary and likely a grammar text handy to do it. Take that last sentence, for instance: I'm fine up until "would take me a solid chunk of time". I can say "would take many minutes"...that's not the same thing. "I'd need a grammar text"--that's do-able...."handy"? Not the foggiest. I could say "close to me"--is there a better translation than that? If I were fluent, I would know. 

You get the idea. I'm not fluent. Nowhere near. I can understand most spoken French if it's spoken at a speed that would put actual French people to sleep (the listening exercise on my final last night was on eco-tourism in Lebanon, written by francophones for francophones, and there was easily five minutes worth of information I had to try and glean from a 90-second clip. ) I can read French passably well and I can sort of write it, given world enough and time. Speaking: not so good yet. I have to write it in my head before I can say it. 

Luckily, this last course, French for Business, is really heavy on oral and aural comprehension. It's also much more challenging that I had thought it would be, given that I have taken French V and the prerequisite for this is only French IV. I am learning that just as there is a difference between informal spoken French and textbook French, there is a difference between French spoken in business and French spoken anywhere else. The prof, who is more fluent in French than she is in English, is great in that she speaks at warp speed...but covers the material very slowly, with lots of repetition. C'est parfait. She is also an absolute stickler for translation. I mean, I know Google Translate is almost useless, but she thinks Linguee is bad, and Linguee shows you direct translations of government documents. Ah, well. Just have to learn what she likes, and do that. Isn't that school in a nutshell? Isn't that married life, too?

I adored my last French teacher, Carolyn Cresswell. She was also my teacher for French II. She's a bit scatterbrained every now and again, but she was super-friendly, quick with an anecdote, and we share tastes in music. Sadly, she was stuck with a totally unfair situation for this course: she was asked to teach it on two days' notice, using a horrible textbook she had never seen before...and the class was more than twice as big as it by rights should have been. At first we got lots of real-world French instruction at the expense of essentially having to teach ourselves the textbook grammar. Then time constraints came into play and we lost a lot of the fun by sticking to a textbook that everybody agreed was awful. (They're switching it up for the next class). The evaluation we had to write left no room to explain any of this: most of it was about whether the hallways were clean enough and whether or not we felt discriminated against as a member of whatever little club we had to identify as belonging to.  Ugh.

But Carolyn: I will miss her. 

Having been unemployed for nine months, working full time and taking a class feels as if it is using up all my free time. It isn't, of course, not even anywhere near, but it feels that way. That's one reason I haven't blogged. Another is

THE HOME LIFE

You may know my wife Eva had bariatric surgery in November 2013: story here.  

You may also know that at the one year mark, she was moving along tickety-boo, all systems go. She has been making a very difficult journey look easy.

What very few of you know and the rest of you are about to find out is that she has suffered a setback, a rather serious one. 

The symptoms presented gradually, though they seem sudden in the context of so much relative health and wellness. They have progressed to the point where she can no longer work or drive, and there, for the moment, they seem to be stalled. We think. We hope.

Eva has earned the right to put alphabet soup after her name: if she's feeling particularly snooty, she can legitimately say her name is Eva Breadner, ALMI, ARA,  PCS, AIAA. 

The PCS stands for Professional, Customer Service and I have always tried to model my customer service on hers. She has always been able to anticipate and respond to client needs before they are articulated or often even recognized. This is because like me, she is incredibly empathic...and unlike me, she is gifted with a logician's brain. I probably don't have to tell you how rare it is to find someone who is both profoundly intuitive and supremely analytical. In all my life, I've met exactly one other person who even comes close. Eva told me I'm not supposed to spend too much time praising her here, but what the hell, she is my wife and I love her.

The focus that she has always brought to bear on any least task is pretty much gone, as is a large piece of her short-term memory. That was our first clue that something was badly awry: the diminishment of a prodigious gift. There were other signs and signals: her digestion, which for a bariatric patient had always been exemplary, was suddenly extremely poor, all the time; she began to suffer from chronic fatigue...and so on. Most alarming to me--well, aside from the Eva I know having been stolen and replaced with a pale impostor--is the stutter. It comes and goes, from barely there to moderately severe, and it is terrifying to hear a woman who has never hesitated over a single word suddenly having trouble with single words. 

On Tuesday she had an appointment with her bariatric team of specialists, which includes one of the most respected bariatric surgeons in the country. They examined her and pronounced what we already knew: she is suffering from malabsorption. Her body is not using much of what little she does eat. This is also the case with her pills, both bariatric-related and otherwise. The otherwise is probably compounding some of the issues.

As to the whys and wherefores--the underlying reasons I have always sought, everywhere, and often come up wanting--we got a whole lot of what Danny Torrance in The Shining refers to as the worst words of all: NO ONE KNOWS.

The consensus is that it's not directly related to the surgery. It is most likely a medication issue, we are told. Something is out of balance. Maybe somethings. Exactly what, amongst the many, many pills and supplements that bariatric patients depend on for survival, is a monkey's guess;  any monkey reading this can guess as to what might happen when you go monkeying around with medications.

We had hoped for a roadmap, complete with a little distance table. We got a big white space with the words Here Be Dragons. This is terra incognita, folks, and it's not very nice out here.

It is  not easy to live beside. I can't even imagine what it's like to live with.

I feel guilty and ashamed even admitting the difficulty. This has been going on scarcely a month and in the grand scheme of things it could be ever so much worse, after all. 

This is Eva's road. I don't drive; I am merely a passenger, as I have been since I met her. But as a passenger I have certain sacrosanct duties. I am a navigator; I am the person who keeps driving Eva awake and functional; I am the person who keeps her calm when some asshole cuts her off. I am failing, abysmally, at all three of these duties. We are lost, she is not functional and often not awake, and calmness is something that seems to be in very short supply chez Ken just now.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME, either, and I struggle to articulate any of this lest people think I'm trying to make it All About Me. This is about Eva, and how to make her all better again, and NO ONE KNOWS.

So.

The road is just beginning, it seems. And here I'd like to publicly and profusely thank Mark, without whom it might be completely unnavigable.

Mark is Eva's partner of nine months. They share a deep bond for a relationship of such short duration, but knowing what I know of the man that's no surprise. He has been a rock. Aside from all the quotidian support--he's been ferrying Eva to what seems like daily doctor's appointments, and running any number of other errands that require a car, even dropping me at work on occasion--he has also provided nonpareil spiritual and emotional solace, certainly far beyond what I am capable of right now.

The man radiates calm in a way I deeply admire and wish I could emulate. I'm capable of that level of serenity, provided nothing is spectacularly amiss in my world, but just at present the most spectacular missus in all my worlds is rather amiss. 

If I try for what seems to be Mark's level of calmness--something I am trying desperately to do, as anxiety helps nobody in this situation--I overshoot and go into robot territory. That's me burying my fear, and I do it because I am filled with a sort of impotent rage and the last thing I want is to add to her own. No, the LAST thing I want is Eva thinking it is at any way directed at her. 

But Ken, aren't you jealous?

No.

I will admit to a fierce pang the day that Eva had her consult with the specialists. That was Tuesday. I worked Monday night, and I had that French final exam at 6:30 Tuesday evening. I have to leave shortly after four to get there on time...and Eva's appointments went all day, something she is still recovering from. Mark drove her, of course, and kept her steady all through the day, no mean feat. There is simply no way I could have been there, which in no way lessens the ironclad belief that I should have been there. And no, at this point I don't think it should have been me, not him...I think it should have been he and I together. And if somebody had've had a problem with that, fuck them sideways. Eva needs all the love and support she can get.

But I wasn't there, and it eats at me. I find myself thinking if only I had been there, I'd have asked the magic question that would have yielded the magic answers. Preposterous! Arrogant! There's nothing I could have said that Mark, who has more of a medical background than I do,  couldn't have said better--and answers are not forthcoming anyway. 

As I said on the polyamory subreddit:

The support everyone gets when a family member is ill isn't just multiplied with poly, it's more like squared. Or cubed. Raised to the power of love? Now I'm getting corny. But it's really a godsend to be able to count on both logistical and emotional support when your own emotions are failing you.

Someone responded:

When I was growing up, and imagined life as poly (before I even knew that word) those scenarios were the ones that pushed me to stronger belief that poly is "right" (for me). Years later, when I tell people that logistical and emotional stability is the reason I seek poly relationships, they say "No, but really, it's the sex right?". No, it's not. And this is proof. Thanks for sharing!

I have a dear friend I'm not going to out here, someone I love very much who has been providing me with the same kind of thing over roughly the same period of time,  always there with a listening ear when I'm going to explode, and always with wise counsel and encouragement. Look at that word--it's another of those en-words that people don't stop to examine often enough. Hyphenate it: en-courage-ment. She gives me daily injections of courage I can share with Eva; Mark gives Eva daily courage that she can share with me. Strength lends its strength.

Life is hard just now. But if ever I needed proof that shared pain is lessened, I have it in spades.