Reset

I really miss coming here to blog – lately, there's only, like, 2 people still reading, so even though blogging is cathartic, it is also hard to motivate myself to do it.

The farther behind I get in updating on all of life's blog-worthy events, the more difficult it is to just lightly jump back in.

This month, one of my good friends – a mentor, like-a-big brother – committed suicide. That has been hard. You know all the intellectual stuff where you say that there is nothing you could have done, he was suffering from depression (and had been for a long time), it was a disease, etc. But even if you know this intellectually, you STILL think all those thoughts and wrestle with your own part in the end.

My part in his last two years is that we had become closer than previously. We spent a lot of time talking about work and architecture - and in retrospect, maybe I was just trying to distract him from telling me one more time about how depressed he felt, or how he was thinking about killing himself, or reading the most recent article about the best new depression/bipolar drug/treatment/therapy. All the depression talk: it was a lot. It began to normalize. Yes, yes, you are feeling depressed. How about this house? Do you like it? Good design? Nice detailing? Or ugly? Whattayathink?

I don't have answers. His family wanted answers from me, because we were close in the last few months. What was it? What was the thing that did this? I couldn't answer them, standing in his living room, wearing the stick-on mustache that his five year old son gave me before the funeral. But the thing was something: it was mental illness; it was depression. The thing, actually, felt a lot like 5 years ago when my uncle died of Lymphoma. It marched onward, without regard to all the various interventions. It was relentless. The disease became a part of life so integrated in the everyday that it was hard to know what was the disease and what was the person.

There's no neat, tidy package to wrap up my feelings or the feelings of his other friends and his family or even society's feelings. Life's so messy sometimes – which is all the more reason to step back and really think about how to live our life as thoughtfully as possible.That is where I'm left: Am I doing right by others? Am I the me I should be? How can I appreciate and prioritize who I am and where I am?

Better

We have had some drama lately with our au pair. The basic story is that she's underage and left an open bottle of alcohol in the mudroom next to the car keys (the car keys which she had been using to drive our car). Deep sigh here, because just writing this down it feels so obvious that this is the the type of violation that should not be tolerated for one minute. But then, there are considerations for us that lessen her crime in our eyes: 1) we haven't had a lot of problems with her being irresponsible otherwise, 2) she's almost 20, 3) she's from a country where it is legal to drink at age 18; 4) we, ourselves, do not feel so strongly about 21 being some magically appropriate drinking age - ie, we think the US law is sort of nonsense.

On the other hand, we're talking about an open alcohol bottle that was 95% likely in the car of an underage person driving our car. And she is given responsibility to take care of our children and as much as she claims to be "completely responsible" for the outcomes of her own actions... how can she be? That's one of those fallacies of her youthfulness - she thinks she CAN be responsible for any outcomes, but really, life isn't like that, especially if something horrible like an accident with injuries (or worse) were to result from her actions.

SO, really, how do we feel about THAT? Not good. She's has refused to talk to us about it, and really, the refusal to talk about it was the most upsetting part (for me). We finally called in the area director to act as mediator.

Things have been seriously going downhill since then, we seem unable to get on the same page. One week it's our fault ("our" meaning the parents), the next week the problem is the kids. The week after that, she's just feeling sad/sick for reasons not related to us. This week she told us she wants to rematch with another family. I tried to talk her out of it, because I really feel like there's some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy going on, and if she would just commit. But what do I know? I'm also not going to make her stay with us if she's so miserable.

And this, I do believe, will conclude our experiment in hosting au pairs. Such as shame, because I do feel that the right au pair can be so great. But obviously, there's a lot of flakiness out there among young adults. Our current-almost-gone au pair tells me that she is so nervous about finding a new family that she is waking up at night and throwing up.

Sheesh. We must be a pretty horrible host family for her to endure such a situation. I'm annoyed - we ARE inconvenienced by her leaving, but we ARE NOT desperate for her to stay. We are all making an effort to be NOT vindictive and as helpful as possible to her in this transition period. But I'm not going to lie, I'm doing a bit of wound-licking and eye rolling behind closed doors.

In the end, I don't have anything to prove here. And the most important thing is that people are healthy and happy and safe. My working full-time definitely took some toll on the kids; now that I'm working from home with a more flexible schedule, I'm going to spend more time with the kids. Which is good. Better than an au pair.

Fences are for climbing

This past month, I opened my own architecture firm and said goodbye to being someone else's full-time employee. A number of stars aligned, such that it seemed like the right move to make and the right time. But I won't lie: I'm scared about doing this, scared about bunking conventional wisdom, scared about the amount of risk involved.

One of the things I keep telling myself, in the back of my mind – or right up front and center on my blog – is that for most of life, I've been pretty good about staying in the lines and doing things the way that everyone else says to do them. Sometimes we have to break the rules and defy convention to venture into new territory. So, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that figuratively climbing over the fence was the right thing to do (this time around). It feels exposed. It feels a bit lonely. It's also an exhilarating and hopeful feeling. And, if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you are probably very tired of reading about me wanting my own firm, but taking no action in that direction.

Well. Here we go. Hold on.