Homesick

It’s been too long, I know. There is so much to tell. I’ve missed interacting with you all via this blog. So many of you have reminded me that I need to keep it up. Thank you.

The last couple years have been tough for everyone. One thing the pandemic made absolutely clear to us was that being an actor is a “non-essential” job. Not like society doesn’t treat us that way anyway. This was different though. Before we were keeping busy, the both of us, trying hard to fill a schedule with gigs. We were gaining momentum. Ben had gotten an agent and a manager. We were gearing up for pilot season excited to be getting more frequent auditions. Then in March of 2020 everything stopped. There was nothing. Not for months.

While we waited Ben wrote scripts and networked remotely. He was writing for pandemic filming (one man show type scripts) with the hopes to create jobs for himself. No one was purchasing or even interested in looking at ideas. Everyone was just trying to keep their heads above water. At one point Ben tried to get a crew together to film a short film. He had spent months prepping for this shoot- coordinating schedules, arranging locations, gathering a crew, etc. The week everything was ready for filming, there was a massive Covid surge in our area. After talking with the director we decided it would be safer both health wise and legally to delay the shoot. So much for creating work.

Meanwhile, at home I was teaching our children in a one room schoolhouse. Literally in one room. The rest of the family was now working from home which left little space to spread out. We made it work.

My parent’s house isn’t a large house. Ben was in our room working on whatever he could to keep up the dream. My brother was in his room right across the wall from my bedroom working for his call center job. My mother was in the living room teaching her fourth graders in a virtual classroom. That left me the girls room and a back room that was kind of like a second living room/den. I taught our girls in the den and tried to keep the noise down because just through the wall was my mom’s class. If the little ones needed a play space during school I would send them to their room, but I had to be careful and watchful so they wouldn’t run through their room and into the hall. The hall connected to my room and my brother’s room.

The kids and I went on lunch and breaks when my mom did so we could access the kitchen (which was connected to the living room). If our timing was off for the day, we would eat snacks or lunch on the floor, in the den, on a blanket. Sometimes I would line the kids up and very quietly walk through the living room to escape to the front yard. We all tried to be respectful of each other and of the space. It was a finely choreographed routine. Due to the huge outbreaks in California, and specifically our neighborhood, we were in this living/working situation for the rest of the 2019-2020 school year and the entire 2020-2021 school year. My mom didn’t go back to in person school until the fall of 2021. My brother never went back to the office. Working remotely became permanent for his company. Keeping the family where they should be, when they should be was my main focus. It was tricky and time consuming.

What’s more in April 2021, our kitchen had sprung a leak in the wall which required a full blown kitchen renovation. We were actually feeling blessed that the kitchen, which had not been updated in years, would finally be modernized with more outlets (you couldn’t run two appliances at the same time), a new countertop, a bigger pantry, and the crème de la crème, a dishwasher. Oh, that dishwasher was going to save me hours and hours of hand washing dishes. But that all meant that the last part of the school year, on top of being confined into a small space, we also had to maneuver around boxes of kitchen gadgets, shelves of food, and bulky appliances. Are you all feeling claustrophobic yet?

The insurance covered take-out for my mother, father, and brother because they were listed on the insurance, but our family of seven was not. This is where “anxiety thinking” took over. I was afraid that the insurance would be raised if we were added. Or that, even if we could be added, the insurance wouldn’t cover enough of the cost difference between cooking from scratch and take out. And even worse, maybe it would stress out my mother or take up much of her valuable time trying to get it all figured out. I mean… it wasn’t like it was my house. It wasn’t actually her problem to begin with. I was already a burden. I didn’t want to be more so.

Anxiety is so debilitating. My solution was to just cook our own food rather than go into debt eating pre-prepped food. …Yes, cook our own food without a kitchen. I hiked up my pioneer skirt and cooked in my pressure cooker and microwave. Dishes were washed by hose in the front yard. This time, I wouldn’t burden anyone.

Don’t get me wrong, my parents, brother, and grandma didn’t let me get away with working myself to the bone because of my silly pride. Whenever they could come up with an excuse, they’d treat our family to a meal so I could take a break. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mother told me that I could turn in all our grocery receipts and the insurance would cover a portion of it. But… “anxiety thinking” doesn’t always make much sense. In my mind, I was being thoughtful and careful. In reality… it probably looked like stubbornness. The renovations on the kitchen lasted from April until mid July.

In fact, once school was out for our extended family in Utah, we decided to take off for a couple weeks to visit with them and to give me a break. I was ready to go home. Since we had moved in with my parents, I had felt homesick. I always thought that going to Utah would help me feel less so. “Really,” I’d say, “Utah is my home.” We would leave the state time and time again and the feeling would go away for a few days but only slightly. After a week of vacationing I’d feel worse than when we left California. Going to visit others just made me feel like an outsider in more homes. And the thought of going back to my parent’s house made me feel homeless. The fact is, there was no easy cure to my homesickness.

I was homesick for a home that did not exist.

I remember a time when I was pregnant with Adrie. There were weeks when I craved Pizza Hut. Every day, all I wanted to eat was Pizza Hut. We didn’t have much extra funds at the time that I could justify spending on an indulgence. I would just not buy it. I knew how to make pizza from scratch. As tasty as my homemade pizza was, it wasn’t what I wanted and hardly took the edge off the craving. I would wake up wanting Pizza Hut and go to sleep wanting Pizza Hut. It took over my thoughts and my dreams for weeks. Once in a while we’d order it so I could get a break but it never failed; in a couple days I’d be craving pizza again.

This longing for home felt similar to that. A craving that I could not satisfy. It took over my hopes and dreams. It took on nightmare properties at night and toxic thoughts during the day. The homesickness made me uncomfortable in my own room. I would tell myself that I wasn’t worth having a home of my own. I would tell myself how much my friends’ husbands must love them to give them homes to live in. And by default that meant that my husband must despise me. I imagined Ben becoming successful and leaving me for some gorgeous model in Hollywood. I pictured it all in vivid detail. As a child I used to look at my ceiling with wonder about who I’d be when I grew up. Now that ceiling would forever haunt me because I was a failure. I was never going to be more. And I would never leave.

Some days I could keep the thoughts at bay. Other days I really struggled. Most days I would brainstorm different life choices so I could somehow prevent my fears from becoming a reality. I researched apartment costs in other states (seeing as how my searches in California proved we could never move out). I brainstormed what living situations I could bear. I imagined transforming a van, buying an RV, or giving up my hopes of being a full time mother to… I don’t know… work full time online or something. I thought of going back to school, getting a retail job, starting an online company, or monetizing my blog. But honestly… who would read a blog about a failure. And I couldn’t tell you all how much I was struggling. No one would understand. I felt so alone.

One day my eldest daughter, Jess, was telling me about a story she was reading. She had felt particularly inspired and decided to share her thoughts with me. The story was about a girl who was terminally ill. Her mother prayed for her to get better. The question came to her mind, “Do you have enough faith to ask for Emily to live?” She responded, “Yes, yes I do!”

Then the question came, “Do you have enough faith to let her go?” That question took her some time to respond but after a few hours she responded, “Yes, I do.” Moments later the doctor notified her that Emily had passed away.

We had all been talking about moving to a new home. I had felt sure we’d move by the summer, and yet here it was. I knew that we weren’t anywhere near being able to leave. We had no consistent income. Work had started again but not near like it was before. There were no auditions, no side jobs, no visible progress, and failing hope. I knew our kids expected us to provide a new home soon. I asked Jess, “Well, that’s kind of like us, I guess. Do you have the faith to not be in a home of our own?” She looked at me and said, “I think I do.”

It suddenly hit me. How much I was demanding and pleading and hoping and praying and fighting for a home of my own. If God didn’t give it to me… and I was forever stuck in my past… would I still have faith? No! I would work harder. I would give up more. I had to. I would hate a god that left me broken and defeated. Wouldn’t I?

Faith is a choice.

No. That’s not who I wanted to be. I loved who I was as a believer of something bigger than myself. I wanted to have faith. Ben was the stable one. He never questions whether he’ll succeed. He keeps trying and trying because he knows what God has promised him. He knows what he’s been asked to do. I wanted to be like Ben. I wanted to choose faith until faith proved me wrong. “I think I do too,” I responded before sending Jess off to bed.

Maybe that’s what God needed me to learn. It seems a pattern in my life. When I finally give something up, God gives it back. But that’s a story I’ll have to tell you next time.