Why I Abandoned My Blog

I quit my blog in December about the time my husband left me. Well, in all fairness to him, I should explain that opening sentence: He took a job in a town three hours away after being unemployed for almost eighteen months. There, I said it. We were “victims of the economy.” I put that in quotation marks because it is a phrase I heard a lot over the last couple of years and because I have been dread to admit that we were part of that national statistic. I even make air quotation marks with my fingers whenever I say it aloud. Really, I thought all of those “victims of the economy” were just lazy bums who really didn’t want to work. Neither my husband nor I have ever had difficulty finding and keeping a job, we aren’t the kind of people who don’t work. So imagine our surprise when he, one of the highest paid managers at his company, was “let go.” I use the quotation marks again, because in actuality he was fired, but somehow “let go” sounds ever so much nicer. But the experience was anything but nice. We consulted an attorney to see if we had grounds to pursue a wrongful termination suit, but discovered that in Texas you can be fired if someone doesn’t like the color of your shirt and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

So began the longest year and a half of our marriage. We learned a lot. We learned that we really meant “through good times and in bad,” we learned about the ineptitude of State and Federal employees when trying to maneuver through COBRA and Unemployment Insurance, we learned we didn’t need cable television or dinners out, and we learned how to not think about our future. My husband, burned and disappointed by his chosen profession, decided to change his career path in his mid-fifties. He learned that was not an option, at least not a viable one for him. He also learned that any self-doubt he acquired during eighteen months of unemployment was misguided. As a favor to a friend he offered to look over a company in the aforementioned three hour away town to see if it was salvageable or if it was ready for the auction block. After a month he knew he could turn it around. After three months we knew we couldn’t stand the separation. Another lesson learned; we really like each other. So here I am. I quit my job, sold our home of thirty years, said goodbye to our dear friends, and moved to a town where I know not a soul except for my husband.

I think I’m probably ready to resume my blog. I’ve got lots to talk about.