How to move from Pittsburgh PA to Athens GA via Greyhound + USPS, Sept./Oct. 2005.
Ok... yeah... I can hardly comprehend how I did the things that I did in my 20s. In August 2005 I had just gotten back home after a misguided summer hitchhiking across a good bit of the eastern U.S. with a guy I had met at a party on April Fool's Day earlier that year. I was now several weeks pregnant (unplanned, if that wasn't obvious) and I intended to follow the dream I had been cultivating before impulsively allowing myself to get distracted & derailed by the promise of love and adventure: moving to New Orleans. Like a thousand others before me, I had fallen completely in love with that city over one romantic week in the summer of 2004 & I was determined to move there regardless of the new obstacle of my "condition." I remember sitting at the computer in my parents' room, about to place an order for one-way tickets from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, when someone turned on the news and it was Hurricane Katrina. So, that plan was out. My then-partner suggested Athens, Georgia: it was a weird little music town in the South, so, he reasoned, could be kind of like New Orleans. He knew two friends from high school who had moved there, so we'd probably have a couch to stay on while we found jobs and our own place to live. I knew absolutely nothing about the place and knew no one in the entire state of Georgia, but I agreed because I had to get out of my parents' house and figure out how to deal with my Situation. And I don't want to align myself in a rude or presumptuous way with the victims of that storm, but I just remember feeling so empty in those days and weeks: pregnant, alone, no idea what the fuck to do with my life, and Katrina had just washed away the one thing I had wanted more than anything I had ever wanted before, the only place I felt like I could truly belong, the plan I had been pointing my entire life towards for the past year. I was only 21 -- and a very, very green 21 at that -- a year was a long time to me back then.
Anyway. Within weeks I had purged many possessions & packed what I wanted to keep into cardboard boxes. On the Greyhound we could each bring two carry-ons (which I enhanced by tying to my bookbag a tripod, art supply tackle box, and typewriter case) and two boxes in checked baggage underneath the bus, and judging from this journal entry I bet the weight limit was like 80 lbs per person and we got right up to that limit. I remember having to drag those damn boxes out of the bus and crawl/push them across the dirty floors of bus stations when we made transfers in the middle of the night. I trusted the rest of my stuff to the postal service, boxed everything up and mailed it to Georgia ahead of us. I think mostly what I mailed was books -- the really important stuff, zines and photos and journals, I kept close to me in the Greyhound boxes.
I'm not going to detail the entire saga here -- I've written a zine about it once before already and I'm working on another one anyway. But, we had a shit time in Athens and I hated this town so much, the first time around. All I did for the first three months was apply for jobs and go to the library and use their internet to write melodramatic livejournal entries and apply for more jobs. We were staying on the couch in the living room of a punk house right next door to the train tracks and the window above our couch was covered in cardboard & duct tape because someone had gotten drunk and thrown a chair through it. I had decided to relinquish my baby to adoption but didn't feel a connection to any of the profiles we were given by the agency I was working with at the time. It was cold and wet that fall/winter and the house had no heat and I was lonely and hungry all the time. Things improved in the spring, though: I found work, rented a room of our own in a different house, and, through a mutual friend, serendipitously met the couple who would become my daughter's adoptive parents.
After the baby was born and the adoption finalized, I crashed out into mournful regret and moved to Chicago because I associated Athens with everything painful that had happened to me and I wanted to put distance between then/there and now/here. It feels insane to consider that literally three weeks after giving birth I was packing my belongings into my ex-boyfriend's (the guy I had dumped for the hitchhiking guy; I sure was a real winner back then) car to travel ~800 miles to another city where I once again had no job lined up & no permanent place to stay, but this type of chaotic uprooting is not exactly abnormal behavior for relinquishing mothers. [I have been reading Gretchen Sisson's Relinquished for the past six weeks, slowly & avoidantly, one chapter every Saturday because every word resonates with my own story and each reading session becomes an excavatory weeping session. This is the book I have wanted to write for decades but couldn't because it is just too close to my heart.]
In any case, I felt even more depressed in Chicago -- throwing up in the basement utility sink as soon as I got to work nearly every day, thinking perhaps I was somehow especially prone to food poisoning, not listening to what my body was telling me, not realizing I was grieving deeply. After all, don't they say that adoption is a win-win-win situation? Don't they say that you can solve the problem by simply giving your baby to some more capable, financially stable parents and then you can get back on with your life like nothing happened? I missed my baby so much. It was too late to change my mind, but we had agreed to an open adoption, and after visiting them in Athens that November (she was 6 months old), I knew I had to come back. I knew I wanted to stay close to her, no matter what. So, after only half a year in Chicago, this time we packed everything into a rental car (including 3 cats now, holy shit) and drove back down South, arriving just in time for a New Year's Eve party on December 31, 2006. My partner and I split soon after and he moved on to points west, but I've stayed put ever since.
And it still feels weird. I've been saying for the past 20 years that "I never expected to stay in Athens for x-years." I continued to be an absolute mess for at least five years after returning & continued to be unable to do any deep emotional work because I was spiralling and impoverished and had to focus on meeting basic survival needs. I drank too much for a while and then stopped drinking. I slept around a bit and then latched onto a man who promised me babies & picket fences but was drowning/flailing faster than I was; I stayed with him for five years. (15 years later, I now believe this situation was far more complex & nuanced than "I dated an abusive alcoholic," but it was also exactly that.) I enrolled at the university & borrowed more money for my fourth attempt at completing my college education, and I did well but sometimes I still wonder how much better I could've done if I wasn't working 2 jobs & living with a man who would get jealous and come to my work and rip up my notebooks hours before an exam. During my Saturn return, I left the alcoholic and almost immediately got hit by a truck. The Universe telling me that it was finally time to buckle down & actually deal with my shit, eh? I had met Pete just before the accident & now I was presented with the lesson of "allowing someone to help/take care of me," ya know, because I couldn't fucking walk for at least the next 3 months. I went back to school (accounting certificate from the community college) again because I knew with my newly shattered knee I would no longer be physically capable of doing service industry work into middle/later adulthood. I eventually got hired at the library, achieving my first "real" "professional" salary-with-benefits grown-up person job for the first time at age 30. This job provided tuition assistance and so I went to library school, finally becoming a "real"/faculty librarian just before turning 40.
My daughter will be 20 next year, and I still remember what it felt like to be 20, and it doesn't feel at all like 20 years have passed. Nearly all of my once-close Athens friends have moved away -- that's just the kind of place this is, a college town, transitory even if you didn't come here for school. I love that I'm close to my daughter; she's an adult now and we can just go out and have lunch together sometimes. It was absolutely worthwhile to have stayed here, to have done the difficult & complicated work of maintaining an open adoption with respect & honesty, to have been allowed to witness her growing up & to be part of her life regardless of how painful & confusing it sometimes felt for me. But in most other aspects I feel stuck: the cost of living is totally nuts due to the constantly increasing influx of wealthy college students, my job gives me extreme burnout, I haaate living in a nonwalkable neighborhood and in my 20 years of living here the buses still only come once an hour... ya know? It has always felt like "I just need to do this one thing...," I just need to save up enough money, I just need to finish school, I just need to find a better job, I just need to pay off this medical bill, I just need to pay off this loan, and then I can.....? I dunno. Like, yeah, maybe I am a little bitter that it's taken nearly two decades to "pull myself up by the bootstraps," as it were, following a mere 6 months of unemployment, all told. But I'm in my 40s & I don't want to carry all of this bitterness & regret forever. What's next?
