Try a little perspective

At least two-days worth of growth

So maybe shaving my goatee off was not the best idea when the current rate of change around my house exceeds all of our coin jars and piggy banks put together.

My wife's reaction was harsh. She can't look at me without giggling, and she'll have nothing to do with me until my face grows back, as she puts it.

Change is rough on families. Our middle child, Carson, is feeling so much stress related to the possibility of moving to a completely foreign place, that he made himself sick this last weekend. The other two kids are feeling it too, but they are better about verbalizing their feelings, which in turn helps us process better with them.

Aside from my bad judgment regarding my facial hair, I have been playing the perspective game with my wife and kids the last few weeks. Yes, our situation is bad, but we've got a house over our heads and food in our refrigerator. No, I don't have a job yet, but if we need to go live with grandma and grandpa, I'm sure they'll be fine with that. (that's cool right, mom and dad?)

Nothing does the trick like taking their minds off the bad things and transferring them to good things or even new adventures on the horizon. Playing the there-are-starving-children-in-Africa card has never worked well on my kids, but understanding the complex set of issues around getting laid off has allowed us to communicate things and set goals.

We put the house up for rent this weekend, then my wife and I had a late talk one evening where she expressed sadness at knowing that all her dreams for this place, the color schemes she picked out, the decoration projects for the kids' rooms were all going away. Yes, we'll still own the house, but someone will rent it from us.

I can understand this. She waited a long time for me to get comfortable with the idea of buying a house. Somewhere last year before our closing date, I murmured the term, "watch us buy this place and then I get laid off." Harmless, seemingly innocuous, something everyone says when they buy a house, right?

It's a house, not the house we've always wanted, but it was our own for a little while. Just enough to start to get creative. We actually painted the mud room and made a flagstone patio. still, it's just a house, probably one of several we'll own in our lifetime together.

 Perspective.


I stood talking to a friend after church on Sunday when I felt someone stuff something into my back pocket. I thought it was one of the kids stuffing the church program in like they usually do, but when I walked out to the car I reached back and pulled out a wad of cash. We're not broke yet, but we've felt the pinch of having only a few weeks of expenses left in our bank account. A friend felt our need and blessed us with enough money to pay some remaining bills and provide a little breathing room.

Perspective.

Whenever I'd get the E-mailed goodbye notes from other friends laid off from the journalism field, I'd inevitably get depressed all day after finding out. But a day would pass, and I'd think about their situation less and less. A lot of those feelings came rushing back at me when I was laid off. It's a thin line between having a job and looking for a job.

When a friend was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago, we felt bad. The struggle for hope is something most people can only watch from the sidelines.

Getting laid off is a big hit to one's ego. It's a big hit to one's finances and a hit to family stability. It's a big deal.

Last week doctors gave my friend nine months to live.

Perspective.

Tim

How Joseph Stalin changed my life

All people share a dream. For the desperate, that dream is freedom. But give a man a sense of peace, and the dream will shift toward security and shelter.

We all want to own a home. Some people call it the American Dream, but it's the human dream, has been since we wandered the earth looking for a dry cave to inhabit.

When Joseph Stalin was in the process of killing 10 million Ukrainians through a planned starvation, my grandparents undoubtedly dreamt of freedom or perhaps even more basically, survival.

They fled their native land and walked halfway around the world to northwest China, where they set up shop. Work, shelter, life.

Until Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution caught up with them, and they were forced to flee once again in pursuit of some dream only attainable in a land far across the known universe, if it existed at all.

They found it under fog-laced blue skies sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge. No Ellis Island for this family, just California dreams on Geary Street and a lifetime away from the Soviet Empire's antithetical sense of ownership.

My grandfather, like most immigrants, worked hard to buy the dream, because the dream is never free, no matter how much you want it to be. He worked several jobs and bought up San Francisco real estate as an inheritance for his children.

Immigrant families have an overdeveloped sense of needing security. And that is often satisfied in the purchasing of land or houses, even to subsequent settled generations.

Somehow this did not affect me.

In fact, I had a wanderlust in direct contrast to that urge to settle and seek security. I suppose this, above all else, is what led me into journalism. Always moving, artistic, something new every day.

I wasn't a loner though, I wanted a partner, and my girlfriend of three years agreed to marry me and go with me. I still feel like I duped her a bit, but she's still along for the ride.

We traveled and lived in trailers and slept on floors in third-world countries. We had a baby together in Hawaii, and I never really had sense of place or any one place.

But I wasn't a loner, and my wife, as wives tend to do, developed a nesting instinct and began to clamor for something more permanent than hostels, low-income housing or rented apartments and houses.

At 36 each, we bought our first house in October 2009. A green, two-story Missoula Modern out by the airport. Our neighbors are only 12 feet away, and every fifth house repeats except for color and trim. But it's home. And it's ours.

I remember feeling sick to my stomach at the closing, but I smiled and celebrated as we popped a bottle of champagne a little later that afternoon.

The feeling of making the first mortgage payment was good, except I kept seeing that huge number that included all the interest we'd end up paying, and I'd go dry in the throat thinking about it.

It's not the money though, it's the feeling of being tied down. Always has been.

So getting laid off is much more about the baggage for me. Generally, the idea of moving on to something new is right up my alley. I'm into the next thing, in fact, friends will tell you that as soon as I'm doing something new, I'm already thinking about the next thing.

Now I feel tethered to this place by this house, even though in reality, it's just an investment that can go whatever way I decide it should go. No matter, it is a cord around my ankle and the most difficult thing I think about when I think about being laid off.

Place is good, it can define you. You can spend your life seeking a place to call your own, and perhaps that's all my wanderlust really is, an ongoing search.

Tim