Several years ago, my grandmother asked me how my then job
was going. This was the period during
which I had perfected the fine art of weeping silently in the bathroom if I
couldn’t hold it off until I got home.
At the ripe old age of twenty-three, I braved a new technique: the
honest but mature answer. And so I told
her, honestly, that it was very difficult to be grateful for something that
made me so miserable.
I remember
she cocked her head in that gentle grandmotherly way and said with reproof, “Yes,
dear, but you need to be grateful.”
Owch.
On the one
hand, I took and still take her meaning.
It was the winter of 2009, and the economy was still freshly in the
tank. Mine was a job that, as a friend
noted, paid for the peanut butter (among other useful things, like rent). In the broadest strokes, yes, I was grateful
that I had a job. It’s the kind of grateful that you try to
remind yourself to be on a regular basis: the basic thankfulness for food,
shelter, clothing, health, and, in this case, gainful employment. But still, I had trouble being grateful for
the specifics of that job: being
screamed at, humiliated, and generally made to feel like mud. Ain’t no way, no how, I was grateful for
that.
I take from
this a few subtleties: that you can be boilerplate grateful for the fact of
something, but hate it for its specifics.
You also, on occasion, might consider the wisdom of lying when someone
asks how your job is going. In fact, my
best friend and I perfected the polite brush off that year: when shit is
hitting the fan and some well-meaning relative asks you how it’s going, you
reply with a confident nod and say, “I’ve got it covered.”
I think
about these subtleties now as I prepare to move back to Boston. I graduated with my MA a little less than two
months ago and have been on the job hunt for about four. I decided last summer that Boston was home—no
two ways about it—and that I would do my damnedest to get back there as soon as
they handed me my diploma. Unfortunately,
I am still at this time jobless. Leases
wait for no woman, though, so I made the decision to move back to Boston and
crash with my aunt until I can shake something out.
Again, in
those broad strokes, I am exceptionally grateful to my aunt for opening her
home to me. She did so back in 2009,
when I had to move to Boston for the soul-sucking job before I had an
apartment. She is, in many ways, the hub
of our east coast family.
The pesky
little subtlety that colors my gratitude, though, is that she drives me
absolutely… fucking… insane.
I’m not
sure how the psychological meteorology works out, but it’s like I exist at the
eye of the perfect storm for her. I
certainly owe her for my stay at her house when I first moved to Boston, and I
am her oldest brother’s youngest daughter.
I also, perhaps unsurprisingly, give a shit what people think about me
and am therefore in some ways vulnerable, and I worked for a few years in the
outskirts of her industry. As a result
of these factors, I am fair game at all times for the most amicably delivered
criticism you have ever witnessed.
A brief
sampling goes as follows: I eat like a man, I don’t smile right for pictures, I
look like a scrub when I travel, I sleep too late, my shoes are ugly, and I am
childish and willful if I don’t sit at her feet in wide-eyed wonder and absorb
every piece of wisdom she has about getting a job.
I am
reminded of the Friends episode in
which Chandler proclaims: “Hannibal Lecter?
BETTER ROOMMATE THAN YOU!”
At least I
could tell Hannibal Lecter to eat me and probably get a good laugh.
Because
therein lies the rub: I have precisely zero recourse. While some of her criticisms come point blank
(“You eat like a man”), others come in little side comments and that passive
aggressive shrug and rueful expression that signals if I can’t listen, I
deserve what I get. You can counter the
direct ones; I actually called her on it recently when she commented on my
eating habits (which, by the way, are perfectly fine). But it’s the sideways ones, the ones that
someone could claim weren’t meant in the way I took them, that grind the
most. It doesn’t help that she can
dismiss my reactions (like most of my family does) because she considers me
overly emotional and claims I take things too personally.
Call me
crazy, but when comments are made about my person, I take them personally.
(But I
digress.)
So here I am,
not exactly on the most even emotional keel as I apply for job after job, and I
am about to move into what is essentially an emotional minefield in a great
neighborhood in Brookline.
When I step
away from the psychological mire, I have to remind myself that I am
twenty-eight years old and have done very well for myself so far. I’m not a child, and I’m not an idiot. Everyone I’ve spoken to in my months of
networking (and dear God, there have been many) tells me I’m doing exactly the
right things and that something will
turn up. And, in my better moments, I
kind of believe them.
The issue
is that my aunt, my soon-to-be roommate, doesn’t see me like that at all. She sees me as some kind of protégé, a
perpetual fledgling, and in that very strange and pernicious way that close
family members have, she manages to get me thinking that I’m those things
too. Even when I can clear my head and
realize I am not those things, I
still bump up against the massive obligation of gratitude: because whether I’m
a protégé or a professional, a twenty-eight year old adolescent or an actual
adult, I’m still living with her through the grace of her generosity.
My dad told
me once that all of these things say a lot more about her maturity than
mine. That’s cold comfort, though, when
I’m still required to grin and bear it, stiffen my upper lip, lie back and
think of England, and make sure that my gratitude shines through the whole time.
It makes me
kind of sad that my aunt is essentially foreclosing the possibility of our
having a good relationship without even knowing it, because I think she thinks
all the things she’s saying to me are in some way helpful, rather than harmful.
Maybe that’s the trick to the equation: just like you can be grateful broadly
and miserable specifically, your advice can be broadly well meant and
specifically very damaging.
I try to be
mindful of both ends of the spectrum and live by my own personal code, which is
essentially trying not to be an asshole to others or myself. I try to remind myself to be grateful but
allow myself to be ungrateful sometimes, and give myself credit when I manage
to turn the other cheek, especially when no one notices that the other has been
burned.
But I have
to tell you, sometimes it’s a damn thankless job.
