You don’t (didn’t!) say!

Oh, yes.

Someone finally said it out loud to me.

Yesterday I went with Chick and Dex to complete some update information for the WIC program. So grateful are we that in our situation the state has programs that help some with nutrition, providing vouchers for some basic foodstuffs (beans, eggs, milk) to keep Chick able to nurse Dex.

Part of the process involved some recertifying questions. As part of those, my situation as to having become jobless since Chick first qualified for the program, was brought out and laid on the table for discussion. Here is where I admit, aloud, again, that no matter how “over” I am about no longer working at the “old place”, the fact of being jobless and increasingly losing hope over finding a new job that will let me take care of my family still sends such an electric bolt of fear through my inner core and I can’t help but tear up and cry. I try SO HARD not to. I think  other thoughts, I clinch my jaw shut, I press my tongue into the roof of my mouth (a tactic I read about online), I look up at the ceiling…. all those things that are supposed to help. But they don’t help me.

If it is not being tripped by a spear thrust about joblessness, it’s tripping over my heartbreak about Snowy’s situation, or it’s feeling that my father would be so disappointed in me and my loss of ability to take care of things as I’d promised him (even tho’ I know that in reality he would not have been so; he’d've just helped me get back on track)… or I look at Dex and wonder how will I get things together before he has to know or be affected by how deeply into the dark I have fallen…  

All these things that remind me how imperfect and currently inept I am and how that affects others just make me crinkle up inside and lose equanimity. Then my chin, no matter how tightly braced or highly lifted, begins to quiver and my eyes get hot, then wet, then a tear or more might begin to spill over, my nose will start to clog up and sniffle, I’ll feel hot and flustered, then with all that comes the wave of mortification that I’ve shown my wounds to anyone in eyesight (or over the phone, since that happens, too, in which case my trembling, breaking voice contributes to the overall mess I become).

So, once again, during the autopsy of my job death and fruitless and painful attempts to revive it here in the tiny bureaucratic office of essentially a welfare arm of the state of Florida, my pain manifested.

The agent helping Chick, fortunately, was a dear person, who had been delighted to see Dex since she actually remembered signing Chick up initially while she was pregnant and was full of good information for her in this next phase, was so delighted and delightful with Dex. She stopped in the middle of the recertification process and immediately began trying to give me some helpful suggestions, websites, other directions (including giving me a sheet about applying to a midwifery school in Gainesville). In questioning me about my own efforts, which I shared had been high in quantity and wide-flung in scope, she looked at me sympathetically but with a hard edge of reality. And she said it.

“You aren’t getting anywhere because of your age. And because you’re a woman.”

She nodded to emphasize the obvious. No mealy-mouthing to tenderly protect my ragged (aged!) feelings, no sugar-coating to make things sound more palatable, no gingerly offered shrouded suggestion. She stated the obvious.

And, there it is. As they say, the elephant in the room. Me. Who I am. 

 

The challenge is how to overcome the things I can not change, especially from afar before anyone even meets me. I don’t know. I think about it, I haven’t solved it.

Have put in for food stamps. Never did I think I’d be at this point.