Hi Darling Ones,

The Shitty Anniversary I didn’t think I’d remember the specific day of is today*. Thanks, TimeHop! Thanks nonstop tweeting past-self who couldn’t help remarking on John Prine’s death on the shittiest, toughest day of my life. Thanks, life for being ceaselessly difficult sometimes.

Today it is officially one year since Cade left and I’ve had any contact with Sister #3 and The Tibbles. I hope it gets easier from here.

Much to my surprise, today has not been as emotionally wrought or difficult as I would have expected. For that, we can thank thunderstorm-induced insomnia and early-meeting-tomorrow-induced anxiety.**

While I feel a little emotionally wobbly, I’m trying to be gentle with myself. I took a nap when I was tired. I ate some green-bag Starburst Jellybeans because I wanted them. I’m listening to Grandpaboy/Paul Westerberg’s “Mono” because it’s soothing to me right now.

Most of all I keep reminding myself I did my very best for Sister #3 and The Tibbles, and I can’t do more than that. I did not fail when there was no way to win. I did not do anything wrong. This was on them, their mental health issues and their addictions.

I know the love I have for them still exists in my heart and is out there in the universe because it doesn’t disappear. I also remind myself it’s probably not the worst thing that Sister #3 exited my life, because she used me for years and is frequently mean for the sake of meanness with a history of being specifically cruel to me about everything from my body to my creative hobbies.

What I’ve learned from all of this is you cannot love someone into loving you back or even treating you well. Not even me, despite how hard I try. It’s not a fun lesson to learn. Zero stars. Do not recommend.

Thank you for helping me survive this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. This next 365 days will be better than the last. At some point I’ll get vaccinated, I think.*** There will be crushes and unrequited love. There will be orgasms and ice cream. I’m gonna listen to a lot of records and read some books. There will be Sadness Garden II:The Bleakness Boogaloo. Things will for sure happen and some of those will be good. The COVID Diaries will end, but I’ll keep on writing, maybe even in this letter format. Who knows? This blog will turn 21 in July and you can start picking out fine whiskey and gin to send our way. I might even get my hair cut by a professional at some point.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I do not take any of this for granted.
Jodi
 
*That is one awkward sentence. I tried to make it less awful and did not succeed.
 
**You should know, for the first time since like 2009 I have had a meeting four out of five days. I’m not a fan. Meetings take a lot of brain energy — ramping up for them, meeting and having to turn thoughts into words that come out of your mouth and make sense to other human beings, coming down from the meeting. All that energy leaves very little leftover for actual work. Zero stars for meetings. Do not recommend.

However, I am a big fan of working. If that involves the occasional meeting, I’ll do it.
 
***This morning I had a call with one of my favorite clients (all my clients are my favorite because I only work with rad people and in the dozen years I’ve been freelancing I only fired two clients) who reassured me I’m not the only person who is struggle with finding a vaccine appointment and feeling like a total fucking failure in the process.

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I suppose it was the very definition of hubris. My cocky self-assurance that Cade was going to thrive here at Aunt Jodi’s House for Wayward Nephews. I thought all he needed was a safe, secure, steady home removed from the trauma and substance abuse at home. In my magical thinking all he needed was all the love in my heart, a ton of of therapy, and a plan — then he’d be fine.

Nope.

What people don’t tell you about tough love is that tough is just about the understatement of the century. I don’t know what’s tougher than tough. Whatever that is, that’s what I was feeling when I had to tell Cade he could not stay here any more.

Things spiraled pretty quickly after I busted Cade for what I thought was shoplifting the day Wendell escaped. Turns out he didn’t steal those things. Instead, he snuck out of my house that night and returned to his house to get a bunch of energy drinks, some cigarettes, a few cans of beer, a bottle of vodka, and a bottle of Maddog 20/20. I didn’t realize any of this until the day after I said he couldn’t stay here.

It’s hard to say what happened when. Was it only Monday that the cops were here because Cade was shouting in the front yard about killing himself because I found a pack of cigarettes in his pocket? Was it Tuesday where I had the ugly confrontation at my front door with Sister #3 because I did not want Cade to go with her? My plan was to bring him to a home for traumatized teens where he could get serious, constant help and then maybe transition to a sober living place. She did not agree, and instead took him away and I have not heard from either of them since.

Cade left Tuesday and my stomach is still in knots about it, though I have stopped crying. I cried so much from Sunday to Tuesday I was constantly dehydrated. Today after after sleeping 10 hours last night is the first day I don’t feel like I’m dying.

You can laugh, but I really I thought if I wrapped Cade up with all the love in my heart it would be enough. If I told him he was wanted and loved that I could start to fix his problems.

I was wrong. Addiction is a beast. I am not an addiction specialist or a mental health provider. I’m a naive spinster aunt who foolishly thought love was enough.

Occasionally, I get angry at all the lies both Cade and my sister have told me, but I try to stay away from that because it gets overwhelming. I try not to be too hard on myself for being so stupidly trusting, but that’s not easy either.

I always think I’m so cynical and pessimistic, but then something like this happens and it shatters me. I’m shattered and probably will be for a long time.

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Oh Darling Ones! This has been the roughest week.

I don’t even know where to begin on what shitty thing happened on which nameless day. Cade’s been having some behavior problems, and it’s hard. So hard. I don’t know how you parents do it. Like how do you keep pushing down that anger when the kid is being utterly ridiculous and taking really, really stupid chances? Also, how do you teach them the utter shittiness of lying and being sneaky when they come from a home where that’s just kind of how things are done, if anyone even notices?

AND on top of all that, Wendell managed to escape one afternoon. Or, if my hunch is correct, he managed to escape when someone else was sneaking outside in the middle of the night when he should not have been going outside. I don’t know how Wendell got out, but he did. Poor Maxwell, who was down with a cold and just returned from clearing out his dorm room so had been driving 7 of the last 24 hours, got up from a nap around 8:30 and was all, “Have you seen Wendell?”

I had not.

There were many tears shed, signs posted, and expletives said. Did you know that when you post your lost pet with some of the helpful lost pet sites that scammmers immediately swing into action? I’m not even kidding you. Within about 20 minutes of posting about Wendell on some lost pet site I got a text. “I found your cat.”

And I was all. “Really? Where?”

Fuckfaceassholegoingtohellforsuredirtbagfucker sent text that said, “Send me the code you get so I can verify you’re the real owner.”

About 22 seconds later I got a text from Google with a voice code. I guess Fuckfaceassholegoingtohellforsuredirtbagfucker wanted to set up a Voice account with my phone number.

Fuckfaceassholegoingtohellforsuredirtbagfucker was relentless in trying to get me the code. Max sent them some random number and they said, “That didn’t work give me the phone numbers of your family and relatives.”

So then Max sent Fuckfaceassholegoingtohellforsuredirtbagfucker the number for the local FBI office or something like that.

Thankfully everyone else was super kind & supportive by helping spread the word, and sending us advice on how to lure Wendell home, and it worked! The little orange beast returned to our open garage where we’d put the litterbox by 2 a.m. Phew!

And on top of all this, I have not been very kind to myself.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m one of the fortunate who has steady work. It’s not an overwhelming amount of work. It’s a consistent flow of work and yet, I’ll be damned if I can get anything done. Each day I start out with a TO DO list of four to five client tasks. I spend hours in front of the screen and yet I consider myself lucky if I can cross off one thing from the list. I don’t even know what I’m doing with the time. By 5 o’clock when I take the I So Lounging break I’m behind on all my Yahtzee games*, I haven’t looked at Instagram all day, and there are 298,193 unread Tweets in Twitter.

So then I beat myself up because it’s 6 o’clock and I’ve only booked two billable hours, I need to start dinner, and I’m exhausted for some reason I cannot fathom. Why is it so hard? I can’t tell if I should cut myself a little slack and stop being so harsh or if I should stop being so lazy? Unfocused? Blase? and just do better.

Oh and today poor Cade has been puking and sleeping on and off since like 3 a.m. I’m so worried about him and feel helpless and shitty. This week blows.

*I brought Yahtzee back because I thought I would have ample time and energy to play it with my sisters and friends. Just another thing I got wrong.

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One of the tough things about aunting in the time of COVID-19 is managing Cade’s anxiety. He’s a recently clean (one week so far) anxious autistic kid with ADHD and other special needs and an extrovert. That extrovert part might be the death of me. He’s all the time with the talking. All the talking. And I haven’t yet figured out how to filter the babble from what might need my attention. Today seems to be smoother than yesterday, so it probably just take some patience, which I hate. Patience sucks and I have very little of it.

One of the issues his anxiety has landed on is food. He was so worried about it even though I easily had enough food to feed the three of us for at least two weeks. I told them both, “It might not be what we want when we want it, but it’s food.”

Last night Cade & I drove to pick-up our Hy-Vee order. He was stunned by how eerie the empty parking lots were.

As we were loading grocery bag after grocery bag into Ruby I asked him if he felt better. He said he felt a little better because we got so much food.

NOTE: I’m not trying to buy more than we need, it’s just that I literally have no idea how much food two young men will go through in a week. Is three boxes of cereal laughably overkill? Not even close to being enough? I DON’T KNOW! How long will 90 pizza rolls last them? Will I kill them if they eat all the ice cream? Probably. I mean I’m generous, but come on.

As we were putting away the groceries he looked at the stuffed-full refrigerator and sighed. “We have a lot, but what if we can’t go grocery shopping for a long time?”
“We’ll order groceries again on Sunday,” I said.
He shook his head at me.
“We’ll order what we want. We’ll pick them up when we can. We’ll get what we get and it will be fine.”
“I hope so,” he said.
“Me too.”

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When all hell breaks loose she really breaks and stays loose, doesn’t she?

You would think life here in Angry Hermitville would be quiet and kind of status quo, right? I mean, I work from home. I’ve been a food/toilet paper hoarder for years, long before it was trendy. Just ask my Book Club, they would make fun of me for having so much toilet paper when it was just me.

Well, it’s not quiet hermitude here in Angry Hermitville. Things have been chaos and change and heartbreak and sadness.

I can’t really get into the details behind things, but I can say my 18-year-old nephew Cade has taken up residence in the loft here at Supergenius HQ. He joins his cousin, my nephew, 21-year-old Maxwell who has the bedroom formerly known as the guest room. He’s been here during summers/school breaks since last year. Thanks to the pandemic, he’s packing up his dorm room and moving here earlier than planned.

If we were a band we’d be Cranky Spinster & the Zoomers playing every night at Aunt Jodi’s Home for Wayward Nephews.

Right now I’m so busy with work and calming the anxieties of a young, special needs kid coming from a bad home I haven’t had time to freak out, but I think as soon as I have some space I’ll be freaking the fuck out. Should be fun.

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