eunice ann

tales of a girl trying to make sense of it all.

on my terms.

by

Black and white photo of a corrugated box, the box is a bit tattered and the flaps are open, but one is folding into the box, while the others are falling outward.

I never saw it coming if I’m going to be totally honest. There was nothing to indicate that this day was going to be different than any other day.

My boss scheduled a 1:1 with me and I was excited to talk to her about how well the project I had just delivered was going. I’d been working on it the whole year and it was finally live and performing beyond expectations. I was looking forward to bragging on myself and asking for the raise that had been promised to me 15 months prior. I had rehearsed what I was going to say all week and I was anxious, but confident, that this conversation would go well.

Like she did every week, my boss canceled at the last minute. I felt a little deflated, but I went on with my work, then headed out after lunch to pick up Alissa and finish my workday at home, the same way I did every Thursday.

Almost as soon as I had logged in and got back to work, my phone rang—it was my boss and the first thing she said was, “Hi Eunice, I have Melanie from HR here with me.” My heart started pounding and I dropped into my chair. I was being laid off and I had no idea it was coming.

“Oh, hi…” I tried to sound like I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but she continued.

“We are terminating your employment effective immediately due to a violation of the corporate credit card policy.”

I felt like I had been slammed in the gut with a wrecking ball. What? I haven’t even used my corporate card since March! “Um, what does that mean?” I asked.

“Melanie will go over the details of your separation with you.”

Holy shit. I’m getting fired! I could not believe what was happening. I started to feel a buzzing in my ears and my heart was now beating in my throat. I was speechless. I could hear a woman still talking to me, but I was not registering at all what she was saying. I had never been fired before.

It didn’t take long before I realized that my termination was one of those that was a mere excuse to avoid paying me a severance for my 5 years of service. I was less mad about losing my job than I was that the company I had grown to love had been so shitty to me to save a handful of money.

It took me about 45 minutes to process the shock of losing my job before emotionally, I was fine. After that, I consulted a few attorneys and learned that, thanks to at-will laws, it would be pointless for me to try to fight it. (I could get on a whole soapbox about how at-will laws allow so much workplace abuse that is not covered by the EEOC and it is beyond maddening, but that is a whole series of blog posts on its own.)

After that, I needed to figure out what I wanted to do. Prior to getting let go, I had toyed with the idea of going out on my own, but I wasn’t sure how to go about building a client base that would match the salary I was bringing in.

I had owned a photography business prior to the job that had just fired me, and I remembered all of the things I hate about running a business: the inconsistent cash flow, the up-front expenses, the ridiculously challenging clients, bookkeeping, and the constant and overwhelming feeling of the imposter syndrome. Nothing about doing that again sounded remotely appealing.

As I started interviewing with new companies, however, I really started to hate the idea of having to answer to someone else and for having no control over what was going to happen to me.

A few friends tossed me some freelance work while I was looking for jobs and I really enjoyed the freedom of being able to work on my own terms. I kept taking on small marketing projects here and there, and the first time I said no to one that sounded particularly horrendous, I felt a sense of freedom. No longer did I have to work with people that I really didn’t want to work with if I didn’t want to!

That was when I decided that I was going to start a business and work for myself again. The idea that I no longer had to take on work that I didn’t want to do left me feeling so empowered and light, it just made sense. I wanted the flexibility to work during the time of day that I am most productive (evenings and late night), rather than forcing myself out of bed at an ungodly hour and having to be functional before 10 AM.

It wasn’t easy—not at all. I worked three days a week at my friend’s coffee shop, and that, along with my unemployment check, kept me going for about six months. The pressure of needing to make ends meet to keep a roof over our heads triggered a lot of childhood trauma and made it really hard to show up some days. But I did it.

A little over two years later, I was far from “making it.” I was close to closing several projects which ended up losing funding at the last minute or the scope drastically changed and there was no money in it. I was frustrated that I just needed one thing to come through and I could breathe easy for a few months. I was racking up debt and seemed like actual income was impossible.

I had my car repo’ed. I was on the verge of being evicted. I was making $650 a month and there was not a single part of me that wanted to go look for employment elsewhere. Instead, I just wanted to persist and show myself (and my overly critical mother) that I could do this. As cliché as it sounds, I refused to believe that failure was an option. And going to work for someone else felt like a failure.

I kept making phone calls and connecting to opportunities and finally, I landed my big fish—the client that I needed to pay all of my bills and have some left over came through. It felt great. It felt amazing. Alissa even said to me, “wow, this new job is pretty baller, huh Mom? I’m really proud of you.”

We celebrated that fall by taking a trip to Mexico, all expenses paid, and I enjoyed a real vacation without worrying about money for the first time in almost a decade. We indulged, Alissa swooned over the “bougie” resort, and I realized that, no matter what, I always wanted to work like this: on my terms.

When the pandemic hit, I ended taking on an employee position with one of the clients I had been working for and that was a disaster. I quit almost three months ago without even thinking about what was next or where my next check was coming from. I didn’t care. I had to get out of there as soon as humanly possible. The situation had become untenable and it was literally killing me.

After I left that job, I finally unpacked the box that had been sitting on my floor for three and a half years. It was the box of my office stuff, packed up hastily for me by a colleague when I had gotten fired. It had been sitting on the floor of my bedroom since the day I brought it home. Every time I looked at it, I got so angry that I didn’t want to touch it. Not only was it holding a physical space in my room, but an emotional one as well.

As I went through the box, putting things away and tossing others, I felt an emotional weight lift from me. Not just for the time that the box held, but for the previous 11 months of stress, pain and abuse I had endured. I realized that I had been carrying an emotional weight of feeling not good enough for years and this new job had brought everything I had avoided dealing with after I was fired right to the surface every day. No job should ever make you feel like that. No amount of money or sense of stability is worth it.

Ten weeks later, I’m rested, relaxed, and healing from the emotional trauma that experience had on me, as well as the physical illness that had me hospitalized earlier this year. I’m back to doing my own thing again, this time focused on my writing, and I could honestly not be happier.

I know that entrepreneurship isn’t right for everyone, but if there is one thing that I have learned over the past half decade, it’s that it is definitely for me.

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Be sure to check out other writers who have created on this month’s theme: Work

How Do You Define ‘Work’? by Adeola Sheehy
My Work is Never Done (a poem) by Mia Sutton
What Do You Do? by Hannah Kewley
They Say a Mother’s Work is Never Done by Leesha Mony
Working in the Margins by Laci Hoyt
You Gotta Work B**ch by Amy Rich
Labors of Love by Liz Russell
I Am a Writer by Christine Carpenter
Potted Houseplant by Crystal James

with love, eunice.

by

Me & Kevin on Chatfield Reservoir, August 2004

Dear Kevin,

You may never read this, although I’m hoping that you are able to. Your words from two weeks ago are still echoing in my head—”before we live with regrets”—and I have to tell you, honestly, I have no regrets when it comes to you.

Ours is a story of true love. 

Not a romantic sort of love—that type that hits you hard and is filled with passion, yet fades away as the years pass. 

No, ours is that slow burning kind of love. That knowing, fully vulnerable, deep from within the soul kind of love. The kind that has been there forever and will last long after we are both gone.

When we first met, I felt an instant connection to you, as if we’d known each other our whole lives. It seems that I wasn’t the only one to notice since everyone around us thought that to be true. You showed up in my life and haven’t left my side since. Even when we stopped speaking to each other for a time, we still always chose our friendship and picked up as though not a day had passed.

I should have known that my marriage wasn’t going to work out when I realized I was more disappointed that we didn’t get to hang out that weekend than I was excited to get married. It wasn’t that I was interested in you, rather, I was sad to miss you. When hanging out with a friend you’ve never met in person and have known for less than a year is more important than your wedding, it’s not a good sign for your new marriage. In the end, I chose you anyway.

I looked forward to your calls every Friday afternoon while you were on your way to The Door. Those calls were so Seinfeld-esque in that they were always about nothing, but that laid the foundation of many conversations we’d have over the years—talking about nothing and still managing to talk about the important things in the mix.

In most ways, we are nothing alike. In other ways, we are completely the same. In true Taurus/Scorpio fashion, we are fire and ice, although we’ve been fire a lot more than we’ve been ice.

We know each other’s darkest secrets. And unlike anyone else, sharing them has always come with zero judgment or shame, but instead, a laugh of knowing exactly why we are telling each other.

I told you that I fell in love with you the day that you called me just to ask me what the name of the beer I recommended you try (it was Pyramid Snowcap, and yes, my strange memory for the weirdest details still functions well). It was because it was that day when I realized that I was more myself when you were around than I was with anyone else. I never felt the need to pretend to be someone else with you.

We just clicked from day one and it has always been the most free I have ever felt. I’ve spent 20 years learning how to show up in this world the way I have so easily shown up with you.

Over the years, we’ve shared too many laughs and beers to count. We’ve dropped everything to be there for one another. We’ve cried, we’ve cheered, we’ve mourned, we’ve watched countless hours of Seinfeld and Dodger games together. Alissa loves you like an uncle (and she says you still owe her $82).

I’m praying that it’s not yet time to say goodbye to you because to be honest, Kev…I’m not ready. We still have so many more memories to make.

With love,

Eunice

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Be sure to check out the other stories written on this month’s theme: Vulnerability

Being Vulnerable With My Body by Hannah Kewley
Quitting Cold Turkey by Mia Sutton
I Have Been Sick All My Life by Jennifer Brown
To The Women Working in Male-Dominated Fields by Christi Jeane
Anxiety Hangover by Christine Carpenter
Butterfly Wings by Megan McCoy Dellecese

losing my religion.

by

Black woman's hands with white nail polish, rest on an open bible with a bookmark inside.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I was 13 the first time I questioned my faith. The previous year, I had spent several months in confirmation classes learning all about the origins of the faith I had been raised in. Like a good student, I took notes and memorized the Apostle’s Creed, among other things. My friends and I would sneak into the church kitchen to snack on the little tablets of shortbread that our church used for communion, not recognizing the irony of us noshing on those sweet little squares as nothing more than a treat because it was outside of the context we were learning in the Sunday school room upstairs.

After we were all confirmed, I was grateful that the cross necklace our class was given from the church was not as ugly as the ones from the year before; I even wore it outside of Sunday morning because I liked it as a fashion statement, not because it meant anything to me.

I never really took my job as acolyte seriously. I would sit in the front of the church, pretending to listen to the sermon but really playing the game our youth pastor challenged us with so I could hopefully earn the lunch she promised. The game was simple—listen to the sermon and pick out words in alphabetical order. If you made it to Q, she would take you to lunch after church. I never made it to Q, and mostly that was because the pastor never used a Q word as far as I could tell. I knew it was a trick to make it look like we actually gave a shit about the sermon while 300 people were watching, but I appreciated the possibility of the bribe coming to fruition at some point.

I still believed in the things I had been taught to that point, but that all changed that fall when my parents filed for bankruptcy and lost everything. For the first time in my life, we really struggled to make ends meet. We had just moved into a new house, but my dad was trying to start a new business with the shadow of his last business venture hanging over him and my mom went to work for the first time in my life. That Thanksgiving, our youth group hosted a food drive at our church, and our family dutifully dropped our cans in the collection boxes on Sunday morning, and later in the week, my peers and I sorted the cans and packed up the boxes for families in need. At the end of the week, my Sunday school teacher arrived at our door to deliver one of the boxes to us.

I was hurt. I was pissed. I didn’t think that we were that “in need,” and I remember my mom feeling insulted that the same people who had been her friends earlier in the year now saw us as a charity case. Looking back on it, I realize that this was probably the only Christian act that the people of that church actually did, but it was done out of an act of pity, and that just made it feel like shit and hurt my pride. Not long after that, my parents started looking for a new church because they had been ostracized from the circles where they had previously been accepted.

It was at that point that I decided that God was a fake. I could not reconcile the fact that this body of people who claimed to believe in Him could be so cruel and dismissive simply because we were struggling. We hadn’t changed as people, so why were they treating us so differently?

I started questioning everything. I learned about other religions and I asked the question, “How do we even know the Bible is real? How do we know that someone didn’t just write it, bury it, and then ‘discover’ it, claiming that it’s an ancient text?” There wasn’t a single answer that my mom could provide that was sufficient for me.

I sat down and wrote my parents a letter, not having the courage to tell them to their faces, what I had concluded. I didn’t believe in God anymore, and I was no longer going to attend church with them because it was pointless. I had completely lost all faith in everything I had been taught to that point, and I blamed God for not protecting my family. My mom was devastated.

My parents let me get away with not going to church for a few months, but then they dragged me along. I usually sat in the pew, doodling on the bulletin or staring out the window and counting the number of trains that passed by in the course of an hour. I wanted nothing to do with church and I resented my parents for making me go.

With the addition of our family, the new church now had enough teenagers in the congregation to start a Sunday morning bible study for us. Now I was not only forced to sit in church and listen to a sermon, I had to sit in a classroom with a half dozen other kids and I couldn’t even pretend to be listening. I had started to believe in God again, but this whole concept of religion seemed like a total sham. I decided to use this as an opportunity to answer some of the questions my mom could not.

One morning, we were discussing the migration out of Egypt, and completely bored, I said, “How do we even know our religion is right? We spend all this time worshipping this God, and if we don’t, we’re told that going to burn in hell. But what if we’re wrong? What if Judaism, or Buddhism or Mormonism is the right one? Or worse, what if heaven doesn’t really exist?”

Needless to say, that didn’t go over well. After that conversation, the elders of the church seemed to be hell bent on saving my soul. I got into youth group because it was an opportunity to hang out with the friends I no longer went to school with. We went to church camp, which was really only an opportunity for me to leave home for two weeks every summer. One year, I even gave my life to Jesus, not because I wanted to, but because the boy I liked got up and I followed him. I was really pissed when we were all brought to a dedication ceremony and had to listen to another two hours of preaching while the rest of our group went out for fish tacos.

After I graduated high school, I completely stopped going to church. I decided that it wasn’t for me. I had grown close to one of the older couples in our church because she had survived the Holocaust and I had interviewed her for a documentary that had I made. Not long after I moved out, they invited me to dinner, and I gladly accepted. We enjoyed our meal and by the time dessert came, their true agenda came out. They wanted me to come back to church. The betrayal that I had felt in my early teens rose up again. I thanked them for the meal and stormed out in tears and vowed never to step foot inside a church again.

Nearly ten years later, my daughter had just turned one and I felt this tug on me to raise her with some sort of religious foundation. Despite my feelings about church, my faith in God had been growing, and I decided to dip my toes back into the baptismal waters of The Church. One of my coworkers invited me to join him and his wife at their church, so I did.

We showed up one Sunday at a building that, on the outside, looked reminiscent of the church building of my youth, but we actually met in a big side room that smelled stale and reminded me of a community rec room. There was no pulpit. There were no pews. There were no offering plates or stained glass windows. There was no choir and no processional, simply a guy with an acoustic guitar, playing music to go along with the songs I didn’t know and wouldn’t learn because there were no songbooks either.

It reminded me nothing of the churches I had grown up attending. And I loved it.

For the next five or so years, we became active members of that church and it felt so different than my life’s experiences to that point. We learned about the history of what we studied and the contextual importance. We learned about caring for each other from a place of love. And most importantly, I started to get answers to the questions I had been asking since I was a teenager.

It was all amazing until that church stopped feeling like God was at the center of it all, and then it felt just like the other churches I had been to in life. I was disappointed and stopped going after a while.

I had a realization not long ago that my faith really has nothing to do with going to church. For the majority of my life, I kept looking for the answers inside of a building and within a congregation and with a specific label on it.

In the end, I realized that all of the answers have always been within me all along. My faith has never been stronger than it is right now, and even though my journey has come with a lot of pain, it has forged me into the woman I am today.

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Read other writers’ take on this month’s theme: Faith

Opening Up to Faith by Amy Clark
Faith by Amy Rich
Something to Believe In by Sarah Hartley
Making Sense Of Faith by Adeola Sheehy
Pesticides and Jesus by Liz Russell
Indian Lilac Brings Me Home: Reflections On Relationships by Laci Hoyt
Twinkling Lights of Faith by Mia Sutton

hope in the time of 2020.

by

One hand passing a black paper heart to another hand
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Let’s get real, y’all. This year was a shit show. Personally, I knew it was going to be that way when Alissa disappeared on New Year’s Day for 53 straight hours. You don’t start your year discussing with your attorney the legal implications of hiring a PI to find your missing daughter and have high hopes.

In full transparency, I also didn’t expect that I would spend the better part of 9 months in the same 150 square feet of the apartment that I hate. Is this what it’s like to be in utero? I’m not sure. I also don’t know the gestational period of coronavirus, so there’s that. There are days when it feels like I will never escape from this womb. And there are days when I am not sure I want to.

Aside from my personal strife and science deniers, I didn’t expect that this would be the year that I would discover my voice as a Black woman.

If you’ve known me for any period of time prior to this year, you know that being Black is an identity that I’ve struggled with my entire life. This year, I learned that is not uncommon for those of us who are mixed. But something broke open in me this year, and it was a lot of pent up rage that led me to write probably one of my most raw and honest pieces of work, ever.

It quickly turned into the most read essay I’ve ever written, which was exhilarating, to say the least. What was even more beautiful were the conversations I was able to have with some people because of it. Not even a month prior, I was asking the question, “Will Black Lives Ever Matter?” because it seemed that the racial justice movement we saw ignite at the beginning summer was nothing more than a passing fad to many. When I wrote that piece, I had lost hope that this year had any influential significance.

As the election grew closer, I began to feel more and more unsettled. Here in Colorado, a state that has only been blue since Obama was elected in 2008, all signs were leaning Trump. Literally. His supporters were more vociferous with their big trucks and obnoxiously large flags. Billboard sized signs peppered the hillsides of the mountains I hike on the weekends. Walking through the neighborhood adjacent to mine, a house was proudly decked out in QAnon garb. I immediately stopped walking in that neighborhood after explaining to my (white) dad what the display meant. After all, I saw the video of what happened to Ahmaud Arbery and I didn’t want the same fate.

I think in my gut, I knew that the election would be close, and I was genuinely fearful of what that would mean for me, a mixed-race woman of color and a solo parent to a mixed-race female teen. Yet all I could see in those last few days before the election were women in my circle who still didn’t get it. My business coach. A fellow blogger. A woman I adore as an artist and a mother. I was filled with so much frustration, I had to scream into the void.

But when my words were echoed back, I was not expecting it. I was not looking to be encouraged, applauded, or even acknowledged. Sure, there were plenty of negative comments. Bullies who called me names and fragile white feelings that were hurt, but overwhelmingly the response was, “Yes! YES! I get it and I support you.”

The conversations that came out of that fifteen minutes of rage were what gave me hope for what’s next.

In thirty-seven days, we’ll have a new President of the United States. While I don’t expect him to cure us of what ails us by any means, I am hopeful that we will see some of the change we have been fighting for come to fruition in my lifetime.

“Hope” is not a word that I would naturally associate with this dumpster fire of a year, but as the calendar winds down on 2020, I cannot help but feel hopeful that in some aspects, 2021 will provide the fresh start we all desperately need.

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Read other writers’ take on this month’s theme: Hope

Stay Hopeful, My Friends by Christi Jeane
Shifting Sands of Hope by Mia Sutton
In It Together by Laci Olivia
Who is your Only Hope? by Amy Rich
The 2020 Storm by Adeola Sheehy
Hope Over Survival by Sarah Hartley
Optimist on Purpose by Megan Dellecese
A Story About a Dog by Jenn Norrell
Both Fragile and Enduring by Danni Brigante

life itself.

by

Misty view over a mountain valley
Photo by Thomas Millot on Unsplash

I would like to meet the person for whom this pandemic has not been an utter mind fuck. Really. I would.

The past almost eight months have been strange, to say the least. As tired as I am of hearing them described as “unprecedented” or “unusual,” the fact is that nothing is normal, obviously.

In early quarantine, I don’t think I was alone in my desire to use the time to reevaluate my life and priorities. Prior to the world coming to a complete and total halt, I had committed to writing a book and I wanted to spend this year restructuring my marketing business. I had planned to do that in the margins of working between the three clients that kept me busy full time, growing my wine business, and managing a teenage daughter as a single parent.

People always wonder out loud how I do it—how I juggle all of the things I do, and manage to keep the outward appearance that I do it easily. Before the pandemic hit, I did it by sleeping as little as possible and saying yes to absolutely everything.

I often spent my weekends so overbooked that I would do all of the math to figure out exactly how long I could stay at one event before I had to leave so that I could make it to the next (mostly) on time. I was overwhelmed and forgetting things left and right. My anxiety was out of control as the few nights I managed to go to bed at a decent hour, I spent laying awake worrying about everything I needed to get done.

Once quarantine was announced, I had the idea in the back of my head that life would slow down and it excited me. I thought to the book outline that I had yet to start and all of the research I needed to begin and I lit up with hope that I could get going on this project. I looked at my stack of books to read with longing, believing that this year, I was going to hit my reading goal, no sweat.

Not yet ready to let go of my social life, I agreed to every single Zoom happy hour that was offered. We played games. We did karaoke. My “commuting time” was filled by catching up with friends and seeing how quarantine was treating people. It took about three weeks for the Zoom fatigue to set in before I reserved that time for only the people I really wanted to spend time with, which eventually waned to be almost exclusively my book club.

The slowing that I was expecting never really happened. I took on part-time position with one of my clients, but was still working more than the ten hours a week that I had told my other clients I needed to limit myself to. I still wasn’t prioritizing myself or the things that I had decided early on that I wanted to get to.

By a month in to quarantine, I was exhausted. Emotionally, I was stressed out about getting sick and frustrated dealing with a teenager that did not think that COVID was that big a deal. I was tired at the end of the day and everything irritated me.

I’m not sure if it was the pandemic or just my usual spring bout of depression, but I stopped being interested in pretty much everything. I struggled to get my work done each day and I went from barely getting any sleep to sleeping every spare chance I got. I went days without leaving the house, not even to check the mail.

I watched my writing come to a complete halt. I stopped reading. The only thing that brought me even a little bit of joy was sending letters to my pen pal. A friend made a post asking if we were making the most of “all the free time” that quarantine gave us, and I snarkily asked her, “what free time?” I was working more than I had been before and still not sleeping.

I had one night at the end of April where I just sat up in bed and started crying uncontrollably. It was then that I realized that I was in full-blown grief mode. And it wasn’t about the pandemic. My tears had nothing to do with what we have collectively experienced this year.

It was about my challenges with raising a teen with trauma.

It was about being a single parent to said teen.

It was about almost getting evicted.

It was about getting cruelly dumped by a man I fell deeply in love with and expected to marry.

It was about getting completely beat up by the court system.

It was about getting fired.

It was about losing the half of the family that I spent so much of my daughter’s life trying to gain.

It was about my child being abused by her father.

It was about my parents getting divorced.

I realized, as I sobbed, that I haven’t grieved any of what has happened to me for six years.

At the beginning of 2014, when I whisked my dad off to a fun-filled trip to Boston that was overshadowed by my mom screaming and yelling at me for doing it (along with some other horribly inappropriate things that made my therapist say, “what the fuck?”), I had no idea that the year would end with my dad in jail and my entire family completely broken. I also had no idea that I was on the cusp of living life in survival mode for the foreseeable future. But it was what that year put me through that has made the strangeness of pandemic life bearable.

As the year closes in on its final sixty days, I don’t know if life is going to get any less crazy. I’ve found myself wondering if I will ever be in the right mental state to finish the dozen books that hang out on my nightstand.

I have begun writing regularly again. That always seems to be my salve. No matter what has been thrown at me, processing it with my written words has managed to be the one thing that helps me to deal with life itself.

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Read other writers’ take on this month’s theme: An Examination of Life
A Day in My Life by Laci Olivia
An Ideal vs Actual Day in the Life by Ashleigh Bowling
What Makes a Life? by Amy Rich
A Real (and Imagined) Examination of Life by Sarah Hartley
The Things We Carry by Jenn Norrell
An Engineer Writes Fiction by Christi Hurelle
An Examination of Life by Danni Brigante

from the victim seat.

by

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

I never expected that being a victim of a crime (or in our case, advocating on behalf of a juvenile victim, my daughter) would be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to endure in my lifetime. 

To that point in time, I had survived my own painful divorce as well as the highly traumatic divorce of my parents. I had dealt with an unexpected pregnancy and a job interview that seemed like it would never end (until they offered the position to someone else after wasting two years of my time). I’d suffered heartbreak and disappointment. I said goodbye to friends far too soon. I transitioned from one hard thing to the next, but the day I had to show up for court to advocate for justice in my daughter’s child abuse case, I began a journey I was completely unprepared for. 

From the outside, the criminal justice system makes sense. Whether you learn about the process from your government class in high school or from watching Law & Order, the process seems fairly straightforward: crime is committed, charges are filed, the trial process begins, and conclusion is reached (either by plea or verdict). As the victim of a crime, you hope that justice will prevail, a conviction will be made, and you can move on with your life.

The reality is, it’s not that simple. The worst part is, as the victim, you are the one person in the room with the least amount of control. It’s almost as if you’re a child watching your parents make decisions in front of you with no care as to how those choices affect you and allowing limited input.

I wish I had known this before I stepped into the courtroom for the first time. I expected that as her advocate, I would be a meaningful part of the prosecutorial team. I walked into that courthouse full of confidence with full mama bear attitude. I was ready to see the man who abused my daughter made to pay for his actions.

Our case seemed fairly straightforward, so I expected that we would issue the charges, offer a plea deal, he would take it and we would be done and could move on with our lives.

The prosecutor met with me privately to discuss the charges and what she was thinking. Of the five months we ended up spending in court, that was the only time that I felt I had any influence over the decisions that were being made. 

It was all for naught, as she came back shortly after we had talked to let me know that the defense was going to ask for a continuation—a request that essentially put everything on hold and a new hearing date was set. 

It was a stall tactic and we both knew it. I still remember the way she rolled her eyes as she delivered the news. I asked her what the options were and she told me I had a right to object, for the record, but she was going to go ahead and accept the motion. 

“For the record,” was what my voice was limited to for the next five months. It was incredibly frustrating not to have a voice in the most important thing I would ever give my attention to. We would show up in court, some nonsense would ensue, a motion to continue would be made, I would object, my objection would go on the record and “The People” would accept. 

If only “The People” knew my daughter, the pain she had endured and how traumatic it was for me to return home and tell her that nothing had happened.

At the beginning of the process, I had to write a victim impact statement, which became part of the court record. At the conclusion of the process, I had to revise it to include all of the ways that the process itself had contributed to lasting trauma for both my daughter and me. 

Even that statement was barely heard. Although we walked away with a conviction by plea deal, I didn’t feel like justice had been served at all. 

the journal.

by

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

I’m not sure how I knew something was wrong. Woman’s intuition, I guess. We had a ritual, a routine. He would call me at work on his way to work, then I would call him when I left work on my way home. Because of our opposite schedules, we barely got to see each other, so this was our time to have our conversations. Not those big, deep conversations, but the daily ones. The married conversations.

That day, he didn’t call. Always the one to immediately jump to the worst case scenario, I called his cell phone. No answer. I called our house. No answer. My internal alarm started sounding. Something didn’t feel right. I mentioned it to my friend on the other side of the cube wall.

“I’m sure he’s just busy. Maybe he went in to work early. It’s fine,” She said.

“He always calls. Something is wrong.” She tried to reassure me, but the next three hours, I could not help but believe firmly, in my gut, that something was off. My imagination went everywhere, except to the scenario that was reality.

That, I did not see coming.

As soon as I got done with work, I called him. I sat in the parking lot, phone ringing, ringing, ringing, voicemail. I tried the house again and still got no answer. I finally called his store, praying and shaking as the line connected. “Thank you for calling Office Max, how may I direct your call?”

“Um, hi. Is um, is Clint in today?” I wondered if the person on the other end could hear the sound of my heart raging in my chest.

“Clint? Yeah!” the voice on the other end was a little overly enthusiastic. I breathed a sigh of relief. The “freak accident/hospitalized/amnesia/death” scenario could be crossed off the list. “One sec.” I was put on hold.

A few minutes later, a familiar voice answered. “Hello, this is Clint.”

“Hey babe, I was just calling because, well, you didn’t call me on your way to work today and you’re not answering my calls and I’m worried about you. Glad you’re okay. Do you have a minute to talk, or is it busy?”

“You are the last person in the world I want to speak to right now.” The line went dead. He hung up on me. Why did my husband just hang up on me?

I started the car, in complete disbelief at what just happened. I pulled out of the parking lot and instead of taking a left to head home, I turned right and headed toward his store, just 5 minutes away. In the short drive, I racked my brain to think of anything I had done that would have him so angry with me that he didn’t want to talk to me. Nothing came to mind.

I parked the car and walked nervously into the store. One of his coworkers recognize me and greeted me enthusiastically. “Oh hi, Eunice! How are you?!” Whatever he was mad about, he hadn’t told anyone else. I waved and went searching for my husband. I found him in the employee break room, a place I technically wasn’t supposed to be, but he was the manager, so I knew I could get away with it.

He was not happy to see me.

“What are you doing here?” He growled.

“I came to see what’s wrong. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“I’m not doing this here. You need to leave. And by the way, I’m not coming home tonight.” I looked at him and tried to swallow the lump that had taken over my entire throat.

I fought back tears. “I don’t understand—”

“Just leave,” he cut me off. The glare he gave me was so icy, it could have sliced me in two.

I walked out to the parking lot and peered into his truck. His suitcase was sitting on the seat. I climbed into my car and called his parents, hoping they might know what was going on.

They answered cheerfully, so I knew that he hadn’t said anything to them yet, which left me even more bewildered. Whatever was happening was big enough that he wanted to leave, but he hadn’t yet told his parents, who were his closest confidantes. We chatted casually as I drove home. I didn’t let on that anything was wrong.

When I unlocked the door to our apartment, I dropped the phone and my keys. The framed Pulp Fiction poster we had opposite the entryway was shattered and torn. I quickly scooped the phone up and told his parents that I would call them back. As I stepped into the apartment, chaos and destruction were everywhere. Our wedding picture was broken and laying on the floor. All of his prized collectible movie posters were destroyed. Things were so disheveled, it looked like we’d been robbed. He was clearly really angry and I still had no idea why.

I walked into the bedroom. Unlike every other room in the house, our bedroom was intact, but something still felt off. I opened the closet. I opened the dresser drawers. I opened the drawer in his nightstand. I opened the cabinet in his nightstand. His gun was gone.

I started to panic. My husband had been raging, taken his gun and would not speak to me. Why?

I walked around to my side of the bed and tugged open the drawer to my nightstand, and there it was. My journal. He’d read it. I had never cursed my photographic memory until that day, when I noticed that my journal was in my drawer, right on top, unlike how I’d last left it.

I immediately grabbed it and started flipping through the pages, reading every entry from the beginning. I had started this journal just two months after we began our lives as husband and wife, the same time I am certain was when the first signs of my clinical depression appeared. There were 9 months of entries. I started reading.

I didn’t make it past the first page before I knew why he was upset. I wasn’t happy. I hated that we had opposite schedules. We had moved to a new state with no family or no friends the year before we got married and I was lonely. As an extrovert, it was a challenge for me. As an introvert, he was in heaven.

I kept reading, and things only got worse.

My sex drive had been completely sapped and I didn’t care. I didn’t care so much that every effort he made bugged the shit out of me. He was really insecure, and I wrote about how I faked every day of my life those first few months to keep him from freaking out. He had uncovered my secret. I had questioned his ability to love me unconditionally in private and now he knew.

Every feeling that I felt, but was afraid to say out loud, was now out there.

  • My resentment of his perfect credit.
  • My lack of feeling gratitude to his parents for many gifts they gave me, including a truck (I was so resentful that I refused to drive it and it became his truck).
  • My frustration with the unsupportive comments he made toward me guised as jokes.
  • My crippling loneliness and why I blamed him for it.
  • My crushing fear of getting pregnant.
  • My new friendship with a male coworker (who worked out-of-state).
  • My sex dreams about Eddie Vedder & Matt Dillon and how those were more satisfying than having to have sex with my husband.
  • My hesitation to be honest with him about how I was really feeling.
  • My irritation over how fucking awful our wedding day was.
  • My embarrassment over the ugly ass hat he insisted on wearing our entire honeymoon (I wonder if he still has it—it’s totally hipster now).
  • My sadness over realizing that he was going to be the only man I could ever love again.
  • My melt down over September 11 and my anger toward him for not understanding why I was freaking out.
  • My acknowledging that I had married down in the looks department. (Okay, so my exact words were, “he’s certainly not the hottie I wish him to be. Ouch.)
  • My refusal to believe that I could be suffering from depression, but also, that I really knew my doctor was right.
  • My disappointment in his inability to cater to my hopelessly romantic dreams (Or even my modestly romantic dreams, like being driven to the bus when it was raining).

It was all there, plain as day, every negative thought I had ever had about my husband, catalogued like a scorecard and paired with the harshest criticism of him to go with it. He was never meant to see any of this, but now he knew my truest feelings about our marriage.

I felt awful. I called his cell phone and left another message begging him to come home that night so we could talk.

I started cleaning things up and putting our home in order as best I could. As I was fixing things, I started to get really angry. I still had no idea why he read my journal in the first place. I felt incredibly violated. There was no topic that was mentioned in my journal that we hadn’t talked about, but he had gotten the filtered version of my feelings, not the raw, unedited emotion.

As a writer, I would have thought that he, of all people, would understand how much writing helps you process your feelings. That yes, the words on the pages of my journal were the truest reflection of how I felt about things, but I also hadn’t taken the time to work through those emotions and organize them into something meaningful and actionable.

We hadn’t yet been married a year. I had no idea how to talk to my extremely insecure husband about any of the negative feelings I had. He also couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that I might be suffering from depression. His reaction to that notion is a large part of the reason that I resisted entertaining the possibility for ten years. I did not see how we were going to make it through this.

He did end up coming home that night, and we had a long, tear-filled conversation. It was so emotionally draining that I ended up calling in sick for work the next day.

When I asked what prompted him to read my journal, he said that he’d gotten a weird feeling. That feeling was prompted by my trying to understand why people cheat. A friend of mine was dealing with a boyfriend who could not stop cheating and I would talk to my husband about it on the rare nights that we had together. He said that I spent so much time obsessing over the topic of cheating that he thought that I might be having an affair and he wanted proof before confronting me.

He got a whole lot more than he bargained for.

I know that day was the end of my marriage. We never really recovered trust in one another after that. I stopped journaling because I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t read it. I also stopped talking to him about how I was feeling because I couldn’t trust that he would try to understand and be supportive. He never stopped worrying that I was cheating on him (which is ironic that our marriage finally ended when he started having an affair with a friend of ours). It took another three years before the divorce was final, but we both knew our marriage ended the moment he opened that journal.

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Please check out these amazing writers and their posts on this month’s theme: Trust

Trust is Hard to Come By by Mia Sutton
My Superhero in the Sky by Sarah Hartley
Pattern Making in Parenting by Laci Hoyt
In How We Trust by Liz Russell
Challenging the Relationship between Trust and Fear by Christi Hurelle

personas.

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Photo by Barthelemy de Mazenod on Unsplash

It’s interesting to me all the different ways we work to understand our identities. I am addicted to understanding what it is that makes me who I am and if I had any influence over it or if I’m simply influenced by when I was born and how I was raised. Of all the methods that have been devised to put a language behind the things that make us uniquely us, I’ve yet to find one that didn’t feel like I was reading a portrait of myself in words.

I am a Two. The Enneagram explains why I desire to be loved and connect with others in an authentic and meaningful way. It is in my nature to help others, which explains why I so strongly desired to be a peer counselor in high school (although one of the most awkward encounters was counseling my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend after a suicide attempt. I still haven’t lived down the guilt after he dumped her to get back together with me), and why I’m drawn to being a victim’s advocate now.

Motherhood is a perfect example of where I tend to forget to attend to my own needs. I will fall into bed, exhausted, wondering when the last time I ate was. Although I have often fought against the idea that I should sacrifice my desires for my child’s, I still choose her over me more often than not.

In group settings, I have to hold myself back from being the first to volunteer or the first to speak. I was the one in college who carried the group, resenting everyone else along the way while also not allowing anyone to participate.

I have boundary issues. I could go into a whole post on this topic alone. I will say yes before I say no, and I will bring my A+ game (because nothing less is acceptable). I’m actively working on learning to let go of control and say no.

This is how I show up in all of my relationships. I love helping people and my heart bleeds for justice. I supposed that subliminally, it happens because I have a need to be validated, but that’s not my motivating factor. If you need me, I’ll be there, no questions or judgement allowed.

I am African Violet. My color says that I am highly creative, but afraid to share my work because I am easily hurt by critics. My emotions are reflected in my work, and I wear my heart on my sleeve. African Violet is a shade of purple, my favorite color.

I am a Warrior. My Archetype tells me that my divine purpose is to protect the universe and I am constantly seeking justice. A natural leader, I am drawn to create change in this life. Showing up in this way lets me feed my need to Get. Shit. Done. I won’t back from a challenge and I don’t shy away from change.

I have always been best as an entrepreneur. I am learning through my current life changes that I am a terrible employee. I dance to the beat of my own drum.

The downside is that “yes” factor again—I say yes to projects and people that I’m not fully committed to, simply because I enjoy the challenge of something new or exciting.

I am a Taurus. Astrology gives me another layer of identity characteristics. As my mom likes to joke, even though I fall on the cusp, I am all bull. I will stubbornly insist that there are no Aries traits here. A lover of food and inspired by tactile desires, this could not be a more perfect sign for me. I am loyal to my friends (sometimes to a fault), and love to indulge in luxurious things (especially food). I can be a total hedonist and will make decisions based on pleasure before being rational any day.

I am an Illuminator. My intrinsic motivation is to think in black and white, with no room for gray areas. I stand for justice and will quickly and vociferously speak out when I see injustice. I am most certainly not shy with my opinion.

I will stand behind you to the end of days, if it ensures that justice will be served. I will cheer you on, all along the way.

I am a Goat. The Chinese zodiac says that I constantly look for the best in people, even those that have hurt or betrayed me. I see this a lot in how hard I work to support reunification with Alissa and her dad, even though he’s spent over two years resisting the formal apology process that the court has now ordered him to comply with. I catch myself making excuses for him and being open and supportive if he decides to do the work, which makes Alissa feel betrayed.

I am ENFP. Sometimes I think that Coronavirus might have broken my extrovert because Zoom calls exhaust me and I don’t want to go out into the world, but at the end of the day, my Myers-Briggs type shows how much I desire human connection and am rooted in curiosity. I truly seek to connect with people on a real level, so that I can understand and work to make the world a better place.

I embody love. It’s my power word. My purpose on this earth is to spread love. It can come in many forms, and I have seen it in many aspects in the way that I show up in this world.

I believe that we all have value, and it is my hope for the world that we can all see our own value without waiting for someone else to validate it for us.

All of these things are what make me who I am, and it never ceases to amaze me at how many of these varying persona types have elements that cross over and reinforce one another. I still wonder how much of who we are is tied to our birth date and the experiences we’ve lived since. I don’t think that these assessments really answer that question, but rather, uphold the idea that it is a combination of things that make us who we are.

This post was inspired by a prompt or theme from illuminate. This monthly membership was created by the editors of The Kindred Voice to encourage more people to write and share their stories.

Please check out these amazing writers and their posts on this month’s theme: Identity

Becoming Myself by Jacey Rogel
A Reintroduction by Kristin Rouse
A Rose by Any Other Name Would Not Be Me by Mia Sutton
Shifting Identity by Sarah Hartley
Discovering Identity by Mala Kennedy
The Identity You’re Given by Liz Russell
What’s My Name Again? by Danni EverAfter
Dinosaurs and Unicorns by Jenn Norrell

minute orders.

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Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

Phone Status Conference. 10:07 a.m.

Petitioner appears by phone with counsel.

Respondent does not appear by phone. What? He asked for this hearing. Why is he not here? Respondent counsel appears in person.

Matter comes before the court on Respondent motion to clarify parenting time. This is such a waste of time; he just needs to write the damn letter and this will all be over with.

Updates provided to the court. He has spent more time trying to get out of writing the damn thing than it would have taken him just to do it. Oh God, they’re asking for a new therapist. Someone who won’t make him write the letter.

The court orders no change in therapist. The judge agrees that would be detrimental to the child, my child. The one he hurt.

Order Respondent to comply with the recommendations of therapist and proceed accordingly. The judge says we should trust the therapist if she says that the letter is an important part of reunification. I breathe a sigh of relief.

No additional matters are pending before the court at this time.

Adjourned. 10:15 a.m.

no finer name.

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photo from Alt Summit 2019, by Christina Best Photography

For easily the first half my life, I hated my name. No one could say it. No one could spell it. No one could go without making a comment about how it was “so old fashioned.”

Yeah, I know. The last time that Eunice was in the top 200 names was back at the end of the 19th century. I’m honestly surprised it ever ranked that high. It is still solidly in the top 1000.

Some would say it was an “old name,” as if everyone named Eunice just changed their name when they turn 65, but before that they were Lisa or Kimberly or Hope.

My name was so unpopular that I could never find it on a pen or a keychain. When my parents would travel, they would bring back a magnet for Erin or a license plate for Josh. I would get some other random shit that made no sense. And yet, to this day, I always look at the rack, just in case. This obsession was rewarded when I came upon a little shop in Leavenworth, WA that had “Eunice” emblazoned on everything—mugs, potholders, dishtowels, bottle openers. I wanted to buy it all, but I settled for two mugs (you know, in case one broke).

There aren’t really any famous Eunices. Hardly anyone knows who Eunice Kennedy is…and she’s a friggin’ Kennedy! I guess that’s what happens when your brothers are John, Bobby and Ted. And major props to you if you know who either Eunice Wentworth or Eunice Higgins is. Seriously, if you do without Googling it, leave it in the comments. I just might send you a mug with my name on it. I have one to spare.

There’s allegedly a Eunice in the Bible. I’ve read a lot of my Bible and I still haven’t found it. But apparently, she was a badass, so of course, I had to buy the book, Giddy Up, Eunice when I saw it. I still haven’t read it, but it looks nice on my shelf. I tell people it’s my unauthorized biography.

Eunice is popular enough though, that there’s a town in both Louisiana and New Mexico that share my name. But not cool enough to be in a more hip state like California or New York.

It wasn’t easy growing up Eunice. I got made fun of. A lot.

Unicorn.

Unison.

Unisom.

Unicycle.

Eunuch.

And don’t get me started on how my trainer could not say my name with a straight face the week I started working at Unisource.

My name has been the source of endless strife.

I was named after my great-grandmother, who raised my mom. My parents originally wanted ten kids, and as such, had names picked out for ten boys and ten girls. The top of the list was Erin Leigh, but when I was born, she said to my parents, “you know, there’s no finer name than Eunice.” And that’s how I got stuck with it (and how my sister got my sloppy seconds).

My whole life, I cursed my parents for being so amenable to please a dying woman. I wanted to be named anything else. I had made a plan to change my name the day I turned 18. I tried on a lot of names. But the day came and went and nothing really sounded right.

As I’ve gotten older, my name has grown on me. People still can’t pronounce it, and they still can’t spell it, but I like being the only Eunice in the room. Except last year at Alt Summit, where, in a conference of 2000 women, there were actually three Eunices in attendance (I only found one). Meeting someone who shares my name is so rare that it’s exciting. And I make people take our picture as evidence (see above).

I no longer mind the awkward pause before the inevitable, “um, how do you spell that?” I only huff slightly when I correct people’s pronunciation—although the huff is louder and more pronounced when I say my name and then you say it wrong. And I’m still amused that not only do I find other Eunices, but there was even another Eunice Brownlee. Although she died in 2017 and her obituary is still ranking on the first page of my Google search. I guess I can share.

After all, there’s no finer name.