So much has transpired since my last real blog entry, I’m not even sure where, exactly to begin.  The truth is, I initially wrote this update by hand almost two months ago, and even more has transpired since then!  But I will do my best to pickup where I last left off …

The Cliff

The last time I wrote, I was in a desperate position. Not only did my life seem stuck on a track to nowhere, trapped by the slow and steady tug of inertia, but my fellow passengers had become destructive forces that increasingly threatened the health and wellbeing of my family on multiple levels.

My husband and I were as cash-strapped as ever.  Our job prospects were mediocre. We had burned through most of our savings and amassed a ridiculous sum of debt. The thought of moving out of my parents’ house and acquiring a whole new set of huge bills that we had no idea how we would pay for was more terrifying than ever. And yet, it had to be done.

I had come, once again, to a crossroads in my life that called for nothing less than a complete leap of faith. I could either continue safely, securely, down the same path we had been on for years now, or I could close my eyes and leap off a cliff screaming “I can fly!” to the horror and astonishment of onlookers who were convinced I would fall crashing onto the pavement.

I love my parents deeply, and I am forever grateful for their help and the assistance they’ve provided us since we’ve been home from Iraq, but my parents were not the only people we shared their house with, and my father is not the easiest person in the world to live with. I had reached the point where I was no longer willing to raise my son in an environment where there were too many variables out of my control. But what was so astonishing to me is how many people around me didn’t see it that way.

My husband and I had a free place to live, and to some outside observers, it didn’t seem to matter how deeply dysfunctional the household had become. To the onlookers, leaving the security of that house to go struggle even more financially was just way too risky. But I had complete faith that protecting my child from the dysfunction was the most—the only—important consideration. As long as that was my guiding light, I believed as deeply as I have ever believed anything in my life that God would help us along the way.

The Leap

New York is not an easy place to live, or even just to survive in for that matter. Insanely high property taxes drive up the price of just about everything, from rent to gas to groceries. Like California, just about everything here is two or three times more expensive than it is just about anywhere else in the country, and the small bump labor sees in wages doesn’t even come close to making up for it.

The irony, of course, is that these ridiculously high property taxes are supposed to fund services for those with fewer means, except the net result is that those of lesser means are the ones who suffer the greatest consequences of the higher taxes. In other words, it is infinitely more difficult to survive in this state on a shoe-string budget than it is to survive, say, in Iowa, where my husband grew up.

Now I’m from here, so I’m used to the rat race. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter how much money your parents had—if you wanted stuff, you better get a job because shit was expensive.  My husband, on the other hand, grew up a little different. He’s used to not having much, but he’s also used to it not mattering much.

Even if you don’t make much money in Iowa, you probably live somewhere that gives you all the space you need (as opposed to having to choose between a shoe box in a nice neighborhood or a roomy place where you have to look over your shoulder while you unlock the door to your apartment). A gallon of gas cost $2.99 in Iowa today, not $3.60, and a carton of eggs costs $1.00 not $2.50, so you’re not going to loose sleep wondering where your grocery money is going to come from or if you’ll need to fill the tank again before you get your paycheck.

So when my husband and I set out to find an apartment we could afford that gave us the space we need in a neighborhood we felt good about raising our son in, as fast as possible no less, it quickly became an overwhelming task.  (Before I go any further, I want to point out that I’ve heard it said before that “safe neighborhood” is code for “white neighborhood.” It shouldn’t be relevant at all, but to head off any such accusations, I should point out that of the four families who live on our end of the block, we are the only white one, so when I say that a safe neighborhood was one of our most important criteria, I am not talking about race.)

The Landing

We looked at crappy apartments with paint peeling off the walls in lovely neighborhoods, great big spaces in the middle of nowhere, and just about everything in between. And that is when I stumbled onto a Craigslist ad for an apartment I just knew was the one. It was a typical Schenectady flat on Goose Hill, which used to be a Little Italy of sorts back in the day. I’ve been told that not so many years ago, if you took a walk through Goose Hill on a Sunday afternoon, you’d smell nothing but the thick and heavy aroma of pasta sauce permeating the air. Now, like most parts of Schenectady, it’s dotted with nice areas butted up against ghetto sections you wouldn’t want to live in.

The pictures of this flat, however, left me hopeful that it was on one of the nicer streets still  left. Beautiful hardwood floors, dark stained molding around the doors, and a kitchen that was dated but at least didn’t look like a health-code violation.

I got on the phone immediately, and an older-sounding woman with a thick Italian accent picked up. She was highly skeptical and wanted my life story. She wanted to know what my husband and I did for a living, how old my son was, and who takes care of my son while we work. The highly personal nature of her questions felt intrusive, but instinct told me to oblige her.

She sounded traumatized. She was going to be very picky, she explained, about her next tenant. She wanted lots of references. She had to evict the last tenant—twice—to get her out. The tenant and her kids did thousands of dollars worth of damage to the place. We couldn’t see the apartment for at least a week because she was still cleaning and painting and fixing it up. She asked me three times about my income. She wasn’t accepting any more Section 8 tenants, not after her last experience, she said. And she needed good references, she repeated, over and over again.

I took the woman’s name as an omen. Her last name is a reference to those medieval angels who “burn with the fire of charity.” (I didn’t know it at the time, but she also shares her first name in common with a devastating hurricane, which seems equally appropriate to our circumstances).

When I finally got off the phone, I told my husband about the eccentric Italian lady. He didn’t like all her questions. I laughed and told him she was going to be our new landlord.

Scheduling a viewing of the place was tricky. She had shown the apartment to a woman who was a GE executive and who was very interested in renting it, but the landlord was holding off until we had a chance to see it. She had a feeling about us, she said. She explained that her mother, who had died recently, owned the building and that she herself grew up in the beautiful apartment that the last tenant trashed. She had been praying to her mother to send her a good tenant, and when I finally met her to to see the apartment, she was convinced her mother had sent me to her. (This, of course, was all very hocus-pocus for my Iowa husband, but very much in keeping with my own Italian upbringing).

The apartment was perfect! Well, by my standards anyway. The outside of the building left much to be desired. The white aluminum siding was coated in a dark gray film. The porches were hanging crooked, and the tub was so old, it looked dirty even when it was clean. But I didn’t see any of that.

What I saw were beautiful hard wood floors and plenty of space for all of us and my soap making equipment! The kitchen was old but it was big and in decent shape. There was an old-fashioned, walk-in pantry like I have always wanted, and a big back yard for the baby to play in.

In the course of the conversation while looking at the apartment, the landlord began to tell me about the region in Italy she was from. She had trouble pronouncing my last name. Was it German, she wanted to know? Yes, I said, although my husband is mostly English and I am mostly Italian. I told her my maiden name, and we spoke some more about Italy. I told her that my brother’s in-laws are from the same region of Italy that she is from, and she wanted to know their last name. When I told her who the family was, she almost fell to the floor. She is dear friends with my brother’s father-in-law, she told me. They are both on the board of the non-profit Italian American organization she belongs to. That was it, she decided!  It was an official sign!  I was meant to rent the apartment!

At that moment, she showed me the attic, which she wasn’t sure if she was going to give me access to because the last tenant let her kids go up there to smoke and drink, but any lingering skepticism she may have had withered away in that moment! (And so did any doubts I had about the apartment as soon as I saw the huge attic). Maybe I could even buy the place someday, she said. She could help me with the VA loan process. There was no more need for references—my in-laws were the only reference I needed!

The only thing left to do was drag my husband down to Schenectady and try to talk him into living in the city. That is a story, perhaps, better left for another time, but I will say, to my great surprise, he took much less persuading than I anticipated. In fact, he fell in love with the place—and even the eccentric landlord—almost as quickly as I did.

The landlord, as it would turn out, soon lived up to her name—part angel, part pain in the ass, but always my saving grace. My mother hated the neighborhood, and my brother thought we were paying too much, but I was so very grateful to find the apartment, I could swear my guardian angel appeared in the form of a crazy old Italian lady wearing sweatpants and slinging a Gucci handbag.

We moved in so fast, there was still tons of cleaning to do. There was black funk built up in all the window locks, and a thick layer of grease coated the kitchen cabinets. But there was a moment when I was down on my hands and knees, scrubbing the filthy kitchen floor that really just needs to be ripped up and replaced, that I looked down the hall toward the great big windows in the family room, where the light came crashing in, and in that dirty, sweaty moment, I tell you, I felt sheer bliss.

For the first time since my husband and I were married and my son was born, we had a place of our own. It was dirty and old and our downstairs neighbor would turn out to suck, but it was a space we would never have to share with anyone we didn’t want to. It was a place where we would make all the rules we felt were necessary to keep our son safe in our home and we were free to tell anyone who didn’t want to follow those rules to get out.

Our new apartment was a completely empty, blank space, just waiting to be filled with our possessions and nobody else’s. For the first time since we were married, we could finally unpack the wedding presents that had been for years waiting ever-so-patiently in the basement for their new home. We didn’t have to worry if the toys were in anybody else’s way, or where we were going to put our junk because all the drawers and closets were already filled with somebody else’s junk. We could finally step out of the bathroom naked without having to worry about somebody walking through the front door unannounced, and we could hang whatever the hell we wanted to up on the wall without feeling like we were overstepping someone else’s boundaries in the place where we reside.

Schenectady is a city that the rest of the Capital Region views as having gone completely down the tubes. It is the poster child for the aforementioned high-tax dilemma.  The city kept hiking and hiking property taxes until it drove GE right out of town, and the rest of the job creators soon followed.  Many of the neighborhoods in the city that once lit and moved the world have now become the very definition of urban blight.  To the surrounding towns, the entire city is the ghetto. No one says they’d like to move to Schenectady, and when I told people we had, the response I usually got was, “You moved to Schenectady?!”

And all I can say is that those people have no idea. If they cannot imaging how truly, deeply, blissfully happy we are to have our little flat in Schenectady–not because it is some Bohemian lifestyle choice, or because we are trying to vanquish Bourgeoisie guilt through self-imposed austerity—if those people simply cannot imagine that right now, Schenectady is just the best we can do, and we are blissfully happy to have it, than those people are truly, deeply deprived of true happiness.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying everything in life is all better because we moved to a run-down apartment on the edge of the ghetto. I still have plenty of days where I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall, running in place trying to improve our lives and getting nowhere. But In those moments, I try to stop and take a look around, and I try to remind myself of what it once felt like on those days to look around the room and see someone else’s home.

Drowning in Laundry and Blissfully Happy

I began this blog on 20 August, 2011 with the stated goal of preserving my sanity while I felt stuck living at home with my parents.  We finally took the giant leap of faith we needed to and moved into this apartment on 18 August, 2012.

Almost exactly one year to the day later, my life came full circle. My mission in creating this blog was to reflect on motherhood from the perspective of a combat veteran in hopes that it would help me look at my situation with a little levity, but also in the hope that a blog would help me move forward and change the circumstances I found myself in. If you’ve been with me since the beginning of this journey, you know that I dedicated this blog to any of our service men and women who sometimes wrestle with living a “normal” life after the war. If you haven’t, you might find the About Me page interesting (it’s the shortest thing I’ve ever written, so really, it’s worth a second to take a look at it!)

Of course my journey in life continues, but the particular journey this blog was dedicated to is finally over. I could continue to blog about my personal life, but I think there are other projects I need to dedicate my time to right now. One of the things I have discovered along this journey, however, is that OnlySpartanWomen is a concept that resonates with many of my fellow sisters in arms. Rather than shut the blog down, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to invite others in. So instead of keeping this a space all about me, I think my plan is to open it up to other female vets and soldiers in hopes that it will turn into a safe place for them to tell their stories as well.

If you are one of my sisters who follows this blog, this is an open invitation for you to contribute to OnlySpartanWomen. If you know other vets and soldiers who might care to reflect here on their experiences as women in combat, please share with them my contact info. If you are a female vet or soldier who is interested in helping me grow this space, you can leave a comment or email me anytime at onlyspartanwomen@gmail.com.

If you are a follower, please stay tuned! I will be making some changes to the About Me page and hopefully we will have some new voices here in the upcoming months.

I want to thank my followers—all 47 of you ; ) —for your love and support. I have not amassed a huge following over the last year because stats have never really been my driving force behind this blog, but I hope if I open the doors to outside contributors, this will turn into a space where we are able to dispel some myths, illuminate some mysteries, and share with the rest of the world what it is truly like to not just be a woman in combat, but also what it is like to live your life after having lived that experience.