My two best genealogy friends fell from the sky into my metaphorical lap. They are both Czech.
There's nothing like a good friend who shares your same interests to make you realize how much you wish you had more of them. Externism again: the more close friends you have, the less close friends you feel like you have.
Every day my husband goes to work and I count down the hours until he can come home again and we can talk about everything. Or rather, that I can spill my soul out and have him collect it again. I have so many thoughts and feelings and they are not shareable with the majority of my current friends. One of my close friends moved to St. Louis recently, and I feel that loss.
Danny has very few friends and doesn't seem to mind it very much. He tells me that he sometimes wishes he could just have close friends without the effort of making them. I understand that feeling. Cultivating friendships is a little bit like planting a garden with a package of mystery seeds. It takes a while to figure out if anything you've grown will be beautiful or edible.
When you find a beautiful flower, or a tasty pepper plant, you try to overwinter it in the safety of your house. I have 10 pepper plants I started from seed that are on a counter next to the windows in the basement, one of the few sunny rooms in our house. They are nice to look at when I'm typing at my computer. I also brought the red geraniums inside and they are by the sliding deck door in large window boxes I built and painted by myself. If they bloom all winter, it will be much more cheerful than last year when somebody drained all the color out of the landscape for months and months, and we were stuck inside with nothing to do and four very energetic small children.
I also have some begonias, impatiens, and one habanero plant that I overwintered in 2015. If it is possible to overwinter plants, it should also be possible for a housewife in Iowa to make lifelong friends with whom I can discuss my nerdy interests and explore the exciting world of transcriptions and genealogical proof without abandon.
Maybe someday I will be friends with my children. As long as they still lick the floor, that day is not today.
Motherhood is very hard, but in ways I hadn't foreseen. It's hard to be home all day with a mountain of meaningless jobs to do. I sometimes feel like a slave. But I am fully aware that this would be the same if I were a father, and in some ways worse because at least I have the small benefit of being my own master. I can and often do intersperse the most obnoxious chores with exciting transcriptions, 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. Unless the 10 minutes turns into two hours, and the school bus suddenly has arrived and we still have no groceries because I was supposed to have gotten them earlier…
But the way motherhood is most painful to me is the loneliness.
Although, claiming motherhood is the loneliest stage of life is wildly inaccurate because absolutely nothing competes with being a celibate unmarried college student while Danny was serving his mission. I dated so many guys but the whole time it was so, SO pathetically empty and miserable. I can relate very well to Škvorecký’s lovesick novels and the desire for human connection.
The loneliness of motherhood is not like that. I have found another human soul, my beloved husband, who understands me and loves all of me. If we could spend every waking second of every day together, maybe it would not be like this, but since we can’t, it's like loneliness of the brain. I want meaningful intellectual connections with humans.
Teaching English to small humans is neither easy, nor mindless. But it is tedious. Other tedious jobs include teaching basic morals (no you may not punch your brother in the back with your shoes), basic manners (no you may not fart on purpose at the dinner table), basic religion (no you may not fart on purpose during the prayer either!), and basic common sense (no you may not lick the floor!!!)
I try to reach out to smart people I know in the real world. There are many well read, witty, fun moms out there… somewhere… right? Maybe it will require me to try to focus more on their interests rather than luring them into indulging in mine. But that sounds so...boring...
My close friends from college all have infants to worry about right now. If I become pregnant again anytime soon, it will most certainly not be out of boredom or an attempt to address an identity crisis - which maybe is an accurate description of how I feel. I'm turning 30 next week but I feel 15. This stupid trampoline injury from three weeks ago that refuses to heal tells me I'm not 15.
I went to Las Vegas in April on a “girl's trip.” I spent a week with my awesome mother in law, who I admire and get along with well, since she is Danny's mom and they are very similar. Also on the trip were my sisters in law, a cousin in law, and Katie the close family friend. It was not for gambling. It was for a cheap resort hotel, human interaction, and tradition. We do this every other year or so. I would never be invited if it weren't for my family connections, though I get along well with all of them. It’s just I would never naturally fall into their friend group. But then, neither would Danny. It was just the luck of fate that he would be born into a “cool” family.
For example, there I was, reading “Deciphering Handwriting in German Documents” by Robert Minert by the pool… for fun. Despite (or probably partially because) they all made fun of me for it.
“What are you reading, Kate?”
“Oh...just my book about German handwriting.”
“Let me see.” [looks at it] “Um...I would never read that. I would rather die”
After talking about the Family History Library, and how the women lucky enough to live in the vicinity (cough cough) really should go do some look-ups for this specific British genealogy problem Danny and I were working on back then, his oldest sister Ruth Ann said, “I would literally rather poke my eyes with a stick than do that.”
This increased my feeling of gratification by 1,000x when, a few months later, I won the ridiculous diet competition that I was pressured to join with these 8 women. Everybody else’s requested prize was something like money; I asked for 3 hours of their time in which to teach them how to do some family history. I shall claim this prize when we visit there at Thanksgiving in the end of November. Ruth Ann will definitely need to bring a stick with her.
I don’t naturally fit in with these people, but with conscious effort, I can be relatively happy. Of course, know also that the way these women show their love is through their teasing, and nobody is exempt. It’s a compliment that they tease me for my bookishness. In the end, of course I swam in the pool with everyone instead of devouring my glorious nonfiction book. Later, though, as we were loading the cars to leave, I somehow became engrossed in my first ever texting conversation about Czech nationalism with my friend Lukáš, and the contrast was palpable even to my mother in law. I was beaming.
“Who are you talking to?”
“oh, just my genealogy blogger friend. He says that Czech nationalism is a really interesting but complicated topic, that maybe people weren't as oppressed under the Habsburgs as we sometimes pretend they are… which I had never considered… but maybe it's because blah blah blah”
Her eyes glazed over as she stopped listening.
“How did you meet this guy?”
“oh just through blogging.”
Out of the sky.
Maybe if I work really hard I can trace the living descendants of my Czech ancestors who stayed in Moravia or something. Maybe I can fall into their metaphorical lap “from the sky” (ha! the “sky” that actually represents hundreds of hours of research spent in trying to find them). Maybe I can find another brain with whom I can share my genealogy musings, thoughts, wonderings…
I haven't heard from Roman in about a month. He's been busy. He says he's “lazy.” I have been wickedly hoping he breaks his ankle at badminton again, like he did when he found me in 2012, so that we can discuss the important pressing genealogical issues for our family. This desire is partly so that I can solve the puzzle, partly so that I don't feel like such a pariah, worthy of only one single good Czech genealogy friend with whom to discuss time machine envy, negative evidence, whether the letter is a capital H or not (and thus changes the meaning of the sentence), etc.
No, I simply refuse to accept this. It’s time to start searching through the wide, blue sky for some more geraniums to overwinter: friends with whom I can share my brain freely, and who in turn help mine to expand and bloom.
Update November 2018:
Two years later, I can attest to these facts:
Friending is still a struggle for me, and will probably continue to be for the rest of my life.
But it really can happen. People do exist in this world around whom I can be my mostly unfettered self.
But like, perhaps sometimes being a good friend means "fettering" yourself. And that's okay.
I really wanted to keep this blog upbeat, positive, non-melancholy, non-bitchy. The 2016 section of this post is not really any of those things, at least to me. When I reread what I wrote, I am flooded with memories of how I felt and who I was. It is so difficult to love one's past self.
I am choosing to be confident that there are people in the world who share my deep passion for somewhat eclectic things, who are interested in reading my thoughts and feelings, and who love me. This is a really difficult choice to make. I realize that my personal anxiety refuses to trust anything or anybody. But perhaps to really have the kind of friendships I really want, that's what is needed. Trust in people, that they won't let you down, that they don't implicitly hate you, etc. etc.
I think I can try out this trust, even if it is not my natural state of being, and even if parts of me would rather not. I am quite sure there is a version of myself called "Tragically Romantic Kate." She's pretty much a myopically stupid super-female drama queen who deeply enjoys writing awful poetry. Maybe I'll allow some of the poetry writing, but mostly I think she belongs in a nursery with all the other helpless crybabies.
PS
The 3 hours remain owed, but I've accepted that it's not going to happen, least of all how I imagined it.
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