This is a barebones retelling of my mom and grandmother’s journey. I’m having an existential crisis and have been feeling a lot of anxiety. I am struggling to take care of myself and as I’m applying for jobs, I am hoping that I find something that sparks joy in me. I like writing and creating and interacting with people. But I am so so so scared of change and this does makes me feel so helpless. But learned helplessness doesn’t benefit me in any way and I know I need to keep going.

I still hear my blood rushing in my ears all of the time. I didn’t realize the side-effects of my medication would be so bad again. Shaking, more sweating, vivid dreams, headaches……. But I also need to take better care of myself and know that it’s okay to be struggling. I realize that I only reach out for help when I can’t take it anymore and this leads to breaking down relationships and leads to more stress for me. I feel like I have to have it all together and feel so ashamed when I don’t. Anyways, here is an imperfect account. I just wanted to get this out there. I’ll go back and edit it later, but this has been in my drafts for too long. I feel so overwhelmed.

My great-grandmother immigrated from Hamburg, Germany in 1909. She landed in December in NY. When she was on the boat to the US, she met an older man and somehow he convinced her to come work for him on his farm in Nebraska. She married his son the next February and almost exactly nine months later, she had her first child in 1910. My grandma was raised with seven other siblings, although one of her siblings died when they were still a toddler. They all were raised in Nebraska. Somewhere along the line, my grandmother moved to the West Coast after high school.

My grandma didn’t like to talk about her past much, so a lot of what my mom told me is choppy. She was born in 1917 and married my grandfather (who was from Idaho) in 1941. Many of her siblings also ended up on the West Coast. She was a waitress for all of her life. Her husband was an alcoholic and abusive. When she was 36, she adopted my mom and eventually divorced her husband in 1969. He later died in 1976.

My mom was adopted in Washington state by my grandmother when she was only 5 weeks old. She was born prematurely and was only 3 pounds. Once she was 5 pounds, my grandmother took her home. All of her life, she grew up in the same house.

She graduated high school a year early. She went to Bible school in a city, but after a year she realized that she had to go back to high school and finish up 1 credit. She took a needlecraft course and because they didn’t have enough students for what was supposed to be a 2 hour daily class, they dropped it to a 1.5 hour a day for six weeks during the summer. She went back to Bible school. but dropped out after five quarters. She only had one more quarter before she could have graduated, but decided that she wasn’t taking advantage of the opportunity to justify what she was paying.

After she came home from Bible school she got a job at an insurance company in 1973. She saved up money and was able to buy a car. She filed cards, stuffed envelopes, worked in HR and was a receptionist while she was there.

In May of 1975, she visited her old Bible school roommate for a week in Moorhead, Minnesota. However, the friend’s roommate suddenly decided that she wasn’t going to renew her lease for the next year. From May to August, my mom worked at the insurance company and then decided to go back and live with her old friend. She stayed in MN for less than a year working in the library while her friend was finishing up the semester. In March of 1976, her dad died. She flew home for the funeral and stayed another month in MN before coming back home.

In May of 1976, she got a job at a Bible Bookstore for the summer. She was offered a fulltime position, but she declined and went to a school in Seattle to become a teacher. Her major was English and she became certified to teach K-12. While she was there, she worked at the registrar’s during the schoolyear and summers. That’s where she first became interested in computers. Once my mom went to college, her room and board were more than grandma’s yearly salary. She relied on grants, scholarships and loans. Because she was

She graduated in 3 years, in the June of 1979. When my mom was teaching, my grandmother retired in the 1980s. She stayed at the college to work and then moved back home in the fall. She got a teaching job that Fall. She was offered a position on Friday and had to show up the next Tuesday. Her original commitment was changed over the weekend because another teacher had quit. She had to teach Sophomore fundamental English and Junior English and then yearbook.

The second year she taught she moved out during Spring break. In 1989, after 10 years she decided she couldn’t handle teaching anymore. It was too stressful and she couldn’t figure out the right work-life balance. This is when she started working as a temp for an accounting and an engineering firm doing word processing. She saw how long it took to create documents manually and created a template that automated Word Perfect files. She learned to program and got better at Excel and Office applications. The engineering company hired her after a year and she worked in IT.

By 1992, she had been trying to get her own business started. She told them that she had enough outside clients that she couldn’t keep working with them anymore. She was a freelance Word and Excel programmer.

I was adopted in 2000. Kelsey was adopted in 2001. In 2004, the engineering company hired her back again fulltime. Once my grandma’s partner died in 2004, my grandma moved in with us right before I started Kindergarten. In 2006 we moved to a new city and my mom put a payment down on a house. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and went through a double mastectomy. She went back to work after 6 weeks, but then when the recession hit she was laid off in November of 2009.

She went back to school at a technical college in spring, after she spent months looking for jobs and going to the unemployment office. We were living on unemployment and the government was offering tuition remission because she was learning a new skill. She got a degree in .net programming. During this time we lost our house in 2013. We stayed in a rental.

She got a job working for another company for a few years. She commuted for over an hour from our old city, but then in August of 2013 we moved to our current city.

In the summer of 2016, when she was 62, she did a DNA test and found her biological family. There was a lot of drama here and she is still learning more about her bio family. I’ll write about this later.