I live at home

The last 18 months or so have not been easy. Things have happened in my life that I never thought would come to pass. Nicole, Jonathan, and I moved to Minoa in November 2009 after selling our house. Nicole was (still is) going to nursing school and needed to quit her full-time job. My independent contracting business had taken a major hit since my job sub-contracting for an IT services company had dried up when the main contract ran out. We were moving into a house with an in-law apartment. The plan was for us to move there so that we could help my parents, who had recently had to sell their condo. My father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease about 5 years ago and hadn't been able to work as much. The medication was screwing with his sleep cycle (and he'd already been in a decade long funk since my grandfather died that he refused to get help for, but that's a story for another time). It had the makings of a good plan. They buy the house (STAR exemptions keeping the property taxes significantly lower than if we'd bought it), we pay the mortgage. We take care of the lawn and shovel the driveway, my mom watches Jonathan after school. Everything works out. Unfortunately, my parents selected a house the needed a large amount of reconstruction done to the main portion of the house. They moved in July 2009 (moving them was a herculean task helped by an all-star team of Syracuse twitter folk and assorted friends whom I will never fully thank enough). Work began shortly after that but was going very slow due to them hiring an extremely nice and very capable builder who, by all accounts, did great work, but insisted on using a manual hammer instead of an automatic one and oh, got there at 10 and left at 4 and took an hour lunch. So work dragged on. And on. We sold our house and the time came for us to move and work was nowhere close to being finished. So we all, Nicole, Jonathan and myself, crammed into the second bedroom of the house. Jonathan slept on an air mattress wedged between our bed and the wall. A month later they ran out of money to pay the very nice builder and Nicole and I had a house with no walls. My brother came up from Pennsylvania and taught me to hang sheetrock. So I did, at night and on weekends. Sometimes it looked nice and sometimes it looked shitty but up it went. Friends came by when they could and helped. When I accidentally broke my wrist, my friend Matt came over to give us some much-needed help with putting down new floors. Nicole learned to spackle. I learned to install sinks.

 I was doing a lot of self-blaming. Reviewing the wrong choices I had made that left me in a position where this was my life.  I could've taken that crappy job that I turned down a while back. I could've done a lot of things. Instead, I'm hanging sheetrock on my weekends. Living in my parents back bedroom with my son on an air mattress. No space of his own. No space of our own. I'd find myself saying aloud "This is not the life I should be living." The stress eventually caused me to break out in shingles on my scalp.

This burden of helping my parents rests with me because my siblings have moved away and I am the one left in Syracuse. I didn't blame them, you grow up and get your own life going, that's what you do and I hadn't. I started resenting the city instead. The whole area, really. I wanted to flee. Just go. Fall through the earth and come out the other side. I'd see my friends on Facebook going places and envy them. Anywhere. I'd go anywhere. As far away as I could get from this was too close. Turns out I wasn't the only one with plans to leave.

Because apparently things in the house weren't tense enough, my mother announced in March of last year that she was leaving my father for a man from North Carolina she'd met on Facebook. I knew they'd been having problems for a while, but I'd figured that as long as my mom had decided to move from the condo she was going to stick it out. Again, I couldn't blame her, people have a right to seek their own happiness. Nicole could. She was ready to rip shit and was frustrated with me for my lack of anger at the situation. All I felt was anger at myself for allowing myself into this position. Curiously, strangely, excruciatingly, nothing much happened after my mom announced this. She continued to live with us. She didn't seem to have much a plan for how this was going to go. It wasn't until three months after the announcement that she moved to North Carolina with the man she'd met.

Right about that same time, I took a job working for a technology services company in Ithaca. I'd been looking for a full-time job for a while since contracting work had gotten scarce. It's a pretty long drive every day, but the money is good and it's steady. About that same time, we finished work on the house enough to move our stuff into it and finally have our own space. Which was extremely fortunate, because very soon after that the in-law apartment became infested with fleas. We eventually got rid of the fleas, only to be plagued with mice. My dad, as is the case with many bachelors, is not the best at keeping his space clean. Nicole and I had a plan though. After her graduation in May we would be moving to Ithaca. Again and again we'd tell ourselves, "Only x more months, we can do this." Who cares if it was just down the road a ways, it was somewhere that wasn't here, and that was all that mattered.

Nicole took a job late last year as a Healthcare Technician in the Medical ICU at SUNY Upstate. She's gained tons of experience above and beyond her nursing school clinicals, and the management there loves her. She looked for jobs at Cayuga Medical center and they were pretty thin. Overnights mostly. Housing in Ithaca wasn't looking much better. $1500/Month for anything livable. We made a few exploratory trips down there to look at apartments. Nothing within a half-hour was affordable. I'd get a dozen emails every day for places she'd seen on Craigslist that she wanted me to look at. Everything was either too small, too gross, too expensive, or too far.

In late summer I would bring Jonathan with me on my way to work and he would stay at my friend Lisa's house in Cortland where her oldest son would watch him during the day. On the way home he would always yell "It's Syracuse!" when we crested the hill before the Onondaga Nation exit. One night last month on my way home I came over that hill and saw the city. I did every day, but that day it looked different. I heard him in my head and I knew I was looking at my home. The MONY towers. The Civic Center. The Dome. They're my MONY towers. My Civic Center. My Dome. I talked to Nicole that night and we decided we're going to stay in Syracuse. We like the school Jonathan goes to and we have a lot of great new friends we've made in the area through twitter. She's been hired as an RN at SUNY Upstate as soon as she passes her boards. As for me, I'm going to keep working in Ithaca for the time being. Things aren't perfect, my dad is still a slob, though we have vanquished the mice with a combination of a psychotic cat and D-Con. I'm not saying we're going to live in Syracuse forever, but we're not running away from anything anymore. We're going towards something. I don't think we know what exactly, but it will be of our choosing. In the meantime, everyday I crest that hill and I know I'm finally home.