Doing well

It has become second nature when I see someone I know to say, "Hi, how are you?" And it has also become second nature for me to answer, "I'm doing well, thanks" when I hear that question asked of me, even if I know it was asked in a passive moment with no meaningful conversation coming behind it.

Truth is, lately, I don't feel like I'm "doing well." Seems like I don't really know what the hell I'm doing in any aspect of my life. 

When I was a kid growing up, my dad worked for IBM and my mom was a stay at home mom. She was responsible for dinner each night, my dad cleaned up and took out the trash. He mowed the lawn while she did laundry. My parents, my sister and I ate dinner together almost every night. We had a certain "Leave it to Beaver" quality about us. There were practices and rehearsals and after school things to go to, and my parents took a few nights a month to do their own activities (I remember they used to go square dancing together), but my life as a teen seemed to have been much more cut and dry than the current lives of my children. My kids don't have any aspect of similarity to that memory of mine. My oldest might remember family dinners with his dad, if he tries really hard, but the other two have basically lived life from a split family. We do have family dinners at my house, but it's usually quite a bit more chaotic than what I recall. The kids have more chores and responsibilities than I used to (which is very possibly a good thing), and I've always worked outside of the home, leaving the three of them to bounce around after school and during the summer between their dad's and grandmother's houses. The past few years, my oldest has been in charge as the three of them stay at home by themselves. My memories are not bad or wrong, and neither are my kids'. They are just entirely different scenarios.

For the second time in my adult life, I find myself without a job. Which scares me. And I do my absolute damnedest not to portray that fear to my kids. I reassure them (and myself) that something will come up, we'll be ok and everything is just fine. This is something that was intrinsically known during my childhood, because my dad had a steady job at IBM for over 30 years, not something that had to be reiterated to me and my sister by my parents. Of course everything is fine. My dad works and my mom takes care of the house. Why would anyone have anything different than that?

I get that the world is a much different place now than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Of my children's friends, I can count on one hand those whose parents are not divorced. And nowadays both parents working (or the single parent, whatever the case may be) is, I think, a bit more common. Kids are picked at up bus stops directly in front of their house, with the bus stopping multiple times on one street, instead of a mass of school-goers being picked up on the corner around the block. My kids have no idea who the Cleaver family is or what their perfect little TV life was like. And I get that, and all that is ok.

I guess the part that frightens me is how my kids will remember their childhood, and me. They've seen me cry out of anger, sadness and despair. They've watched me fight with their dad, occasionally on an escalated scale. They've seen me belittled and know that someone else doesn't like me or wasn't somehow satisfied with me or something I did. My parents were not perfect, and I don't expect my kids to have this glowing image in their head that I'm the end all be all of human perfection. That would be terrifying because it is so not true. I don't remember my parents ever struggling. Maybe they did and were just able to hide it from me. I hope my kids remember that I worked hard and love them no matter what and am resilient. I hope that they forget the battles and demons that they've seen me struggle with.

My son recently made a comment to me about why I ask everyone how they are doing when we pass on the street. I said something along the lines of it's the polite thing to do, social graces, it's just a nice gesture. But he got me thinking. I'm certainly not going to bore every person who asks how I am with my day to day problems. But maybe I don't need to pretend that everything is rainbows and butterflies either. Overall, yeah, I'm fine, good, well, ok ... whatever mediocre positive word you want to fill into that blank, that probably sums me up in a nutshell on my bad days. To the average passing Joe, maybe "doing well" is an acceptable answer. I mean, the people who need to know are the ones who do know the more intimate details of how I'm feeling at that particular moment. "Doing well" is a very relative term, whose meaning could dramatically change in an instant. I guess when someone asks how you're doing while passing on the street they probably don't really want the whole story anyway. Generally, they are probably just being polite. To get the real answer to how someone is doing, call them up and ask them to have a beer with you. That's where the true discussions are.