Freedom & Responsibility: The Best and Worst Year of My Life

In philosophy, there is a well known concept stating that true freedom requires a degree of responsibility.  It’s a paradox, that in order to enjoy the things life has to offer, one must take on duty to cultivate that liberty.  The more freedom a person wishes to enjoy, the more responsibility they must take, with these two qualities sharing a positive correlation.

For example, in order to explore the world and vacation with minimal care or burden, one must be in a comfortable financial position, a status usually obtained via hard work and fiscal responsibility.  By doing the dirty work, there comes reward.

The inescapable balance of Freedom and Responsibility.

This year, I was gifted an exponential increase in my freedom and rewards, and learned quickly that the cost of responsibility is no joke.

For one, my husband and I welcomed the most precious being into the world at the very end of 2023.  This was the most rewarding responsibility a person could have in life.  Having a child brought on a new level of stress and selflessness, but also grew our abilities to love, and we have been granted the miraculous opportunity to raise a human being.  There may be no greater responsibility, but with it we’ve experienced a privilege too sizable to measure.

Around the same time, we became homeowners.  This was an accomplishment we had both worked towards for years, exercising the utmost frugality-- and, quite honestly, busting our asses-- to achieve.  Through college I cranked out sixty-hour work weeks in food service, interned another twenty hours in my field of study, and managed to pass five classes a semester, all with the goal of homeownership on the horizon.

I don’t think we were quite mentally prepared for the continuation of responsibility once we closed on our house, that the financial burden doesn’t end once the papers are signed and our names are inscribed on the deed.

Don’t get me wrong, owning a house is a privilege that nowadays, not most can accomplish in their early twenties (and some folks never can).  With this newfound responsibility, we have fostered a level of freedom unrivaled by renting.

By embarking on these incredibly rewarding life journeys, though, we were met with so much responsibility.  This is why I often describe this year as being both the best and yet undeniably the worst year of my life.  I have more things to love than ever before, which paradoxically means I have more to lose than ever before.

My husband and I, anticipating the arrival of our baby and counting the days until we closed on our first home.

There isn’t much of a purpose to this post; rather, I’m using this as an opportunity to rant about the hectic year I have had.  I acknowledge that countless others have it much, much worse than I do, but my family certainly struck some bad luck since last December.  Sometimes I want to scream about the unfairness of this all into the void.

For my purposes, this blog post is me screaming, and the internet is the void.  Enjoy!

This has been the best year of my life for many reasons.

This has simultaneously been, hands-down, the worst year of my life, for many other reasons (and sometimes, for the same reasons).

In both the high moments and in the low ones, I was expecting to have friends to share it with.  I did not.  From the time my child came into this world until now, my circle of friends have all but dissolved out of my life completely.  I have not had people to turn to for emotional support during the lows, and I have not had people to celebrate with during the highs, unless I count my mother and my husband.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have connected with one newer friend, who is at a similar stage so she understands some of my current affairs.  Sometimes, though, old friends are just different in that we grew up together.  The relationship never felt superficial or surface level.  We really knew each other.

In the last year, I brought my son into the world, an ever-growing light in my life for whom my heart has enlarged a thousand times what I thought possible.  My husband and I have made a number of renovations to our home and I am realizing my lifelong dream of homeownership.  We celebrated two years of marriage, both of which have been filled with (mostly) harmony and friendship and teamwork.  I was promoted at work and my new supervisor has been an empowering advocate for me and my career, which feels more right than ever.

Here’s the rest of the story:

In the last year, I suffered one of the most physically demanding and draining things a human being could do: childbirth.  When I got home from the hospital, I cried every single day for weeks on end because the pain was so intense, and I wondered if I would ever feel normal and human again.  I could barely drag myself out of bed.  I could not drive; I could not sit; I could not cook a meal for myself.

At the same time, I was responsible for keeping a fragile, needy, and unpredictable little person alive, with absolutely no freaking clue what I was doing.  After fifty hours of labor (and no sleep) I was not even rewarded with a solid eight hours to recover.  As each day waned and the sun went down, my husband and I would have to mentally prepare ourselves for the struggle that became the night.  Every couple hours (sometimes minutes) we’d be up rocking the baby, singing lullabies to the baby, walking him around the house, and worst of all… feeding him.

Each time was a struggle, me fighting the little guy to accept my poor, deflated boobs.  Sometimes he would scream and cry so hysterically that he just wouldn’t even notice I was trying to offer him food to soothe him.  After a couple hours my boobs would fill up with so much milk they’d feel like giant rocks hanging off my chest, leaking everywhere and intensely painful.  And, our child would still be screaming himself blue in the face because he was starving.

After so many sleepless nights I started pumping exclusively, no longer offering the baby milk directly from the tap.  Pumping helped the nights go smoother, and my husband could help more.  I felt disappointed because I did all the work to make the milk, pumping every two hours all day and all night, for months-- but while I was doing that, my husband was feeding the baby from a bottle, and I missed out on the opportunity to bond with my son.  I felt like a machine, my body wrecked and struggling to heal, providing everything to keep a newborn alive, its only purpose now.

The perfect tableau:

Sleep-deprived Dad with a two-week old baby, several dirty bottles on the nightstand, still in bed in the middle of the day.

At this stage, despite my physical exhaustion, I felt starved for human interaction.  Boredom had done a number on me and I felt so lonely, like I was living a completely different life in a bubble that others rarely felt inclined to check in on.

Even my parents were no longer a resource where I could find support and solace.  Just a month after my son’s birth, they gathered us all in a room and informed us that they were separating and ending their marriage.  None of us were surprised, in fact in a way it felt like a relief.  For so long, I’d wondered when they were going to finally drop the news.  I often felt that I had some responsibility to “save” my parents from themselves, helplessly attempting to guide them back to one another, but to no avail.

Even in my relief, I was met with new feelings: Hopelessness for my own relationship with my own spouse, fear that I’d end up just like my mom and dad.  A realization that the idols I once looked up to were perhaps not even capable of loving and forgiving and healing.  Their flaws were out on the table now, and with no distractions I had nowhere else to look.

I watched my sibling withdraw and grieve in his own way, coping with excessive weed and alcohol.  He began to struggle with truancy at school, and questions of his ability to graduate started spilling out.  In the turmoil of my parents’ drama, they found themselves so engulfed in themselves that they neglected to pay mind to my brother, until I stepped in and told them it was negligent to ignore any longer.

It was a few months later when I’d find myself clammy and shaking and lightheaded throughout the day.  I had to snack constantly to keep myself from going unconscious when I finally decided to go to the doctor to have my glucose levels checked.  

Ninety-nine percent of women with Gestational Diabetes recover immediately after delivering their placenta.  My doctors assured me that the test was overkill and that a person like me-- young, skinny, and otherwise low-risk-- would be completely fine.  When I got my test results confirming my diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes, my life felt over.

I cried, and cried, and cried.  I obsessed over the idea that my life expectancy was now shorter, that I will be living with this condition until the day I am dead and that not a day will go by that I don’t have to think about my blood sugar and how every decision I make affects it.  I shuddered at the thought of needles and finger pricks and blood draws every three months forever.  To this day I live in fear of expanding my family like I so truly want to, knowing that any future pregnancies I carry will bear the weight of being high risk for complications, insulin dependence, birth defects, and stillbirth.  I question that if my first, supposedly low-risk pregnancy could alter my health in such a drastic way, what could a second pregnancy do to me?

The entire experience was traumatic.  While my husband has been a support, he lacks empathy regarding my health and cannot seem to acknowledge the severity of its implications.  Everything about it has felt so incredibly unfair, and I have been isolated in its wake as I navigate how to manage my diabetes both mentally and physically.

Before I could even recover from the news of my health problems, my whole life was shaken by the tornado that hit my house on June 26th.  If I thought diabetes was traumatic, the universe had plans to show me that things can be much, much worse.

At around 11:30 PM after an entirely normal day, I was woken abruptly from my sleep by what sounded like a mac truck driving straight through my house.  The sound of the severe weather alert on our phones alarmed through the halls.  My husband woke me by shoving me away from the bed, and before I was even fully awake I knew exactly what was going on.

I scrambled out of bed with fear coursing through my body, and I wondered if this was the moment I was going to die.  The tree, its trunk about three feet in diameter, plummeted towards our bedroom, our bed’s headboard in its direct path.  In a matter of seconds I had sprung from my sleep and towards the hallway, and in my disorientation fell face-first on the ground.  My teeth broke my fall on the hardwood, and I knelt there, screaming, holding chunks of bloodied teeth in my palms.

When I collected myself enough to stand, I caught a glimpse of the window.  The wind howled in a way that made the whole house quake and shudder.  Raindrops were falling upside-down, carried towards the sky by the intense swirling winds.  Through alien-like flashes of green lightning, I could make out the eerie silhouette of humongous tree limbs encasing our house, pressed right up against the window just mere inches away from where our heads were just laying.

By some miracle, our six-month-old’s room was untouched and he slept through the entire ordeal.  My husband was busy collecting him while I wracked my brain trying to figure out next steps in our isolation:  Call 9-1-1?  Trees were down all over the neighborhood as the tornado ripped through our town.  Would they even come?

Should I go to the ER?  Blood still poured from my gums and while adrenaline kept me from feeling much pain, I knew my nerves were exposed and could only guess how bad it would be hurting soon.  The best I could do in that moment was call my mom and beg for help, reduced to a hysterical and helpless child, paralyzed with fear.

We slept at my parents’ house that night, and when we returned to our home the daylight exposed the true carnage that became our backyard.  Dozens of trees spanning the whole property (and surrounding neighbors) had snapped like toothpicks, their trunks crushing everything in their paths.  

The yard was unrecognizable, littered with branches and debris.  Craters were punctured into the earth where huge limbs had fallen, leaving the terrain unfit for foot traffic.  Our fence was mangled under tree trunks, the yard rendered a jungle, unrecognizable even to its owners.  

Even worse was our house, which we’d had the pleasure of owning for only six months at the time.  The tree had completely uprooted, its massive roots unearthing the surrounding land and actually upheaving the neighbor’s entire shed.  It looked even bigger now, on its side, engulfing our home.  Its branches enshrouded the house like a hand with twisted fingers, crushing themselves into the roof and siding.  I was bewildered at just how much surface area the tree covered, wrapping around the western side of the house and stretching all the way over to our son’s bedroom window near the garage on the eastern side, and touching everything in between.

Our house encased by the huge oak, post-tornado.

Below it our patio fence and furniture lay utterly demolished.  When the tree crew came to remove everything a few days later, they brought equipment that then demolished our entire front yard, too.  I stood and watched, powerless, while their crane smushed our Rose of Sharon bush we had planted in my Great Granny’s honor.  Prior to us, she had owned the house since 1956 when it was built.  The heart of my home felt dead.

We lived at my Grampa’s house for a few weeks, confined to one bedroom, and with little to no kitchen access.  Not that it mattered-- my teeth were in terrible shape, and our dentist had such a tight schedule that it was days before I could even be seen.  He confirmed my left tooth had fractured all the way up into my jaw bone, and was going necrotic.  My right tooth was semi-salvageable, but not without undergoing two root canals.

The left tooth ended up being extracted by an oral surgeon, and without any sedatives the experience was nothing short of traumatic.  I felt no pain but was fully conscious as I could hear and feel my tooth cracking under the pressure of the surgeon twisting it from my jaw.  Once it was finally out, they screwed an implant into my bone and I was instructed to wait out the healing process.  I’d be spending the next six months toothless, and it only cost me a few thousand dollars (not covered by insurance, of course!)

Just a few days after my root canal and tooth extraction, adjusting to my new smile, which I’d have for the next six months.

In the days following, we tried to make the best of our situation.  We pushed forward, meeting with structural engineers, insurance adjusters, and building inspectors.  The town inspector condemned our house, stating it was unfit for occupancy since the tree had penetrated the structure.  He told us that had the tree fallen at just a slightly different angle, it likely would have come straight through the house’s framing, crushing my husband and I to death in our bed.  I was pissed at the unfairness of everything, but for a fleeting moment I felt lucky.

Our insurance company refused to cooperate, and insisted on cutting corners with repairs to our home.  I hired a public adjuster to help advocate for us, which was expensive and lengthened the process a lot.  There were a lot of tears shed over the lack of empathy from our insurance company, who knew of the ordeal we had gone through but stopped at nothing to make our lives just a little bit more difficult.

Then, just five or six days post-tornado, my husband got the jarring news that he was being laid off from work due to company-wide budget cuts.  What a gut-punch.  We now had a mortgage, almost $100K in damages to our house, and a six-month-old with less than half an income.  We prepared to lose our health insurance, which was the only thing covering my new onset diabetes, our son’s physical therapy and check-ups, and now, my teeth.

For a month, my husband’s new job became searching for more work.  We tried so hard to hold it all together, but there comes a point where a person just cannot function anymore.  I was at that point. 

I want to stop and say I’m forever grateful for the people in our lives that stepped up and supported us at that time.  One new friend babysat my son regularly, so that my husband could attend job interviews while I continued to work my job.  My grandfather opening his home to us was a blessing we could not have gone without, though we knew that due to our tight-knit family, we’d never be without a couch to crash on if we needed it.

Friends old and new came out of the woodworks to reach out and ask if we were okay, some of them people I hadn’t seen in years.  It was nice to just know that people were thinking of us.

The weeks became months.  Our insurance put us up in temporary housing near the beach.  Our house was small, smaller than our first apartment together, but it worked.  The neighbors were all freaks, proudly displaying their radical political flags for the world to see.  Some creepy people lived around us, and we were pretty sure the neighbors across the street were doing illegal stuff.  We were too scared to play with our son in the yard or go for walks, so we lived like recluses, sheltered in the house.  As soon as each workday was over, I couldn’t wait to hit the road and hang out literally anywhere else, so we spent a lot of time at Target just walking around.

Our insane temporary neighbor’s political display. Often, he would sit outside for hours and hours on end wearing a Trump mask, staring at cars passing by. He (amongst others) made us feel extremely uncomfortable spending time outside.

We didn’t see much of anyone for those five months we lived on the other side of the state.  The entire time we were there, we had three visitors:  My sister, once.  My husband’s brother and his girlfriend, once.  My cousin, once.

On weekends we’d make a lengthy hour-long commute back to our home county to visit my family or my husband’s parents.  Once or twice we actually got to see friends.

Right before we were finally able to come home, I felt like things were looking up.  Saying I was excited was such an understatement.  We’d commute to our hometown every single day after work just to come look at the house, often unable to even step foot inside due to the repairs being done.  We were so close to home that I could practically taste it.  Despite delays with construction, it was looking like we’d be back home in time for the baby’first birthday.

As we packed our belongings and cleaned the rental house for the next tenants, I received a call from my mother.  She was oddly not panicked, eerily nonchalant even.  My mind raced as she went over my dad’s symptoms, putting my old health anxiety to good use for once.

I’d known for over a month that he was struggling with breathing.  His lung capacity just seemed diminished, and a man that once ran miles at a time and worked out daily could no longer handle a flight of stairs without finding himself breathless.

I encouraged him to go back to the doctor, who kept pushing it off and settling him by saying “welcome to your 50’s!”  But based on a quick Google search, this sudden onset breathlessness seemed like something more serious than typical middle-aged-man stuff.

Heeding my advice, he went back for X-rays and scans of his lungs.  By the time my mother called me, his leg had swollen to the point he couldn’t walk, and I knew precisely what was going on, deep-vein thrombosis, a blood clot in his leg.

To make matters worse, his doctor had just informed them of the results of his scan, noting there were small clots scattered all throughout his lungs.  He was having a sub-acute pulmonary embolism, or clotting preventing oxygen from reaching his lungs.  Had he gone longer without treatment, he could have died.

Most people diagnosed with this problem are admitted to the hospital immediately, put on IV drips of blood thinners and clot-buster medications.  I panicked over the fact that my parents were so unconcerned, and then was met with fear that this clotting problem could be genetic, wondering what the implications were for me, my siblings, and my son. 

It dawned on me later that over the Summer, my father suffered from a COVID infection, which is roughly when his breathing issue popped up.  I had also contracted COVID at the same time, and to this day about five months later, have faced new onset chronic fatigue, brain fog, headaches, and dizziness.  Blood clots can also be a side effect of COVID, and I suspect it has something to do with my family’s misfortune.

For weeks I lived in fear every day that the next call I’d receive from my mom would be about my dad, either hospitalized or dead or dying.  I often found myself the only family member taking it seriously, putting some responsibility on myself to hold him accountable to making healthy choices and seeking medical care when necessary.  

This burden was intense, and I had nowhere to turn as an outlet.  I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because they were the problem.  When I talked to my husband about it, he was so stressed about our own living situation that he was unable to provide me the level of support I was seeking.  All I could do was drown in my own thoughts about everything, and hope that he’d just get better so I could breathe again, too.

A week before our son’s birthday party, we moved back home.  My husband started a new job a couple months prior, and was doing well at work, even going on a business trip to meet his coworkers.  Our son was almost a whole year old, now climbing on furniture, babbling away, and chasing the poor cats around the house-- an entirely different baby than the one we left with in June.  That was bittersweet.

Nightmares still came of branches impaling us while we slept, or tree trunks pressing down and holding us captive in bed till we ran out of oxygen.  Each time a weather alert sounded on our phone, or thunder clapped or the wind howled, my husband and I would meet halfway down the hall to just hug.  No words needed to be said.

My father’s blood-thinners seemed to do the trick, as his breathing improved and the swelling in his leg returned to normal.  My brother started seeing a psychiatrist and began dosing with antidepressants until he could somewhat function again.  

We’re settled back into our house, which we appreciate more than ever.  Our master bedroom and the office are freshly painted, and all of our hardwood floors were stained and refinished after the water damage they saw.  I finished doing my DIY remodel of the kitchen, and the exterior of the house has gotten a facelift with a new paint job, landscaping, and a beautiful new roof.

Life is settling.

While I was met with some serious misfortune this year, I’ve found solace in telling myself that I am not a victim of unfairness.  Tragic things happen to all kinds of people, all the time.  Everything is arbitrary; the universe is not seeking out victims for its crimes.  I didn’t deserve any of this, but I didn’t not deserve it either. Things just happen.

So now I go back to the correlation between freedom and responsibility.  Having a child, becoming a homeowner, having a tight-knit family, and enjoying the benefits of being promoted at work-- these are all wonderful things that offer bountiful rewards.  On the other hand, they also induce stress, financial burden, and increased liability.

Our son’s first birthday party, a celebration of his growth, our 365 days of parenthood, and the end of our family’s displacement.

While I wish I could say that the hard parts are over, I know this is naive.  The hard parts are never over, truly.  Not unless we shed our burdens (simultaneously shedding our freedom and our love for those around us).

Instead, I will simply enjoy this lull that the universe has given me, while it lasts.

Just kidding.  It never lasts.  My main sewer line has a blockage and greywater is backing up into my basement. :)