The other day I was helping a customer when I asked her about her last name, a short, one-syllable name I'd never seen before. She told me it was German. "I was married twice," she said. "This was my second husband's name."
After a meaningful pause, she went on. "They both died."
She told me she had known her second husband for ten years but that they'd only been married three when he died. I could see in her eyes the wound was still tender. "We were only married for that brief period, but I have a lot of wonderful memories from that period. We got to travel a lot together." She looked at me. "I'm very lucky to have fallen in love again. I'm grateful for the time we had."
With that, she left. And in that moment I felt all of the stress of my day melt away to be replaced by a warm and secure and absolute feeling that everything would be all right. That it always is, somehow.
For this woman, probably one of her worst nightmares came true. Twice. The death of a spouse is probably something a lot of married people worry about. They wonder if they will have the strength to deal with it if it should happen. I'll never know how that woman coped with those deaths at the time or how long it took her to be able to have casual conversations about them with bank employees, but what's clear is that she has emerged with gratitude.
To me it seems at once the most difficult thing to do--to let go of attachment--and the simplest. Having had the experience of losing or having stolen from me significant material possessions, I was surprised to find myself, in the wake of the losses, not crestfallen but instead with a strange sense of relief. It was the relief of the burden of having to safeguard the thing in the first place.
People are, of course, infinitely more valuable than possessions. It seems a different thing entirely to lose a person, or to lose one's own life. And yet I love the idea of being ultimately able to handle that loss in the way this customer did.
About love, about this whole experience of living, I hope I can hold her message close to my heart: I'm grateful for the time I had.
I've written a bit about my job here before, and I think mostly it was to say little things about how it doesn't exactly inspire me. I'm not sure my job would inspire anybody, as it's tough to see room for that in it. I'm a bank teller. My job is to process transactions and--though there are slight variations in the contexts and applications--I basically either receive or distribute money in cash or check form, all day, customer after customer.
I had no reservations about taking the job when I did. I guess Monkey was so young and I was so thrilled to be a new Mom that I didn't really care what I was doing during the time I was away from him. I just wanted to get there and get it done and get back home as quickly as possible.
And the job was a great opportunity. I was looking for something that would provide health care for myself and my dependent, even working part-time hours. The banking industry seems to be one of few where this coverage is offered without the employee first having to be employed for at least a year. Also, in working at a bank I was guaranteed to have evenings and Sundays off. It was a good fit.
And I think I was also fine with the less-than-thrilling, far-out-of-my-area-of-interest job--not that I don't like money, but I never dreamed of cash handling as a career (Ok, that's not exactly true. When I was young I thought cash handling jobs like cashiering were incredibly glamorous and appealing, but that was when I was 8 or so.)--because I thought of it as a temporary thing to get us through a short-term period of our lives, my family and me.
When it became clear to me that this job was a good idea to hang onto for the time being, not only because it's great to have a job, and a benefited one at that, I started to think more seriously and critically about it. It was like a dream in which you suddenly become aware of some embarrassing condition you have or are in and are all-at-once frantic about correcting it. I've pledged on this blog to find a new job ASAP, and I've been very hard on myself in my own mind for still--8 years after graduating from college--not having found a satisfying career in my field of interest and education.
Then today happened.
Today's New Activity: Finding True Appreciation for My Job
On the most basic level, I have always had appreciation for my job. I see dozens of unemployment checks every week (though significantly fewer, I must say, in my new location. Though it's just a few miles down the road from the former one, the demographic is dramatically different), and I was grateful to have a paycheck and the medical benefits I've mentioned.
But lately I've gone nearly crazy trying to ward off boredom at the slowish branch where I now work. I've felt that my brain was melting from such long periods of inactivity (and ok, I'm not saying you don't have to use your brain to be a bank teller. But while I can say you have to be a lot of things to do the job--you have to be patient, you have to listen and respond well, you have to have an incredible eye for detail (my Achilles heel for a while there), and you have to be able to stand all damned day--you don't really have to do much critical thinking or problem solving. The rules are very much set and you are to follow them. That's it). I have asked myself, 'What am I doing here?! This is not challenging. This is not fulfilling!' I've been ashamed that at my age and with my education, I'm not doing more with my career.
But today a little light was thrown into the dark cavern of my thoughts on the subject. In the early afternoon, an elderly couple I knew from my former branch dropped in to make a payment. The couple is super fun because the man always gives the tellers a hard time and they both have cute, playful senses of humor. I found I was genuinely happy to see them, and made that much more so when they told me they'd come to the branch just to see me.
While I try hard to always be polite and even make connections with customers when I'm not tired of talking for the day, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that these people would go out of their way to say hi. When they were leaving, the husband said, "See dear, now we've made her day. Watch, now she's gonna be smiling for the rest of the day just because she saw us."
And he was right.
Pretty shortly after they left, I went to lunch at the nearby Costco (talk about glamorous!), where I recognized the man checking memberships at the door as a customer at my current branch. He smiled the nicest smile and said, "Hey, it's the friendly teller!"
I am telling you that these two pretty small (in the grand scheme) events really did make my day and give me a whole new outlook on my job.
I've sort of always thought of mine as a thankless job. But it's not true. People thank me all day long. Many people are disproportionately appreciative of the relatively easy work I do to assist them. It was me who was not appreciating the fact that having somebody do this job with a smile does make a difference for people. And I do believe that you get back what you put out there. Every single time I've caught myself thinking customers were in a bad moods on any given day, I've come to realize that it was actually me projecting the rotten vibe--they were just reflecting it.
Today I resolved anew that I would keep gratitude in my heart for my employment, and strive to work such that any customer would be happy--not disappointed or even ambivalent--about seeing me out of the confines of my teller station, and me them.
As cornball as it is to say, I truly am striving to adopt the stance that if I'm going to be a bank teller, I'm going to be the best darned bank teller I can be. (I feel like that sentence deserves a "dangnabbit" in there somewhere.)
I don't know if that attitude will necessarily guarantee the long hours pass more pleasantly, but I believe it will, and it's worth a try.
I don't know about any of you married folks, but when I got married, the part of my brain that instinctively generated flirtatious behavior (or whatever organ is responsible for kicking this instinct into gear...use your imagination) shut down completely. I still flirted with my husband, but the kind of flirty exchanges that used to happen between me and customers or co-workers came to a screeching halt. Actually, that happened before I even got married...just as soon as I was exclusively committed.
I was happy about that. I didn't want to be getting into any sticky situations, and I certainly never wanted to do anything to make my husband feel uncomfortable or disrespected. For the record, I think a lot of (healthy) marriages allow for some, even a good degree of flirting. It can even be good for a marriage. The key is knowing the limits of what works for you and your partner and respecting those limits. I was well aware of my own.
While I was happy about being able to feel strong and committed to my marriage, I did--at times--wonder if a part of me had died a little. I like flirting. Who doesn't? And to feel that what was once a significant part of my personality had disappeared completely was kind of odd. I think I must have given off a different pheromone entirely--or maybe it was just the presence of my wedding band--because all activity in the stranger/customer flirt department ceased, even outside of my own initiation. Despite the odd feeling, however, I mostly considered it a good development.
Stranger, though, has been observing how this part of me has just now begun to reawaken, 8 months into separation, 4 months into divorce. As you may imagine, I meet and talk to a lot of people working at a bank. And I've only recently started even hinting at any kind of response to men who are giving off a vibe.
Being totally honest with myself, I suppose I can say I'm more than a little bit scared of men at the moment. I'm not physically scared of them (though having a young son, I do feel *especially* cautious about whom I would welcome even a little ways into my life right now). It's just so fresh for me still...the idea of being with anybody other than the man I'd thought I'd be spending my life with. It's not nostalgia for him, or for my marriage...it's not even the hurt about that--I recognize that getting divorced is the best possible thing I could have done for my life and that of my son. It's just, oh god, getting to know somebody new? The idea of intimacy in every sense of the word, with someone new? Sometimes it feels like something I could go for at any moment. And sometimes it feels like it'll be months before I'm ready to go down that road, if then.
And yet I must have been giving off some kind of quasi-readiness/flirtatious vibe, because after I'd helped a customer today, he called the branch and asked for me, then thanked me for my assistance and offered to "take me to lunch on a purely professional level, just to thank me for my great service." That's a different approach. I told my Mom about this and she said, "jeez, just imagine if you help him again. Maybe he'll offer to take you on a cruise." Haha.
As you might have guessed based on what I've said, this is the first time I've been asked out since I separated from my husband last June. In the past, I might have gone along with that "purely professional" pretense and responded accordingly ("Oh sure, customers take me out to lunch ALL THE TIME to thank me for clicking a few buttons on my keyboard, despite the fact that I'm paid to do so. Why don't I pencil you in, next Saturday, say?") But one truly good thing that has come from my marriage is my finally learning the lesson that dishonesty, even in the form of lies of omission, or going along with pretenses, gets a person into a lot of trouble. Sometimes it takes a long time for that trouble to materialize, but it will eventually. Honesty is, finally and forever, my only policy.
Today's New Activity: Using the "D" Word
For the first time today, I found it necessary to tell a stranger who knew nothing about me or my life that I was in the process of a divorce. My exact words were, "I appreciate the offer, but I'm in the middle of a divorce right now. I'm not really going to lunch with anybody." I do find this customer friendly and handsome, though (it was the second time I'd helped him), and I might be interested in going out with him at some point, but I let him know I would just see him at the bank for now, and maybe take him up on his invitation in the future.
It's a weird thing, to leave the familiarity of a marriage (however clusterf*cked it may be) and reemerge into the world as a divorced woman. Doesn't it just sound so ugly? I'm a "divorced woman." Okay, I'm not yet, but my divorce will be finalized within a few months, and I will soon find myself in a category of people I never imagined myself belonging to. Who does really? Nobody goes into marriage expecting to get divorced ("Eighth Time's a Charm" Larry King excluded...if he expects anything different at this point he is even more delusional than he is irritating), and no matter what the circumstances of your decision to part ways, it is a sad, sad day when you realize that despite all your love and best intentions and efforts to make it work, this marriage--like so many others--has, too, run its course.
Two important shifts have happened in my mind since the reality of my own marriage's demise has set in. First, I've had to come to terms with my own judgments about divorced people and their choices. Although I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, in my mind I had judged that they simply weren't trying hard enough...that they were lazy or selfish or uncommitted or bored. I always made the exception in my mind for people who left physically abusive marriages, but for the most part I think I judged divorcees pretty harshly. I now recognize that there are myriad good reasons why a marriage can end, and that people deserve some sympathy and the benefit of the doubt.
Secondly, I've had to come to terms with the idea that many, many, many people out there likely judge divorces and divorced people the way I myself used to. And I have to wonder how they will view me. Karma is a bitch though, ain't it?
I've been embarrassed, ashamed, and highly unlikely to share my marital status with people except those I trust completely (and it's been a challenge even among some of them), and I'm *really* not looking forward to the first time I have to mark the "divorced" box on some kind of document or questionnaire. No matter what my circumstances and all the whatnot that brought me to this place, if I'm honest I'll admit there is a part of me that feels like a failure.
I acknowledge and deal with that feeling as it comes, when it comes. And at the other end of that processing, I always get to the place where I know in my heart that a first step in getting my life on track as I want it to be is accepting where it is right now. And right now, I'm a soon-to-be-divorced 32-year-old woman, a single mother who's living with her parents. Ouch. It's kind of a harsh reality to face.
Always moving forward though, honoring the path that led me here and sending out heaps of gratitude to all the people and events in my life that have touched me along the way.
