Topix Questions 47: What Was The Most Difficult Time In Your Life? What Did It Teach You? & 48: Imagine You Can Create Or Change Any One Law. What Will You Do?

Question 47/424:  What was the most difficult time in your life? What did it teach you?

There are two very specific instances that always come to my mind when I’m asked about difficult times. One example is the first year after high school, the second is when I broke up with my first adult boyfriend when I was almost 21.

I graduated high school in May and by that point already had plans to go to college the following September, two months before I turned 18. My open house to celebrate graduation was held in July and by August 1st my dad had gone missing and a community search found his body. When college was set to start in September, I was more than a little overwhelmed. My entire world had been flipped upside down at home, and now I was trying to figure out how to balance being an adult seeking independence, while also trying to help my mother as much as I could because she wasn’t planning on living alone in my childhood home and there was a lot that had to be taken care of.

Everything started piling on really quickly. I was working two jobs, one in Flint and one in Lapeer, I started dating a guy who lived in Owosso, I was taking classes both in Flint and in Auburn Hills, and I was still trying to go back to Otter Lake to help my mother. I was running myself ragged both literally and figuratively. While I had places to stay, my schedule was so hectic that I found myself often sleeping in my car between work and school or between school and going home. I was basically living out of suitcases in Owosso, and would go home to Otter Lake on weekends when I had time. Not to mention I was 17 until November after the school year started and then I was 18 so I was also trying to have a social life on top of everything else going on, and at the time I was the only one with a car. Eventually, the pressure and the stress was just getting to be too much for me and I was having panic attacks leading up to and during classes. I realized that I simply couldn’t do everything at once so I dropped out of school.

When I was 20 I had to come to terms with the fact that the relationship I had been in for three years was no longer healthy.  He and I both had come to the realization on our own time but we didn’t really want to have the conversation. I was terrified of being alone in the apartment I had acquired at 19 and I made his life really comfortable. I took care of things and he barely worked during our relationship and was able to just stay home and focus on his hobbies and his kid. I was working full time and taking care of his kid when he was out with friends or when he took a night-shift job for a time. Needless to say over the course of our three year relationship, the bond I formed with his daughter was intense. Not long before the split came, I was sitting in the bedroom with her and she asked if she could call me mom. She had a mom, and custody was split 50/50 so it wasn’t as if she didn’t have a mother in her life, but she wanted to call me mom. I told her that she could and I sobbed because a part of me knew that my relationship with her dad was on its last legs but I couldn’t stand the thought of telling her no.

He and I attempted couple’s therapy and went for a few weeks, but at one of our sessions the therapist asked each of us why we were in this relationship. He said because I made his life easier and I said because I cared about his kid and I didn’t think he had anywhere else to go. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I’ll find somewhere to go.” So the therapist recommended that we take two weeks to live separately. It would prove to me that he wouldn’t be homeless if I asked him to go, and it also would allow us some space to miss each other; “If at the end of two weeks, you don’t miss each other then that’s your answer. If you do, then you come back here and we discuss the next steps to take.” So we went home after that appointment and he started packing things. Because of the custody, it meant I wouldn’t see his daughter for the next visitation so I made sure to tell him to pack things for her, too. He packed a few boxes of essentials and left and said he’d call me later.  After he had left, I looked around and realized he hadn’t packed any of his daughter’s favorite things. All of her favorite toys were still on the shelves, her favorite blanket, her favorite clothes. I sobbed, sad to see the spaces left behind but also furious that he didn’t seem to care about her as much as I did. I packed up another box or two of her favorite things and insisted I bring them to him right away. He seemed annoyed but I didn’t care.

On day four of our fourteen day experiment I told him I didn’t see any reason for him to come back to live. That we would make arrangements for him to get the rest of his things but that we needed to be done. When the day finally came where he took all of his and his daughter’s things out of the apartment and I was left with what felt like an empty apartment, I sobbed. The loss of his daughter and her presence in my life was gut wrenching and heart stopping. I felt like I was making such a huge mistake, that she would resent me forever and I couldn’t even blame her for it because I didn’t have to break up with her dad and I didn’t have to ask him to leave. Part of me knew staying wouldn’t have been any better, that ultimately we would just be two people who stayed together for a kid and that kid would eventually pick up on that and either resent us for it or worse find herself in a similar situation and I didn’t want either of those things. For a few years after the breakup he did still allow me to see her and would bring her to my office to visit. I loved those visits even if it ripped my heart out at the same time.

At one point my mother told me I needed to treat the loss of her like a death instead of an open ended possibility of one day reconnecting wit her. It seemed like a harsh way to deal with things, but I understand what she meant. Ultimately, that loss did feel very similar to the death of my father, they both remain to this day – even 10+ years after the fact – some of the most life altering experiences in my life.  As for what these experiences taught me? That life is never black and white, and most often it’s just a bunch of different shades of grey. That sometimes the most important choices you have to make are also the most difficult and most painful, especially in the moment. That life is short and that it is so important to live your life fully because you never know when something can end or change forever. Love people, take care of people, do good and be kind as often as you can.

 

 

Question 48/424:  Imagine you can create or change any one law. What will you do?

Despite working in the legal field for my entire adult life – 14 years – I have mostly worked closely with bankruptcy law. I am uncomfortably ignorant in the process of what laws are, how they come to be made, and how they can be maintained. I bring this up because I wonder if I understand enough about our country, the legal system, and the government to even answer this question.  The first two laws that come into my mind are both controversial so we’re off to a great start.

Firstly, I think marijuana should be federally legal. The fact that so many states have already legalized it, but there is this big fear of the federal legality of it that keeps people living in fear instead of educating themselves. I just think that making marijuana federally legal would make a lot of things easier. However, I also think it is more important for us to retroactively release any and all persons with a marijuana drug charge. Again, going back to my ignorance about laws and how they’re made, I don’t know if you could put a law into practice that would both legalize something going forward and simultaneously free anyone who had been put in prison when it was illegal. I just think that with how much talk circles around prisons being overfilled and tax dollars going to them, that everyone would be much better off if we were to release petty drug charges for a drug that has been deemed safe enough by 24 states.

Secondly, I think that abortion rights should be locked into place and in such a way that it can never be overturned. To my understanding – which maybe totally off base – Roe v Wade was a court opinion that was used as precedent in cases where abortion rights came up.  The reason that Roe v Wade was able to be overturned in 2022 is because it had never been ratified or written into law.  Had it been written into law anytime between 1973 and 2022 then the overturning process would have at least been simpler than just a vote of nine people. I recognize going into this issue on a public forum is a risky move because both of these issues are extremely touchy. Regardless I think it’s important that people really look at why they think these things are wrong. Abortion is healthcare, whether you like to believe that or not, the procedure is medical and needs to be performed by a doctor which by definition makes it healthcare. There are so many protections in place that state that any and all medical information must be kept under lock and key and can never be discussed or shared because it is such a private and personal matter, yet abortion is something that is open to be debated and protested against.

I’m not trying to get into a legitimately public debate, quite honestly I know that in most cases arguments about issues like this are typically fruitless, so there’s no need to get into defending why these are the top two things I think are worth addressing if I was in a position of power and could make or change any law I wanted to. Of these two, if I was able to accomplish exactly what I wanted but could only pick one – I would choose the abortion law. I feel like enough people are Team Weed that the likelihood of that law going into place naturally is pretty high (even if it takes another decade or more). However the divisiveness of abortion and everything that entails is still so sticky that I think relying on any type of majority vote is always going to fail. So I think that if given the power, the most good would come from passing an abortion law that would take more than a supreme court vote to overturn.