At dinner we held hands and thanked God for our unity. “We ask for your guidance in this process. Help us be mindful of our lives on this Earth and our lives with each other.”
Not long after that, he called me up on the phone and said, “I’m done. I want to move to Vermont.”
“You’re going to hate it here. It rains all the time, the snow is not fluffy, and the mountains are not high peaks,” I said.
“I don’t care. I love you, and that is where I need to be.”
I was so terrified of ruining everything. Until this point, our relationship had been in short spurts. I knew full well that living together was very different from spending weekends together every month or two. My tiny cabin was already overcrowded—there wasn’t a lot of room for a six-foot-four guy in there with me and a dog and cat. Yet we drove across the country together in his Isuzu Rodeo packed with all his belongings like a 3-D version of Tetris. He is stunningly adept at organization.
We traveled well together for those four or five days, which I thought was a good sign—because being stuck in an SUV for days on end where there isn’t any room to blink in the midst of summer heat can really teach you what you’re made of. Sure enough, the move worked very organically; only the cat was suspicious of this intruder. We fell into our new lives together with amazing ease.
And then he proposed.
Chapter 7
The Big Move
WE WERE IN DAYTONA visiting family when he got down on one knee in the same garden where we took our prom pictures, and I felt so giddy.
As we made our plans to get married in Florida near where we grew up, we wanted to do something fun to mark our new life together. We were both athletic and loved to ride bikes and run as a pair, but neither of us had done a triathlon before. We were thinking it over and surfing the internet for honeymoon ideas when we found that there was going to be a triathlon in a place called Honeymoon Island in Florida in June 2010.
“We should do that. We should train ourselves and do that and get married. It’ll be super fun.”
I was kidding—at least mostly. We were newly engaged, back in wintertime Vermont, and the triathlon was only six months away. Sean lightheartedly agreed with me, and I’m not sure if either one of us was actually serious about the idea…yet for some crazy reason, a couple of weeks later, we went ahead and signed up. Which meant that we were going to have to train for the triathlon and plan our wedding quickly.
Then a bit of reality set in when we tried to swim together for the first time at the gym. We both barely made it one lap. Neither of us had any technique. We hired a coach who trained us a few times a week, and after the first couple of sessions, we both agreed: This was a bad idea. We were not swimmers, and there wasn’t much time to become swimmers.
Still, slowly but surely, we were able to do more and more laps. The goal was to make it eighteen lengths of the pool without stopping. We’d have to replicate that in the ocean, then bike fifteen miles and run a 5K. We practiced at and around the gym until we finally gained confidence.
“We can so do this,” I announced.
“We’re going to nail this,” Sean agreed.
And then we got there, and we were wrong. That triathlon kicked our butts.
We had heat exhaustion and sunburns and we thought we would collapse, but we finished. It was humbling, but we got it done. Then we headed to Daytona to prepare for our wedding before friends and family showed up.
My parents really liked Sean, and my father smiled and said, “The first two were just practice for the perfect one,” as he walked me down the aisle. He knew, at last, that I had gotten it right this time. This meant so much to me, and the tears rolled down my face before I even saw my husband-to-be standing on the beach. Making my father proud was always of utmost importance to me.
It was not the ornate spectacle that my first wedding had been, for sure. We stood barefoot on a quiet stretch of beach with two bagpipers leading us in and a friend serving as our minister; my bridesmaids wore navy-blue sundresses and the guys wore tropical shirts and linen pants and it was just perfect.
About fifty close friends and family members stood in a circle around us. Our vows were written on pieces of birch bark that we had collected while hiking in Vermont, and our song was “In My Arms” by Jon Foreman—a song that encapsulated what it was like to live apart for the early part of our relationship and wait for the day we could finally be together.
At the reception, an entire pipe-and-drum corps played for us in return for $300 and half a keg of Guinness. They were more than an amazing gift to our day. After going over our wedding a hundred times in my head, there is nothing I would do any differently.
Later that night, I put out my arm, touched my wedding ring to Sean’s, and said, “Wonder Twin powers, activate!”
He cracked up. It became our thing.
Soon after our wedding, I got a terrific new job offer. The northeast regional director of PeaceJam wanted to hire me to work directly for the organization as a program manager because they’d seen how well I’d grown the division in Vermont. I loved the program so much and was honored to hear how impressed they were with me. I was making a salary again, but this would be a financial step forward and a continuation of the type of work I was already doing and enjoying: helping to lead programs and conferences, raising money for scholarships, giving talks, writing press releases…stuff that was right in my wheelhouse.
It would mean moving to their headquarters in Connecticut, though. I didn’t know a whole lot about Connecticut, but it was still the northeast—how different could it be? And it appealed to me that Sean and I could get a start in a new place together. Colorado had been Sean’s and Vermont had been mine; instead of always feeling like Sean had moved to unfamiliar ground for me, maybe Connecticut would feel like ours. It could be a place where we could have some firsts together. I checked in with him.
“I think it’s a great opportunity. Let’s do this,” he said.
“What will you do there?”
“Maybe substitute teach. Anything but the restaurant industry. I think I can dust off my résumé and figure it out.”
The only thing left to consider was that I was leaving the teen center behind. I’d been there for eight years, and that was a hard thing to think about. The kids there felt like my kids or nieces and nephews. It was a time when social media was in full swing, though, and I reasoned that I could still stay in touch with them—many of whom weren’t even kids anymore. In the years since I’d started, some of “my kids” had already graduated from college and started careers of their own, gotten married, had children…it was amazing to watch them bloom.
Things were so much more organized, too. We had a staff and a team of volunteers who were capable of carrying on the good work we’d done, I knew. So I tearfully wrote up a letter to give notice of my resignation almost ten weeks in advance because I wanted them to have plenty of time to hire someone good to take over as executive director, and so I could have a hand in training my replacement. I was assured that this would happen, and then I got called into the city manager’s office.
“Since you’re leaving,” he explained matter-of-factly, “it seems like a feasible time for us to phase out the center because it’s not a good financial asset for the city budget.”
I burst into tears. “It’s not meant to be a source of financial income. It’s meant to help the city’s youth.”
“We still have to be responsible to our taxpayers…”
“This is responsible. It’s as responsible as you can get! It provides a place for kids to be during non-school hours. We have proof that the youth participating at the center are having less truancy at school, teenage pregnancy has declined, teen arrests and violations around the city have declined, and I can show you teachers’ comments that our students are more positively involved in learning and social interaction. We’re making a difference!”
“I understand this is hard. Sometimes hard decisions h
ave to be made.”
I sat there in stunned silence, choking on my tears. I had no power here, no standing.
“What’s going to happen to the center?” I managed when I found my voice again.
“The school is going to rent the space that the city owns and use it for varsity basketball. They’re paying to rent it.”
“When?”
“Next week.”
“Next week?”
We had done so much good in that place. What we had not done, however, was present a pretty, privileged place for the upper-echelon youth of Franklin County to attend. We hadn’t been working with the old-money parents of the community; we were working with a lot of families on welfare, broken families, and students who were not all varsity athletes. As the city manager beamed about the athletic community, it occurred to me that our population wasn’t the city government’s priority.
Soon, they would professionally paint over every wall that the kids had spent months painting from ceiling to floor one summer. They would strip the entire space that had been built with love, sweat, and tears, and sterilize it for a profitable income revenue.
“You cannot leave these kids with nothing,” I said.
“We won’t. We’re in talks with the Supervisory Union to establish a new program. We just need to figure out how to make it profitable, but we’ll work with the kids and find a way to reopen in a new place in a few months.”
A couple of days later, I was sitting there in the center, trying to figure out how I was supposed to tell the kids, when a former student walked in for a visit from college. She was all smiles, ready to tell me about her classes and her roommate, but when she asked how I was doing, I couldn’t fake it.
“They’re closing us down in a few days,” I said.
“For real?”
I nodded and burst into tears all over again. I felt like such a traitor.
We planned a goodbye party for the center, and a city representative came in to tell the kids the same thing he’d told me: that this wasn’t the end. That they would return stronger, bigger than ever. I wanted so much to believe that.
A week after my last day, I came back to an empty center. Blank walls, no furniture, no files, no music equipment…it was all just gone. Paul showed up, too, and burst into tears. It was the end of an era for each of us, and the pain I felt seeing it stripped bare was awful. Would they have closed that center if I hadn’t resigned? I’ll never know. Maybe it would have happened just the same; maybe it would have taken a little longer. Maybe I could have saved it. It still haunts me.
I started work for PeaceJam Northeast on October 1, 2010, while still going through terrible anxiety over the closing of the youth center, and the stress of putting together our lives in a new state. I often felt like I was hovering over my body, watching myself as if life were a movie instead of reality. I kept having a recurring dream of my dry, older hands on my bike handlebars, and then a heavy force would come over me and I would die.
“I think I’m going to die on a bike,” I told Sean, who tried to reassure me. It was just another in a series of empathic visions and dreams that felt very real, which sure didn’t help my anxiety.
One of my first priorities after moving was to find a good therapist, which I did. I went every week.
My office in Hartford was an hour from where we lived on the beautiful Connecticut shoreline. I was now working with gang members and hearing on a daily basis about people getting knifed and shot. Despite my background working with troubled youth, the bar was completely different here. It was relatively easy doing social work in Vermont; here there was much more of everything—teen pregnancy, depression, suicide, hard drugs, violence. I dealt with a lot more mental illness and drug addiction than I ever had before.
The other thing that made it so difficult for me was the great chasm here between the haves and the have-nots. I grew up in a middle-class area where people were friendly to one another. You just waved at everyone you passed—that was normal. Here, if you waved and smiled at people, they’d stare at you like, What the hell do you want? Why are you smiling at me?
People drove too fast and rushed through life, and I didn’t understand why even the wealthy people seemed so stressed out all the time. Driving through the crazy interstate corridor to Hartford, I would question myself, What gives me the right to do this work? I’ve never been in a gang. I don’t know anything about the Latin Kings. I don’t know how to connect with this at all.
I worried that I had made a huge mistake in moving here.
In order to make a difference, I had to shed my own insecurities about being privileged and inadequate, and that was a process. It took a long time to feel that when I went to lead these teachings from our curriculum to audiences that ran the gamut from community centers that welcomed youth from all backgrounds to upscale private boarding schools, I was capable of bringing something relevant and meaningful to their lives.
I’d take the kids to these peace conferences in different states to discuss what they learned and how they could connect it to their lives and the issues in their communities. One of the cool parts was that I roped in a few of my Vermont kids who were now college students to come as mentors.
Within the conferences, students are broken into “family groups” of about twenty-five, and often there are kids grouped together from very different backgrounds. I watched some of them go through transformations more extreme than mine in just the course of a weekend. Some would meet each other and think, I have no idea how to talk to you. We’re totally different, and by the end of the conference, they’d be hugging it out and saying, “I love you and I can’t wait to stay in touch with you.”
We even had students from a school for the deaf attend some of the conferences with translators, and their reactions were always wonderful.
“This is one of the coolest things we do all year,” one of the kids told a program assistant. “Usually we’re just around deaf kids all the time and we feel ostracized, but then we come to a conference like this and we’re not singled out as different. We’re treated like everyone else.”
I stressed out about how to incorporate the conference environment into these kids’ daily lives, which were nowhere near as sheltered and safe. I wanted them to have the same kinds of outcomes as my Vermont kids, who overwhelmingly were going to college and doing well.
My stomach was in knots about it, which only exacerbated my ongoing health problems. After all the testing, I’d finally gotten a diagnosis: lupus.
Lupus isn’t easy to diagnose, and usually gets named only by process of eliminating all the other likely options.
It’s a chronic inflammatory disease that causes the body’s immune system to lose the ability to differentiate between good and bad. Your immune system attacks your own tissues and organs, and it can cause a whole range of symptoms like the ones I’d been experiencing—serious fatigue, joint pain, digestive problems, headaches, fever, light sensitivity, anemia, swelling…it’s a disease that flares up at times and goes into remission at others, which explained why I was often perfectly fine and able to be active, then flattened on the couch other days. Some people have fairly mild cases, while others have it much worse than I did.
On top of that, I was also diagnosed with cryoglobulinemia, a rare condition where abnormal proteins clump together in my blood vessels in cold weather and cause the plasma to thicken like syrup. That can block off blood vessels and cause gangrene in fingers and toes. Awesome.
All I can tell you is that with all these things combined, this was a dark period in my life. I now knew I had multiple serious and incurable health conditions, including an autoimmune disease, and that any of them could actually kill me.
It was work to get myself out of bed and moving each day, to remind myself that it would do no good to stay stuck in despair. I had to find something positive to motivate me. Often, that involved the kids, both from the youth center and from the new program.
Gail, my “little s
ister” from St. Albans, had finished her associate’s degree in fire science and had gone on to a two-year paramedic program, and Sean and I drove to Maine that May to be at her graduation.
When she walked into the party after the ceremony, she didn’t even know that we had driven up to be there. She saw us and everything brightened. Later, she told us that it was a defining moment for her—These are the people who believe in me. Family is what you make it.
That month, we also organized a special event to celebrate Green Up Day and get to know our neighbors. Green Up Day, specific to Vermont, is similar to Earth Day and focuses on cleaning up and improving the environment. I had participated every year in Vermont, gathering up crews to clean garbage out of walking trails or kayak out into the Lake Champlain basin and bag up the trash we found. In our Connecticut town, we found people to be pretty hermit-like, not socializing with one another around the neighborhood beyond simple hellos. It’s hard to get into drawn-out conversations in the winter, but now that spring had come, it felt like the time to change that.
Ospreys had returned to the salt marsh that ran through our backyard to nest and canvass for prey, swooping down over the shallow water and coming up with fish in their beaks. It was fascinating to watch—but whenever low tide came, a much sadder sight arose: lots and lots of human-made garbage in this natural habitat.
Sometimes things like that feel like other people’s things—let someone else take care of it. But I had learned that you can always feel better by taking charge of your own surroundings to whatever extent you can. Regardless of who was responsible or who made the mess, if you have the power to make it better, do it. I reached out to the town and asked if they could drop off a Dumpster at the end of our street so I could organize a cleanup event. The person who answered the phone thought I was nuts, but sure enough, a Dumpster arrived.
Sean and I typed up a letter to distribute to our neighbors:
Hello! We are your new neighbors, Sean and Colleen, and we moved here recently from Vermont. We are writing with an invitation.
Gratitude in Motion Page 6