Here is how you end up living with your Olds again:
Establish the following life:
1. Have your dream job in a career that you love and at which you excel.
2. Own a darling little house in a neighborhood you should not be able to afford, but can because it once belonged to a crazy cat lady and you have had the foresight to obtain an extremely handy boyfriend.
3. Be part of a thriving arts culture where you exhibit and teach things that you love even more than your dream job. Be unusually successful at this.
4. Love the city where you live so much that some days, you just drive around it and stop at random places because there is always more to discover.
5. Allow yourself to finally get a puppy, which you have wanted to do for 20 years but always talked yourself out of, because your darling house is only 5 minutes from your dream job, and you can go home for lunch every day to play with the puppy.
6. Marvel at how many amazing friends you have in your chosen career and your artistic life.
7. Spend your time outside of work making things, socializing, raising your puppy, and generally feeling like a truly fulfilled and lucky human being.
8. Do most of this for 10 years.
9. Do all of it for two.
10. Drive to work every day wondering how you got this lucky.
Once you have done all of these things, here are the next steps:
11. Go from excellent reviews, statewide renown, and writing for national journals to being forced to resign from dream job in space of one hour
12. Have nervous breakdown when you realize that you made the wrong person angry, and that your “friends” and your employees have been feeding information to the library director about you, most of which is not true and all of which has been twisted
13. Refuse to believe the above until you are immediately dropped by your dearest friends and colleagues the moment you leave the building after #11
14. When you begin looking for a new position, realize that whoever you enraged must have been someone important, because you are unable to procure even a phone interview at libraries that just a few months ago were delighted to bring you in to train staff and teach workshops
15. Continue having nervous breakdown. Sleep on sofa every night, knit until fall asleep with needles in hands, find knitting before eyes are fully opened in morning, and wake up knitting because otherwise you might start screaming.
16. Discover you are unable to read anything except short magazine articles for several months because reading is related to lost career, and visiting a bookstore gives you panic attacks. Avoid everywhere with books or anyone you may know from job, which means, do not go much of anywhere. Visit grocery only after 12am.
17. Stop answering phone calls and emails from well meaning friends and family who cannot stop asking what in the world you are going to DO now? And that of course, even you can’t understand this now, you should look at this as an opportunity to do something even better and it will all turn out for the best!! Because everything happens for a reason!!
18. In response to statements above, snap angrily that you have no fucking clue because only a few weeks ago you had almost everything you had ever wanted, and that they should realize that this question is akin to telling someone with a terminal disease to “Get well soon!” Remind those individuals that yes, things do happen for a reason, and therefore the reason they may feel a brisk slap across their faces is because they will not shut up with their insincere tripe.
19. Find yourself a part time job at a yarn shop. Improve sales by half on days you work.
20. Be promoted to manager when previous manager with facial tattoos is fired for theft.
21. Improve sales enough to keep shop open longer than owners thought possible.
22. Within 9 months discover several unsavory facts about owners especially their unwillingness to remember to pay you, or to reimburse you your part of the shop’s profits which you are owed.
23. Quit, after you realize that the fine Christians who own the shop have no intention of paying you the thousands that they owe you so that they can continue to tithe to their church and drive cars that cost more than your yearly salary.
24. Have another minor breakdown when you realize that the few trusted friends you had left, who were also part time employees or customers of yarn shop, knew that owners had shop for sale entire time you worked there but never told you.
25. Attempt for some months to again seek employment in chosen field.
26. Admit that you are never going to work in it again, and you still do not understand why
27. Consider, seriously, for the first time, parental invitation to move back home.
28. Put darling house on market. Bid farewell to few remaining friends.
29. Leave home, career, friends, self confidence, and ability to trust others in the dust.
30. Do not look back.
And that is how you move back in with your Olds when you are 41.
parenting guide for grown-ups 