Update

Dear Bloggers and friends, it’s been a long time. 

My last post was in September of 2008. That would be about 6 months after meeting my girlfriend at the time. However, I really hadn’t been actively blogging since late 2006. 

It’s now June of 2024, twenty years since I started my blog. Holy crap. A few minor things have changed. 

My kids are not kids anymore, well, to them anyway. To me they are still my kids. How and the heck do I ever separate the fact that my grown ass kids are now adults?! My oldest has a master’s degree, the next daughter is starting school late but probably better mentally prepared for it than I ever was, and my son… is following in my own steps I likely would have followed myself, had I not had kids at a very early age. He is working in the auto industry and it’s way too early to tell where he will end up. However, with him and his sisters, they seem to have no limit for potential anyway. 

My STBE was eventually an actual ex, that happened on February 29th of 2008 officially. Somewhat ironic in that the anniversary of that only comes up every four years.

My girlfriend and I bought a fixer-upper house in the school district where I had been dragging my kids to school for years. It saved so much time. My kids made friends from school in their own neighborhood, it was kind of amazing. The house however, was a fixer, our realtor and family friend tried to talk us out of buying the house, but we ignored them. With a lot of work, it turned out to be a good decision on our part. We transformed the house and more importantly my kids had a stable home, near school that they could rely on despite my ex’s wild tendencies that were only getting worse. 

I got a new job sort of, another company from California bought our startup’s assets and offered a whole six of us jobs. I was one of them, despite my lack of educational background. It was the fall of 2009 and jobs in tech were almost non-existent. I had no other choice and my colleagues that were better educated than me struggled to find new jobs. Some changed fields entirely. I got a big raise. 

The six of us immediately traveled to California, China, and me to Italy within the first two months. They said we would be traveling so much that it didn’t matter where we lived so didn’t offer us any relocation packages. Which was fine, there was no way I could possibly move to Silicon Valley and afford to buy a house there despite a damn good raise. The travel over the next seven years however was crazy. I spent over a year in Italy, went to Germany who knows how many times, China, Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland etc. At one point I was at the top status level on two different airlines and all along my new ‘girlfriend’ helped to take care of things at home, with the help of my parents and occasionally my ex. But the chaos my ex brought to the table always outweighed the help. 

Almost twenty years to catch up on. Let me fast forward a bit from here. 

• The years of extensive travel were a huge burden but an occasional bonus when I could bring my girlfriend along. 

• I missed my kids terribly all the time, calling them from various continents hardly made up from being there like I used to be…

 • My salary has more than tripled since I last posted, for a polysci major, I’ve somehow done well in engineering. 

• What should be a post of its own is my proposal to my girlfriend while in Italy, I thought she was expecting it, scrambled to buy what turned out to be an antique ring, she wasn’t expecting it and it all turned out freaking fantastic. 

 • We eventually got married seven years later, also an absolute cluster truck lol. But beautiful and sad all in its own wonderful way. We wrote our own vows, it was nice. 

• I fought moving to CA but eventually lost that struggle but managed to hold off until my youngest graduated from high school. 

 • I built up a ton of miles on various airlines and was able to take my family on trips to Canada, Europe and more. 

 • My ex was spiraling the whole time between potentially great boyfriends and then worse. This requires an entire book, something I haven’t given up on the idea of yet. o Obviously, I like to write so… 

• But some of the crap that happened over the last nearly twenty years is not so funny.

I've got more, if anyone is interested...

Fej

So, I’m living in a million-dollar home in California, my wife works from home but it’s a relatively easy job that brings in some extra income.  Somehow, I have become a high-income individual.  Yet a million-dollar home near Silicon Valley however is not high income.  We bought another fixer upper; it needs major work, and we are busy every free moment.  It’s funny what you think success looks like at when you are younger.  Don’t let me fool you though, I have been successful and it’s not at all pulling myself up by my bootstraps.  I’ll tolerate none of that talk, I was a hard worker, but I had little choice given my poor decisions when it came to birth control, understanding how student loans work, and trying to support a young family.  I had tremendous help from family, friends, and my wife along the way.  Had I made better decisions earlier in life, I might be fantastically wealthy in hindsight.  But no, definitely no.

Why am I updating in the first place?  I don’t blog anymore, but I am still writing.  We will see if any of that ever goes anywhere.  I’m updating because I have found my blog again and it’s been a whirlwind experience of reading about my old life.  I’m fifty-one now, the guy who wrote Fej’s blog was barely past thirty.  That poor fellow had no idea what a mess he was in.  But reading it all again now… brought it all back.  That was a tough time, I wish it on no one, I also know that others go through so much worse, but it was tough for me.  Definitely for my kids. 

To the main point though, it all was really tough on my ex-wife.  The mother of my kids was struggling the entire time.  Probably what frustrated many of my blog readers and commenters was that I simply didn’t divorce her and get her out of my life...  I love all of you, you were so helpful through that difficult time.  Having a community like you was priceless.  But my ex was a complicated case.  She caused the most difficult trials between my new girlfriend/wife as well, she made it hard for everyone.  She didn’t tread lightly.  Ever.

My wife’s nephew’s mother passed away in 2015, she and I went to Chicago to attend the funeral.  I have since become a very good friend with my nephew, we hike together every year, he officiated our wedding, he is more than family now.  His mother had mental issues, he and his brother had a very complicated childhood and struggled with their relationship with their mom.  They had even intimated to me that it was possible their mom had taken her own life.  But that complicates so many things… and they had no idea to be sure.   But on the return flight home, after I had already decided to tell my kids that they too would have to deal with a situation of this sort in the distant future, I turned my phone on as the wheels of the plane hit the ground.  Seconds later my phone was ringing, it was my oldest daughter’s boyfriend asking why we weren’t answering the phone.  The plane was likely still traveling at above highway speeds, I was dumbstruck when he said that my ex was dead.

She had called me for money just two weeks before, I had lied to my new wife that I wasn’t helping her, but I had been.  Not much that she didn’t know about, but that last one stuck with me.  She had been crying, of course, but sounded like the twenty-something year old I knew so well years ago.  She was sad, wanted her life to be different, but was lost and needed help.  I think I transferred $200 or something like that and despite wanting to be off the phone minutes ago I tried to reassure her that she should try to get help.  She told me that she was there to do exactly that. 

She apparently had more than one fentanyl patch one her body than she should have, plus many other drugs in her system.  The stuff we all worried about became a reality overnight.  It was described to us as an unintentional overdose, not because she had taken too much that night, but she had taken too much for too long.  Likely she didn’t mean to take on a second patch and whatever else she took but probably had little idea of what she was doing.  I probably knew her better than anyone else ever did, and I know she didn’t kill herself on purpose.  She would threaten that but never would have consciously followed through with it.  Well, to be specific, she would have announced it loudly.  She never would have died at a woman’s recovery home two hundred miles from her children, without guilting them about it first.  That’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s what makes me so confident she didn’t consciously kill herself.