I was just asked where do I see myself in 10 years - “What do you want your life to be like” is what was asked specifically. Honestly, I don’t see myself alive, but then I didn’t think I’d live past 40, but here I am!

Thirty years ago, I had big plans. I was going to become a journalist. I was going to be an investigative reporter that would put Geraldo Rivera to shame. Riding on the fame I garnered from that, I was going to become a news anchor that made Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters look like amateurs. I was going to be a best selling author - Stephen King would be my biggest fan. I was going to find the love of my life, have some kids all by the time I reached 50.

Clearly that didn’t pan out.

Twenty-five years ago, holding my newborn son, my life changed and so did my plans. I looked down at his scrunchy face as he slept peacefully in my arms and whispered, “It’s just you and me, kid.” My plan was to raise my son with love, kindness and patience. No longer was I interested in finding a husband - men were slave masters in my twenty-one year old mind. They expected the woman to work 40 hours a week, cook, clean, perform their “womanly duties,” take care of the children and tend to the man’s every whim. If that isn’t met, war was declared - at least it was with my son’s biological father. I was determined to raise my boy to look at women as equals - not a mommy to clean up after them, not a body to keep their bed warm - but a human being just as worthy of the respect and dignity he is shown. My plan was to return to work in retail and climb the corporate ladder - what else could I do? I didn’t have a college education (there weren’t many programs for women like me - I wasn’t on welfare) and retail was all I knew.

Well, that was half-assed accomplished. I would love to say that I raised my boy with love, kindness, and patience but it would be a lie. I discovered I despise children between the ages of 8 and 12 - they’re worse than toddlers, who do not know any better, so teaching is called for. Preteens? A punch in the face is what they need. They’re little assholes who still act like toddlers when they don’t get their own way and CLEARLY know better than to test mom. My sisters were the ones that showed me that I hated the preteen years. I went through this with my three younger sisters (the youngest is 5 years older than my son) so I knew what I was going to face. My son fucked around and found out plenty of times, and because I was both mom and dad, I had to be especially harsh. However, I worked at Walmart - kindness left that company LONG before Sam Walton died and my patience died a horrible death (and I’m not a very patient person to begin with) when dealing with stupidity day in and day out at work. I had absolutely no patience left when I got home and got a sit-rep from my father on the stupid bullshit my son would pull. Surprisingly enough, during that time, I met Kristopher, my late husband. He had the patience of Job with me. During our courtship he got the “Nine Faces of Sue.” I was up front with him - I was looking for a father for my child and someone I could spend the rest of my life with. I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t need a piece of paper and some holy man to tell me who my heart belonged to. But I wanted someone to help me raise my son because I was getting close to selling the boy to the gypsies and having zero regrets for doing so. It was Kristopher’s idea to get married - and because I loved him, I agreed.

For 9 years, our plan was to work long enough to retire, sell our house, buy an RV and travel around the country fulfilling our bucket lists in our retirement. If only the American health care system wasn’t as shitty as it is. Kristopher had ulcerative colitis since he was 12, and it was only getting worse the older he got. By the time we got married, I had already drained my life’s savings ($10,000) to clear his past medical and financial debts. When his medications weren’t working and the doctors wanted him to use Remicade, the boondoggle that is our health insurance system caused me to put the cost of the drug on my credit card - it was $2,000 (that was our out of pocket - it only went up from there). Kris needed the drug every 8 weeks - that’s $16,000 every year, plus the yearly $2,240 prescription drug cost for his other medications on $52,000/year salary from two people (Obama’s bullshit healthcare crap only caused everything to increase in price - not the decrease he promised). We tried to recover from it, and we were making headway once Kristopher moved to Smithfield and I became a live-out nanny. The plan was to get all the medical bills paid off, get his student loan paid off, get the cars paid off and his credit card paid off and shredded. We hit every single target. Then we got the cancer diagnosis in 2019. Kris died three months and five days after our 10th wedding anniversary.

So, our retirement plans didn’t work out.

After Kris died, I threw myself into my job - I had a lot of catching up to do if I want to have a decent nest egg because, let’s face it, the U.S. Government isn’t going to let anyone from Gen X onward to retire. We weren’t baby-making factories like our parents and reduced the future tax pool - damn us to hell for knowing we can’t afford 10 kids. I wanted to get my savings back up - that was my only goal for 2021. I couldn’t think any further than that. I knew I wanted to be a store manager of the Dollar General I worked at - it was the next logical step for me in my retail career. I spent the rest of 2020 and most of 2021 with that mindset.

Then I decided to get a tooth pulled and because I couldn’t afford to see my doctor while paying for my husband’s cancer treatment in 2019 and 2020, the dentist advised me to go see one. Usually when a dentist says that, there’s nothing wrong with the tooth, it could very well be your heart. And, since I did have a stroke in 2016 and hadn’t taken my medication in over a year because we couldn’t afford the extra cost during 2019-2020, it was a good chance there was a problem with my heart. All the money I had saved and planned to save from my inheritance after the house and renovations were done was gone by the end of 2021. HOWEVER! That didn’t alter my plans - I was still working towards becoming a store manager and I was able to save little by little.

2022. The year that the entire fucking country lost its shit and decided Biden was responsible for the inflation that happened and continues to happen today. Oh for fuck’s sake! BUSINESSES WILL NOT SWALLOW LOSSES!!! Shutting the country down in 2020 caused an ENORMOUS amount of profit to be lost and those businesses that didn’t go under during the pandemic were going to recover those losses. I saw this coming when I got the blood money after Kristopher died; it’s why I didn’t buy all the gizmos and gadgets I wanted to get but didn’t need. It’s why I didn’t take my car into the dealership to have it looked over for maintenance. It’s why I paid off the house as soon as I did - I didn’t want to pay more than I had to in interest. I was hoping Russia wouldn’t do stupid shit, but, well, it’s Russia. Then all hell broke loose on the economy. In May of 2022 I had lost all hope of EVER getting a decent amount in savings and decided I would just focus on the store manager position. THAT fell into the shitter when the current store manager decided because the economy took a massive hit, her retirement took a hard hit and she wouldn’t be able to retire in 2022.

I gave up on making future goals. It’s pointless. They never work out either through my own stupidity, hubris, or just the universe fucking with my head. I stuck to making short term goals and plans; like, what am I going to make for dinner when I get home, or I should mow the yard this weekend since it’s going to rain Monday. Making long term plans…it’s frivolous. Even states in the Bible not to do it because tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone and you wasted all that time planning instead of living. I was feeling pretty low when I had a conversation with a customer at Dollar General about life.

“Life was intended to be experienced, not tolerated.”

Two days later, on a weekend when I was overwhelmed with life and all the B.S. it brought with it, my ex mowed his way into my life. The world didn’t end when I accepted his help (accepting help is difficult for me) and when he countered my offer of beer as payment with a dinner, those words echoed in my head. I accepted to his dinner proposal - when I wasn’t as busy.

That was when I started making plans. Not financial plans. Not professional plans. Life plans. I still want to hike Pike’s Peak. I still want to learn how to ride horses. I want to sky dive. I want to publish my works. I want to go into a hot air balloon. I want to see the ocean and feel the sand (is it different from the Great Lakes? I don’t know). I want to live life as full as I possibly could. I wanted memories that I could hang onto as I’m on my deathbed and smile as I relive each one in my mind. I didn’t care about money - I just want enough to keep the lights on and food in my stomach. I wanted to live life without overthinking it - just take the fucking leap. If you fall on your ass, just get back up and go again. I had decided I would enter this new mindset with a new ‘do, manicure and a pedicure (never had those done professionally before) for my birthday. It was a waste of money because I wouldn’t be able to maintain my new hair color, I worked retail and had the worst hands and feet (told ya, I ain’t no girlie girl - they get washed and nails clipped. That’s it); but it was the experience of getting pampered that I wanted.

Aannnd the universe decided to implode on me as it usually does when I make plans for my birthday. I never got the experience. My soul was weary with my plans always going to shit. HOWEVER, after soul-searching at my sister’s that July 4th, and realizing I had treated the kind neighbor who had mowed my yard horribly before I had left (we weren’t even dating at that time) I decided I was going to rectify my actions and alter my mindset from defeatism to optimism - the universe can suck a bag of dicks if it thinks it’s going to keep me down. I set a date with him for dinner. I hadn’t been on a date with a man since I don’t know when (I’m sure if I look on my Facebook post it’ll say, but I don’t have that kind of time to look) and I didn’t even know THIS one’s name, to boot! As our relationship continued, my son decided to move to West Virginia and I had no clue what to do with my house (by this time, I hated being in that house, especially by myself). I didn’t want to sell it - I even joked about turning it into a whore house on Facebook (which is probably why the cops keep going by). The house, while I didn’t like being there alone, is literally the only thing I have of value other than my charm and good looks (I’m still pondering the whorehouse idea). I wasn’t going to sell it. But even though there was no one living there, the money to keep it insured, keep the property tax payment current, the water hooked up, the heat kept on - it was draining my finances. I planned to rent it within the year, room by room (because my daddy didn’t raise a fool - I know just because things are going ok in a romance doesn’t mean they can’t go south quick). Getting the crap out was a different story. Work was being idiotic with the trucks STILL not arriving on time, and then Dollar General Corporate decided to pass the buck to us at store level on pricing errors. They made this “pledge” mandatory for employment, so I walked. Without having a job to fall back on.

Not the smartest move I made, but it certainly was the riskiest. Fortunately, I still had my retirement plans through Walmart and my various other employers (including Kristopher’s retirement plans). I cashed out my personal retirement plans and made the decision to use that money to hold me over until I got a new job. That was the plan. I refused to go back to retail - I’m done breaking my body for pennies. I wanted to work in an office - preferably away from people because people are stupid. And I kept getting rejection email after rejection email all summer - I was underqualified for office assistant jobs. I spent over half of my retail career in management - how is that underqualified? During all of the rejections and job applications, I continued with my original plan of just experiencing life as full as I could. I published a short story on my encounters with the “Spider Kingdom” during 2022 and was working on a romance novel in addition to putting the novel I wrote in high school into a more permanant format (a bunch of notebooks isn’t really good for posterity). I started this blog. Life was going as I had planned. Finally. I was in a good head space to actually make plans that would stick. I planned on raising chickens for meat - everyone around here has eggs for sale, but to my knowledge, they all buy their chicken meat at the grocery store. Even the meat locker doesn’t sell home grown chicken. And I know firsthand how to raise, slaughter and butcher the birds. My plan was to start small in July and increase production as word spread. I even aquired old cabinetry that I planned on repurposing into chicken houses.

Then the break-up. Once again, that stupid quote from Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” comes back into my life.

To answer the question “What do you want your life to be like in 10 years”

As I said, I don’t think I’ll be alive at 57, but if I am, this is what I would like my life to be like:

*More fond and fun memories than heartaching ones. Despite recent events, there were more fond and fun memories of my relationship with my ex than heartaching ones.

*More successes than failures (cuz let’s face it, I ain’t got that great a track record, lol).

*Many amazing friends that I made on my own and won’t be afraid of losing if I break up with a man.

*To have completed my first bucket list and started the second one.

*Quiet. Cozy. Happy.

And if I do die before I hit 57, I want to have LIVED life instead of tolerating it.