Tag: family history

Our late-spring indoor garden

Repotting these flowers in our home was tiring but gave me so much joy. I suppose this time I succeeded in exerting myself physically for beauty’s sake without damaging my health. It was a tremendous “win” that boosted my spirit, enhanced the look of our house and invigorated the feel in our home. I believe that, through many physical and emotional struggles throughout winter and spring, I finally achieved a sustainable sense of renewal by the end of this spring. It is fitting that my eventual triumph would be marked by the presence of flowers which are among my most beloved temporal things.

My foolhardy attempt at starting a hopeful Spring and my miserable failure

About two months after D’s mental and emotional breakdown and the near collapse of our marriage, my physical and mental health deteriorated visibly. In March, I was no longer the spunky, sweet, super-loving and all magnanimous wife who was deliberately over-affectionate and overattentive so that my husband would be saved from committing a grave sin of breaking his wife’s heart and of breaking up a family. Our family was saved and our marriage survived, but my health, both physical and mental, was falling apart.

It was a typical New England winter of times gone by. Recent winters had been mild, but January and February 2026 were brutally cold and snowy with grave financial and emotional consequences for many folks. A three-day blizzard dumped more than 3 feet of snow in Rhode Island; we are now still paying in installment a surcharge for the snow removal service we used six months ago. Even though we had to dig ourselves out at one point because our yard care/snow removal company didn’t show up for many days in a row, they still charged us a large amount above what we usually owe them for the monthly maintenance of our grounds.

What a dismal, heart-breaking and expensive winter! What a bleak beginning to the year! My happy spell that had started around the Fall of 2025 was completely broken when January 2026 came around. In my despair, my heart ached and I missed the cottage on High Street where our family used to be together happily. I questioned our decision to move out of Kentucky. We worked so hard together as a team to move our whole family out of the stagnant environment of that small town where nothing happens. And we were so over-the-moon with our new home and environment last July. How did things go so wrong after we achieved our objectives and arrived where we wanted to be?

Did we anger the Gods by having left behind everything and everyone we used to know and count on? We had had to be secretive about our plans because of the toxic nature of Edward Jones (if they had known of D’s intention to leave, they would have made it impossible for him to be employable) and the dysfunctional dynamics of D’s extended family (they constantly quarreled among themselves and are not trustworthy). Still, should we have just stuck it out with everything and everyone that was familiar? Should we have not taken the leap into the unknown that we believed would be better for our family? Were we disloyal and deserved to be punished? Did they whom we used to care about turn out to be vengeful and treacherous? How to live? Do we dream and strive to do what is best for us or just submit to the flowing current of society constituted of other people’s whims and wishes? Do we try to rise above mediocrity or just go along with the majority? I still don’t have the answer.

By Easter, I had started suffering from dysfunctional uterine bleeding as a physical response to excessive stress. I thought I was only having a longer-than-usual period that is quite normal during perimenopause. After I had gone for a doctor’s visit and got a prescription, the bleeding stopped and I felt a small surge of energy. With more energy, I wanted to do something to try to uplift my spirit above the gloom and doom I had lately succumbed to. I wanted to see beauty and something colorful and positive. With Easter on the horizon and the fluttering of Spring’s first breaths, my thought turned to flowers.

So, on a windy Monday during one of D’s business trips to Kentucky, I ventured out to buy flowers from Dave’s supermarket and pots from Home Depot to try to create an indoor Easter garden. Little did I know that my body was still very weak from the bleeding and that over-exerting myself physically outside in the wind would lead to a relapse. The day after my indoor garden had been planted, the bleeding resumed with even more intensity than ever before. I was forced to lay flat on the couch for many days on end, which led me straight to depression. Instead of feeling uplifted as I had expected, I was completely miserable. All because I wanted to plant and see pretty, cheerful flowers in my home so as to ward off the winter gloom in my heart.

Here they are — the flowers I paid for dearly with my health:

By Saturday morning of that week, it was clear to me that my bleeding was not going to be controlled by me just resting on the couch. I called my doctor’s office but they refused to call me back. I ended up having to call random doctors’ numbers, hoping that one of them would call and guide me as to what I needed to do. A doctor from North Scituate called me back and advised me to go to the emergency room at the Women and Infants’ Hospital in Providence. I called our kind neighbors Lauren and Barbara to ask them to help drive me there.

A recap of winter and spring 2025 – 2026 – one of the most depressing periods of time of my life thus far

Winter 2025 started joyfully with absolutely no foreboding of the heart-breaking unfolding of events that was to come. D and I had fun browsing through the Stillwater Antique Mall to look for Christmas lights, ornaments and decorations. Our favorite finds were the singing dolls. For our Christmas tree, we had one fresh tree cut down at the Lockwood Christmas tree farm in Greenville near home.

We had a typically cold, stormy and snowy New England winter in January, February and March 2026. As befits the gloomy weather and desolate landscape, my emotional life was bleak and tumultuous. D and I had marriage troubles and I worked so hard to try to work out what went wrong and how to save our family from disintegration. It was for me a winter of despair.

Early spring was still very cold and windy, and my life still felt unsettled as I continued to have health and other problems after both D and I had succeeded in saving our marriage. There were some moments, however, when I felt briefly consoled by the beauty of nature. Some evenings were enlivened by stunning sunsets and the faithful moon.

After a traumatic and exhausting winter and early spring, I became depressed and severely anxious. As per my tradition every time I felt physically exhausted and emotionally helpless, I turned to God and consecrated religious people for help. I went to Portsmouth Abbey in April for a retreat. There, so as to uplift my heart to God, I joined the monks at Lauds, Mass, Midday Prayers, Vespers and Compline. To sooth the wounds in my spirit, I sat on a rock at Narragansett Bay for one whole morning. I also visited the cemetery to cry and lament at Father Paschal’s tomb. I tried to commune with God and nature anytime I could during my short stay at Portsmouth Abbey.

We came to Portsmouth Abbey for Mass after spring has reached its peak in floral glory and has imperceptibly begun its descent. At Portsmouth Abbey School, the students had already left for their summer holiday and we had the campus to ourselves for roaming around and taking photos. One of the most glorious spring flowers is indubitably rhododendron, and in nowhere else had we found more massive bushes of rhododendron than at Portsmouth Abbey.

Now spring is gradually giving way to summer. Here are some images of the early morning sun in late spring. I love waking up early in the morning and go down to the verdant lawn and misty lake to inhale the fresh morning air and feel the early morning sunshine on my skin. One time I even spotted an enormous snap turtle under the small Japanese maple tree in the front lawn of our townhouse complex. I saw me watching and started retreating back to the lake. I excitedly followed it down the stairs and even made a video of it going into the lake.

D resigned from evil Edward Jones Investments

In this day and age, almost 11 years of working in one place is a moderately lengthy amount of time. D worked as a financial advisor for Edward Jones Investments (Edward Jones for short) first in Lexington and then Campbellsville, Kentucky, between January 2014 until November 2024. This job was his first ever business job in the financial industry and the beginning of a phase of our life together as a more settled family with two children in tow.

When we just had one child, J1, and when he was younger than school age, we were mostly hanging out together and definitely not serious about the family finance. Being in our late 20s and with only one small child, we were still young lovers and dreamers who enjoyed traveling, spending money and going out late at night after J1’s bedtime. The arrival of our second child, J2, in our early 30s and having J1 in elementary school helped us become more aware of our family’s material needs, educational opportunities as well as our children’s future with respect to financial stability.

D had an arduous beginning at Edward Jones because he had to find his own clients… on foot. Edward Jones prided themselves on placing their advisors in branch offices located in small residential areas where the advisors go out to meet local residents to offer their investment services. Thus at Edward Jones, traditional prospecting was also called “door-knocking” because the financial advisors found their clients by going out to prospective clients’ houses and try to obtain business by using creditable first impressions, personable communication and persistent following up through phone calls.

Through a hard beginning and a multitude of challenges, D learned on the job to persevere and push on in spite of rejections and setbacks on a daily basis. He eventually learned to handle clients’ investments skillfully with the help of more experienced colleagues within the firm. As a family, we participated in some of Edward Jones’ communal activities and got to know some other people and families who were doing the same thing. D was growing his career steadily for a while and we thought we had found a solid, family-focused and trustworthy company to be with for the long term.

However, not too long after our family joined Edward Jones, they turned to the dark side and became evil. They decided to expand and increase exponentially and rapidly the number of their advisors and branch offices across the country so as to gain more market share and generate more profits. Evil Edward Jones Investments thus became a bloated organization in a very short time with a greedy corporate culture and managerial headaches coupled with technological challenges. Growth and change come with growing pain, and exponential growth comes with rapid changes and excessive needs for adjustment. The result was that after major organizational restructuring and fast-paced value shifting to facilitate super-fast expansion, Edward Jones was never the same family-oriented, people-centered and value-focused Midwestern financial firm our family had joined. Edward Jones simply became evil Edward Jones.