A Three Hour Difference

Yesterday, while clearing out my files, I stumbled on an old copy of the Holmes and Rahe stress test. This perennial favorite of the health quiz genre measures a person’s stress level by assigning a point value to events in the normal spectrum of life. Everything from Outstanding Personal Achievement (28 points) to Christmas (12 points) to Minor Violations of the Law (11 points) ranks on an objective, research-based scale, and the sum of my points is supposed to show how stressed I am.

“Finally, a quiz where you actually WANT a low score,” cheerfully shouts the brochure. I am not so sure about that. We Americans have a love-hate relationship with stress. It’s both a curse and a badge of honor. I’ve spent many mornings standing around the office coffeepot, comparing hours of lost sleep with coworkers determined to one-up each other.

“It took me four hours to finish the laundry, and I couldn’t start until the kids were home from soccer practice and in bed. I was folding towels like a zombie until TWO last night.” This gets a few sympathetic grimaces, but also a few eyes roll. Everyone has kids. Everyone has laundry.

“It’s tax season. My husband hasn’t come home from work in three days. I drove down there yesterday evening to help make copies so he could come home this weekend, take a shower, and get a few hours of sleep in a real bed. There we were, alone in the dark, empty building long after the cleaning staff went home. We were at it until THREE! Can you believe it?” A few exhale noisily. Another whistles in disbelief.
“I stayed up until FOUR A.M. to finish homework for class tonight after work. It goes until ten,” someone finally asserts triumphantly. The others dip their heads in grudging admiration and disperse.

If we weren’t all stressed, what excuse would we have? It’s the reason those ten pounds from last year still haven’t come off, the reason we haven’t scheduled that routine medical exam. The average American gives up four days of vacation time because using it would cause more demands at work, and a quarter of Americans check their work messages while on vacation. “Too busy,” we say smugly. “Too much going on.” I looked back down at the Holmes and Rahe test, and I wondered…

“Which one of us has a higher stress quotient?” I ask my husband, who reclines on his overstuffed chair with his plant pathology notes on his lap. He’s studying for a test on a Saturday afternoon, but I still think my stress quotient will blow his away. He looks at the papers with me, eyes methodically scanning the categories: Your Finances, Your Work, Your Health.

“I think it’s a toss up, don’t you?” he replies.

“Well, let’s take the test and see!” I grab a pencil, draw a vertical line down the right margin of the test, and label the two columns C and K. I scan the paper and pick a line at random. “Marriage (50 points). We each get fifty points just for being married?”

“Hardly,” Craig reasons, “Marital Separation (65 points) would barely be more than being married. It must mean new marriages. We get zero for that.” Craig frowns in concentration, gesturing for me to sit on the ottoman so he can see the list.

“Ooooh, here’s one! Personal Injury or Illness (44 points)!” I say. The generous number of points makes sense to me. It was almost as stressful to spend a summer nursing a broken foot as it was to get married five years ago.

“Yep, and that means that I get Change in Health of Family Member (39 points),” says Craig.

“Wait a minute. You’re telling me that you earn almost as many points just because I sustain a broken bone? All that pain and decreased mobility for a lousy five more points?”

“Well, you broke your foot, but who had to listen to you? Me!” Craig crows triumphantly. I still don’t see how driving me to Urgent Care and bringing me ice packs is all that stressful. He is really catching on to the spirit of the quiz, though.
“Whatever,” I say, “but I just changed jobs, so I get Change in Responsibilities at Work (29 points) and Change in Work Hours or Conditions (20 points).”

“I did, too, so I get both of those as well as Begin or End School (26 points).”

“That’s double dipping! You can’t count grad school as both work and school!” I protest. I eventually concede that he is right. A funded doctoral student’s schedule involves a complicated and rather confusing mixture of work and school. Right now Craig collects a paycheck for conducting research by the university, who also gives him free tuition for classes and the promise of a degree in four years if all goes well. It’s been a pretty reasonable two months, but the research project that will become his dissertation is just coming together. I can see long days on the horizon.

Category 2: Living Conditions should be a gold mine for both of us. We started the year in Ripon, just north of Modesto, California. In June we quit our jobs, handed our worldly goods over to be shipped, and loaded the car for the 2,500 mile drive to Lexington, Kentucky. That gives us Change in Living Conditions (25 points) and Change in Residence (20 points). Three months after our arrival, I keep staring at maps of the United States, finding the fried-chicken-drumstick outline of my new state, my eyes tracing the edge of the Ohio River until they rest on the middle-of-the-wide-part dot that marks Lexington. “I live here, now,” I think to myself. Maps of the East, with small, irregularly shaped states always got the best of me on history tests. They seemed so complicated and inscrutable compared to the West, where latitude and longitude mark off mostly-square boundaries of large states. If I got in the car right now and drove nine hours, I could pass through five states, depending on the direction. In California, a nine-hour car trip would take me to San Diego.

One strange thing about Kentucky is that the line between Central and Eastern time cuts a southeastern diagonal through the state. This means that you need to set your watch an hour back for a drive almost straight south of Lexington. It took months before I felt at home in a time zone I’ve always associated with places that were far away: New York, Washington D.C., and Disney World. Most importantly, the three-hour shift east gave us a Change in Sleeping Habits (19 points). Craig and I couldn’t fall asleep before midnight, which our bodies still thought was 9 p.m. If I tried to go to bed early, I would lie peacefully but fully awake, lifting my head occasionally to gaze at the clock to see how much time was passing. When Craig started his job, I would take him to work and then come back home to an indulgent mid-morning nap. I am sure this didn’t help me adjust. When it was my turn to start work, two weeks of waking up at 6:30 cured me of my insomnia so completely that I sometimes found myself nodding off in the middle of a DVD.

I guess the move qualifies us for Revision of Personal Habits (24 points). Even a trip to the post office requires a glance at a map, and the grocery stores are just as confusing. I spend hours navigating the packed aisles in search of familiar food that hides in strange places in the unfamiliar building. Since we sold a car before the move, we gave up our respective rural commutes to get into our Malibu at 7:15 every morning and drive down congested Nicholasville Road. Craig gets off in the traffic circle in front of UK, and I continue down Limestone to work. We also said goodbye to our beloved Ripon congregation, and have been sampling a series of places of worship in the Churches-Christian-Baptist section of the Fayette County phone book. That gets a category all to itself: Change in Church Activities (19 points).

“Okay, on to Category 3: Your Finances. Do we get Change in Financial Situation (38 points)?” Craig wonders.

“Yessss! The real question is: do we get 38 points for EACH change?” Eighteen months ago, Craig quit a demanding job without knowing what to do next. It was a gutsy move, but the hours he was working left no time for a job search. We didn’t want Craig to spend his entire career working days and supervising the night shift. We had to do something drastic. We fell from two incomes down to one, and then rebounded back to two again when Craig landed a similar but less demanding job. Then he spiffed up his curriculum vitae and sent off application letters to doctoral programs nationwide. During the summer move, we had zero income. Our savings paid the moving company, who wouldn’t unload our truck until receiving confirmation that our check had cleared. In Lexington, Craig started work in July, and I started in August. Our combined incomes don’t total six figures, as they did in California, but nothing would make us go back to those Saturday mornings when the phone rang at 1 a.m. and Craig got dressed for a spontaneous nine hours of work for which the two hours sleep he had managed would not be enough. We’d rack up almost 200 points if we counted each change to our finances, but we decided to settle for 38.

Hmmmmm… if these points were per change, we would get Change in Residence (20 points) twice, because in one week we move from our interim rental to a newly purchased home. Ah! Add Mortgage (31 points). I don’t see how getting a mortgage is more stress than changing towns, personally. The mortgage application involved only one afternoon of signing papers and explaining to the loan officer why every bank account in our names is less than two months old. Moving was infinitely more stressful. Try explaining to an angelic, free roaming tabby cat that she will be packed into a carrier and transported via backseat to a new home, and there is nothing to be afraid of. Traveling with our cat proved to be the ultimate test of our affection. If we had liked her less, we would’ve pulled over in Fresno, rolled down the window, and let her jump out, which, defying logic, was what she clearly wanted to do. After two hours of listening to her constant howl, it was definitely tempting.

Thankfully, we don’t have Trouble with In-Laws (29 points). I hope, at least. Surely both sets of parents, living ten miles away from each other in Modesto and Ripon, didn’t greet news of our impending separation with delight. Now, the most common question we are asked on the topic of our move is “Oh, do you have family out here?” People our age move to be closer to family, as careers settle down to a predictable routine and babies become a part of life. Thankfully, our parents have cheerfully given up having us close by in favor of seeing us happy and doing what we want with our lives. It means a lot to have their blessing.

Category 4: Your Family and Personal Life is by far the biggest category, proving that relationships, though they make life worthwhile, can be a source of great emotional upheaval. Death of a Close Friend (37 points) was a meaningful but difficult part of the year before our move. Annabelle, who had long been as close as a grandmother to me, looked forward to our move with great excitement, even though at 93 her poor eyesight and hearing would rule out most long-distance communication. She was perhaps in the best position to understand our need for a positive change. She often entertained me with stories of her many moves, telling me about pets she had to leave behind, driving the interstate with a husband who considered every move a race to the finish line, and getting rid of her electric blankets in Ohio only to find out that they come in handy in California, too. Sadly, she passed away rather suddenly in December, so I never got to share my moving stories with her. I was grateful to be living close at the time, so I could say goodbye and celebrate life with her many friends at her memorial service.

Scanning the rest of the family column, my eyes skim over Pregnancy (40 points), and I am thankful to cross that one off, for now. I explained to my doctor, who was quizzing me about my reproductive goals this spring, that a 2,500 mile move pretty much ruled out children until we were fully settled. “Nonsense,” he replies, “having a baby is a great way to get to know a new town! You find out where the good all-night restaurants are, and you can make new friends in childbirth classes. Then, you spend most of the next few months visiting all of the hospitals and shopping all of the large chain stores for baby gear!” My eyes roam around his office, fixing on a photo of three small children in pumpkin costumes. His enthusiasm touches me, but putting off children for now is a decision we don’t regret. Craig’s sister, however, is expecting her fifth child this winter, and that gives us Change in Number of Family Members (15 points). I can’t imagine how this entitles us to any score at all; the addition will be much more demanding for Laura than for us. It almost doesn’t seem like a change, because our nephews have been arriving with clock-like regularity every two years since I met Craig. This one will definitely be different, though. Laura’s having a girl, breaking a fourteen-boy family streak that started with her husband’s great-grandfather siring seven sons in a row. We’ll just miss the birth when we come home for Christmas, but I am sure we’ll hear plenty about it.

“Grand total time,” I announce, adding up two sets of numbers to find our stress quotient. Craig peers expectantly over my shoulder. Craig’s is 341, and mine is a slightly more impressive 355. I knew we would score this high! I imagine us at a club meeting for high scorers, the MENSA of the overstressed. We smile to greet the other members, gesturing at name tags with our respective stress quotients printed under our names. At the punch bowl, we stop to converse with a pinched-faced man who managed a respectable score of 301.

“Yep, it’s been a crazy year, what with the Jail Term (63 points) and the Divorce (73 points), but making it into a group like this makes it all worthwhile,” he quips, his eyes nervously scanning the room.

“It was moving that did it for us,” we exclaim proudly.
Back to reality now, I study the back of the Holmes and Rahe test. “A score of 300 or more indicates an eighty percent likelihood of developing illness within the next year,” it admonishes. Well, that brings us back to Personal Injury or Illness (44 points). I hope I don’t break any more bones in the near future. My broken foot last summer was entirely due to stress. How else does a healthy, young woman twist her foot grotesquely on smooth, clean kitchen linoleum?

The Holmes and Rahe stress test confirms the obvious: we all need to be mindful of our stress factors and how they affect our health and performance. Craig and I know that we are overstressed. We come home after six too many weekdays, mechanically chewing our food at the dinner table so we can jump up and finish making those phone calls. Laundry spills out of the hamper before we get around to washing the clothes, and we’ve been trying to schedule a car mechanic visit for weeks. Kind of makes us wish we’d stayed in Ripon, huh? Actually, no. We could’ve held on to our old jobs and our old life, keeping our stress level well under the recommended 50-150 range. Our laundry was getting done and our checkbook always balanced on the month, but living below our full potential was making us more stressed and unhappy. Moving is hard, but it was necessary when we looked around and realized that we weren’t where we wanted to be, and couldn’t get there unless we committed ourselves to a busy few years. This past year has been and will continue to be stressful, but we are confident. We did the right thing.