Rhonda's Ruminations

Almost Home

2008-12-03T12:20:00.003-06:00

I know I've been gone for ages and ages. I look at Kaleb's photos in my last post, realizing it has been almost a year; since losing him, since a cancer scare with my son, since losing my birthmom. It was a difficult year and, to tell you the truth, I got sick of having nothing but traumatic events to post -- and I couldn't imagine my readers weren't sick of it too!

And, something happened when my birthmother died. All the emotional work I'd been doing concerning my adoption/childhood seemed to settle into sort of a quiet, melancholy acceptance. Writing about "adoption issues" failed to move me because there was no longer a part of me secretly hoping it could all easily be resolved with a phone call or the right words from my mother. Both my parents are gone now. It's over.

Yes, I still carry it with me, but not in a package marked self-blame. Somehow, losing hope freed me to channel my passions into the present and future -- and in a way that honors my past.

Below is the first post of my new blog that will catch you up to speed on my life's events. This blog will remain and I hope to update it too, but you might stop by the other blog if you find it interests you too!

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ALMOST HOME

It was inevitable, I think, though I’d dismissed the thought a thousand times.

“My heart will break, over and again. I don’t think I can handle that. I really don’t.”

“Me foster? Too many goodbyes!”

“There’s not enough space; not enough time; not enough money.”

“. . . not enough strength to say ‘no’ when I want to say yes or ‘yes’ when I want to say no.”

So, I tried to satiate the craving to foster by adopting two very hard to place cats from Heartland Humane Society. Smitten and Splash – mother and son – were so painfully shy they could not tolerate the chaos of PetsMart or find the courage to show their true nature to visiting potential families. So they sat (in a wonderful foster home) for fourteen months, until I brought them home.
Almost a year later, and with much patience and love, they are loving pets I am so glad joined the family.

And then the craving returned.

I ignored it until my son’s girlfriend arrived on the doorstep bearing two of the cutest, scared, most dehydrated little beagle mix puppies that someone thought so little of they dumped on the side of a busy road in the dark of night.

After nursing them through the first few hours, I rushed to PetsMart on a Saturday (my first mistake!) and asked my favorite rescue group for help. Before I knew it, the former foster mom of Smitten and Splash was vouching for me as a foster parent and I was filling out an application to become a foster home.

I really didn’t think I had it in me. After six weeks, crate training, potty training, vaccinations and a neuter and spay, Colt and Kimber were ready for adoption. My heart was already breaking. They were, undoubtedly, my dogs. They slept in bed with me, went everywhere with me and, for almost two months, were the center of the household. Tons of people applied to adopt them. I interviewed families in my home, watching their interactions carefully, listening to my gut instinct and lamenting over whether or not I was doing the right thing.

But when Colt’s new people walked in the door, the conflict eased and my grip on him lessened a bit. Even the adult children showed up to meet Colt. They were grieving the recent loss of their dog. I could feel their reluctance to willingly open themselves up to more heartbreak pressing against their desire for the love and joy a pet brings. It was easy to picture Colt sitting at the feet of his new human as he worked from home all day, wrestling with the kids when they came to visit and walking the neighborhood with his new person daily.

I did it. I let him go. Colt’s sister, Kimber, nursed me through the grieving.

And then, her people walked through the door. This time, I was certain I couldn’t find the strength; that my fostering days were over. I told myself this young family wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of a pet. I pretended I didn’t care that their daughter cried with joy at the mere thought of taking her home. I didn’t want to like Mom and Dad, although it was so easy to do I couldn’t duck the read. And then their two year old little boy wrapped his arms gently around Kimber as he gave her a treat and . . .

I saw the two of them growing up together: A boy and his dog. He would never remember not having her and she would have him her entire life. She would always be his first dog and he would always be her boy.

Because of that, I could let her go too. I did, and then grieved all over again, this time in a house that, despite five cats, felt entirely hollow in the absence of Colt and Kimber.
The next morning, I returned from PetsMart adoptions with Jasmine,our next foster puppy. Ginger and Ace, a cat and kitten left behind when their family moved away, joined us the next week. This week, Jasmine’s littermate, Jake, took up residence here.

The house is busy and crazy. The work is endless. The cold, wet noses are awesome. I love every minute of it. Colt and Kimber brought to me my life’s passion. They rescued me.

And, because of Colt and Kimber, Jasmine, Jake, Ginger, Ace and the many who will come after them, are Almost Home.

Just an Ordinary Saturday

2008-03-02T22:32:00.003-06:00

It was just an ordinary Saturday, the house slowly coming to life, the smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting down the hallway, prying me from sleep; my son barging into the room to share the day’s plans.

Like almost every Saturday, my son was waiting for his friend, Kaleb, to wake up in a little blue house, three streets down. He’d sent him a text message: “text me when you get up, man.” And Kaleb’s reply came after noon. Back and forth in teenagese, that language spoken only by teenagers on cell phone keypads, they planned their day. My son set up the x-box and Guitar Hero and the battles were about to begin. At 1:17pm, Kaleb text’d he was on his way.

Our house is always filled with teenagers and Kaleb is a staple. He’s the kid who I made show me his identification when my son first introduced us. Fifteen then, he had a full beard and stood well over six feet tall. He looked 25. As Ben and Kaleb became the best of friends, he became on of my favorites. Wise beyond his years, he caught my sarcasm and laughed and laughed (and dished it right back), while the other teens sat there looking confused. Never afraid to sit down and talk to me, I nagged at him like a mother, cared for him like a son and he almost always took the time to say hello to me when he walked in the door.

When he laughed, he threw his head back, his shoulders rising to meet his long, dark curls and the house filling with the sound of him. His voice; his laughter, was booming. Many times, it woke me in the middle of the night. Even the neighbors knew it, from the backyard bonfires bringing a gathering of teens every time the weather cooperated.

Just sixteen, he’d recently gained the freedom a driver’s license provides, becoming the chauffer of his circle of friends. When he walked through my living room, he’d jangle his car keys purposefully in his pocket, proud of the big maroon clunker parked in my driveway. That thing was held together by duct tape and bungee chords, but it was his and that is all that mattered.

Kaleb never arrived on Saturday and it ceased being just like any other when the phone rang with the news. Sometime between gathering his things to head over to our house and reaching his front door, he collapsed. His father found him shortly before 2pm. At 3pm, blinded by grief and disbelieving of the news, my son and I drove to his house. A pastor waiting on Kaleb’s doorstep for his family to return from the hospital confirmed the news. “Kaleb was pronounced dead at the hospital. They think it was a heart attack.”

As a parent, I am overwhelmed with my inability to squelch the pain Kaleb’s friends are experiencing and completely unable to wrap my mind around what his parents are going through. I can’t help but remember how distraught Kaleb was over the holidays when my son faced a cancer diagnoses. He hardly left Ben’s side as we waited for the test results, his deep worry clearly visible in his eyes. And now the tables are turned, in the most tragic way. It all feels so unreal.

We don’t yet know what truly happened. Right now, we just know the Universe makes little sense, the world is missing a compassionate soul, the house is too quiet and young man who was only just becoming Himself is missed more than words can say.

Bury My Lovely

2008-02-12T18:01:00.000-06:00

“Bury My Lovely,” by October Project was finally posted on YouTube a while back – and I was thrilled to find it. I scrolled through the comments. Many people say it is about child abuse, genealogy, unearthing family secrets and ghosts of the past. The adoptees and natural mothers who view it might see and hear relinquishment and adoption in its haunting lyrics and images.

Every time I watch it, my eyes well with tears and goose-bumps cover my skin. For me, it is about abuse, genealogy, family secrets and adoption. And, it’s about ghosts of the past, haunting a girl in a big old house, while her family carries on as if nothing bad ever happened to her.

“A picture worth a thousand lies . . .” is how the chorus begins and, when I hear it, I think of the old family farm I was sent away to so many times, to live with my aunt and uncle. They were good to me, but I was scarred and they didn’t understand, entirely, how and why. The old Victorian house, built by their ancestors and decorated with generations of family photos, felt simultaneously like home and a foreign land. And though my aunt and uncle treated me with compassion and I liked farmlife, living in the house was, of course, always a reminder that not just my first mother, but also my second, had sent me away.

Songs always take us places emotionally, but this one is a doozy for me. You see, it was literally filmed in the house I grew up in – which was quite a bunch of excitement when October Project was singing in the attic and barn, walking up the old, creaky stairs and standing on the veranda. An Impromptu casting made my uncle “the gravedigger,’ burying secrets out by the pond. And, even though I witnessed the making of the video, watching it is entirely too . . . real.

Those who know my story will see what I see in it and others, perhaps, will find a meaning within it that fits their story, but I thought I’d share . . .

An Award!

2008-01-06T20:22:00.000-06:00

The assignment was simple. My fourth-grade classmates and I studied poetry and were instructed to create a book of poems, scrawled in chunky child’s printing between the thick, blue lines of wide-ruled paper, sandwiched between covers of mishapingly cut cardboard.

At the end of the assignment, we knew they’d be entered into the school district’s Young Author’s Competition. I was a smart kid, but school wasn’t easy for me. I had two strikes against me: an undiagnosed learning disability (central auditory processing disorder) and a boatload of emotional baggage. I could spell, but never got through the first couple rounds of the spelling bee because anxiety would kick in. And, by fourth grade, I’d been pulled out of advanced reading and placed in the “slow” group. My teacher didn’t understand that I wasn’t struggling with reading, but that sitting at the kidney-shaped table in the corner of a noisy classroom, trying to process her instructions, made my head swim. So by fourth grade, I had no idea I was still the smart little kid who’d been pulled out of kindergarten to attend second grade reading; I was just the kid who needed “extra help,” was “bright but didn’t apply herself,” and was “easily distracted.”

But I liked writing poetry and loved illustrating, neither of which required my ears to work, so I poured my heart into my little book of poems, adding it to the stack of books being sent to the district judges for the competition.

And, entirely to my disbelief, I was chosen to represent my school at the Young Author’s Conference.

That disbelief followed me the entire day of the conference – in each workshop; each poetry reading; each meeting with a real author – I quite expected to be, at any moment, tapped upon the shoulder and asked to leave “I’m sorry, but we made a mistake . . . you aren’t supposed to be here . . ." Still, that little cardboard bound book of poems was the beginning of my love for writing and, from that moment on, I wrote, filling spiral ringed notebooks with my thoughts and feelings; with stories and poetry, dark musings and kept secrets all through childhood, teenhood and beyond.

There’s a point to this story. Charlie has awarded me A Roar for Powerful Words—an award based on writing merit. He’s given me the honor with Kim Ayres from Ramblings of the Bearded One. There is still a part of me who reacts like the fourth grader I once was . . . surely a mistake must have been made to group me with two men who I consider fabulous, funny, insightful, through-provoking writers!

As part of the award, I have to list three things that I believe make writing good and powerful.

Do not leave yourself out of your writing; even if you are writing fiction, a research paper or a letter to the editor. Drawing from your own emotions and experiences, even if your reader isn’t aware that’s what you are doing, gives your words authenticity.
Don’t be afraid to expose yourself; your fears, your weaknesses, your humanness. Doing so connects you with your readers in a real and powerful way.
Don’t talk down to your readers. Writing shouldn’t include endless digressions to explain your topic like you are teaching a 101 class. Assume your readers are intelligent people because they likely are.

And now it is my duty to pass along the award to another deserving writer. Elizabeth ** is an adoptee friend of mine. She’s a mathematician by trade, but writing seems to come naturally to her too. The girl can definitely use both sides of her brain! What I LOVE about her writing is its brutal honesty. She isn’t afraid to add a well, placed f-bomb where it belongs; to say something controversial or to expose her raw emotion. Her blog, Champagne and Tears, is a brave journey of a woman reclaiming her identity. When you read it, it’ll make you angry, make you laugh, make you cry and make you shout “You go girl!” You won’t walk away untouched.

**I discovered as I was writing this, Elizabeth's blog is currently on vacation, but that doesn't change the fact she deserves her award :)

It's . . .

2007-12-28T14:57:00.000-06:00

BENIGN ! ! ! !

We got the results back today and Ben's tumor is benign. No more surgeries. No radiation. No cancer. The Kid is very relieved and so is Mom.

Thanks to everyone for your wishes and prayers these long last couple of weeks - and to all those who popped over from Atilla's place. We are grateful to be ushering in the New Year with some well deserved peace of mind.

Happy 2008!

No Words (Updated)

2007-12-15T19:17:00.000-06:00

****(We're home from the hospital and Ben is recovering well. We don't have biopsy results yet, however. I'll post more, with a full update, after a powernap - promise.)****

* * * * *

In this life I’ve lived, full of abandonment and conditional love; through foster homes and bus passes to relatives, I’ve known things capable of taking the color out of life. I’ve known abuse and molestation. I’ve known words that sting harder and longer than the palm of a hand or curled fist.

But despite all that, I willed myself to break the cycle; when my first child was just a squiggling thing on an ultrasound monitor, I took my duty to parent him seriously. I went to school and collected majors like trinkets. Child development, Child Psychology, Psychology, Early Childhood Education, Special Education and all its sub-categories. I took courses until I ran out of courses to take. I walked away with two degrees: neither one intended, because it wasn’t about career goals; it was about never becoming like my mother or any of the adults whose care I’d been entrusted to over the years.

My children spent their younger years in a house set up like a preschool . . . messy science and art projects all over the place and a kitchen whose utensils became musical instruments. They never attended a school in which I didn’t teach. The degrees came in handy for the I.E.P. meetings and special education classrooms and schools they both needed to work through their learning disabilities.

The teen years came like teen years can. Despite my determination to make education central in their lives, they’ve both continued to struggle. It’s been no secret here the path my son chose to take . . . one landing him in military school. The last few years with him have been difficult, as I’ve let go of dreams of college, relented to the idea he might become, like his father, a fisherman in a dangerous ocean, with only a G.E.D. in hand. As a parent, I’ve been disappointed and questioned myself a million times: Did I do TOO much in the early years? Did he end up feeling entitled rather than motivated? And I’ve had those thoughts few parents will admit to: “I can’t WAIT until he’s out of the house!” But no matter what our kids do to disappoint us, hope never really dies, even when it’s time to step away and let them sink or swim all by themselves. Words from parent of the year? Probably not; but they are honest.

And then last week, he came to me as I sat here at this computer and said “Mom, I have this weird lump in my neck.” He’d had a cold, so I figured a swollen lymph node. I might have been saying just that when I put my hand on the place he lead it to and knew, immediately, it was his thyroid and the lump was large.

We were at his pediatrician’s the next morning, and then to the hospital for an ultrasound, where they called in the pediatric radiologist and the techs all talked in worried hushes. And within hours we were swooped up into what we now call The Cancer Machine – appointments here and there, long days forgetting to eat, long nights filled with worry. Last week we landed in the office of United State’s top cancer surgeon and this Wednesday, my son, Ben, will be in his surgical suite, having his thyroid removed and awaiting biopsy results.

And while we wait, the color has gone out of life, in a way it never has before, despite all the places I’ve been and all the things I’ve seen.

And all those dreams of just last week have gone by the wayside while I dream of something so simple: a benign pathology report.

So, if you’re reading, please keep him in your thoughts . . .

What's in a Name?

2007-09-10T20:09:00.000-05:00

Recently on an adoption forum, I got into a pissing match with a potential adoptive parent of a sibling set. Okay, there was no pissing, at least from my direction, because my intentions were genuine.

I tried to explain why she shouldn’t change the names of the children she will soon adopt just because one was “too girly” and the other “too ethnic.” Why should anyone have the right to erase another’s name?

Admittedly, I was on the heals of having just ordered a copy of my own amended birth certificate, aggravated about having to check the “ADOPTED” box to prevent the State of Washington from mistakenly mailing me my original birth certificate. (Because god only knows what kind of National Incident would ensue were I to get my hands on my own name.)

And, admittedly, I am rather raw with the recent death of my birthmother and the realization that, with both parents gone, so too is my birth name.

So, with full awareness of my frazzled nerves, I attempted to explain why a name is so important and how it might be the only remnant of an adoptee’s history; a history greater than the minutes, days, months or years a child spends within his family of origin. A history anchoring them to their ethnicity, nationality, tradition and heritage; a history that connects them to their natural place in the Universe; a delicate thread woven into the fiber of their identity that says, in some way, their place in the time continuum remains, uninterrupted.

A name says: I mattered to the people who named me. If only for a moment, I was in my rightful place; a recipient of family traditions, of memories and meaning, untainted by the human foibles preceding and following my birth.

And, frankly, for most adoptees, a name is all they possess of their roots and the difference between knowing and not knowing, having and not having, awareness and unawareness might be the difference between them feeling their identity is rooted in reality, rather than pulled from the ethers and worn like a shirt that doesn’t fit just right.

I didn’t expect her to drop her needs as a new parent and rush to embrace this. I waited for the questions to come . . . and they did.

So, you like the name your birth parents gave you more than the one your adoptive parents gave you?

So, you hate your adoptive name?

So, you consider your birth family to be your ONLY family?

So, why don’t you just change your name back if you hate it so much?

She insisted not all people feel as I do. Herself, for example: she doesn’t care about her history. Genealogy means nothing to her. And, in a great act of irony, to illustrate this point, she shared how she’s never even opened the family history book handed down to her from previous generations of her clan.

Ah, but, I explained, you grew up so enmeshed in your history you don’t have to seek it; you choose not to seek it. It is simply there; an integrated part of you, so integrated you feel no need to peer into the pages of that book. No surprises lay there; no mysteries. It shall not be the same for your children.

And then, of course, she chastised me. My feelings were nothing more than the result of a “bad attitude,” a “snarky” disposition. Her children shall be spared my pathology. She will see to that. She will reason with them and, because they shall be reasonable children, raised by people far more adept than those who raised me, they will understand.

God help them.

The Final Goodbye

2007-08-14T12:04:00.000-05:00

I remember our first car ride together. At my request, she took me to my father’s grave. With the anxiety of our first meeting behind us, it was an emotionally calmer meeting. But throughout the hour-long drive, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at her. “That is your mother sitting there,” I was telling myself, “That is where you came from. She gave birth to you.” I simply couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea we’d once shared such a primal connection. I didn’t have that sense of biological recognition I’d expected before reunion. The disconnect I’d always felt between my baby and adult self seemed to fill up the car.

But her hands on the steering wheel offered proof of what I couldn’t seem to grasp. They were, unquestionably, my hands. She caught me looking and held up a hand. I held up mine and we marveled at their sameness.

At the cemetery, she walked me to my father’s grave. I placed a purple rose on his headstone, tears of disappointment streaming down my face. It would be one of the few times I saw her cry. She quickly retreated to the car. I could feel her wanting to run from this place but, instead, we shared probably the most honest exchange of our reunion. She told me she felt angry with him for dying before this reunion. She told me she’d dreamt of him the night before, and he’d raged at her for not telling him I’d come back some day. And then she’d told me how much they’d loved each other; how hard it was to live without him.

Standing in the cemetery, it all seemed like such a waste. My parents loved each other, had even married following my relinquishment. Twenty three years later, we were back together – my mother and me, standing at my father’s grave. She told me she wished they’d made a different decision; she wished she’d known he wouldn’t relent until she accepted his proposal. “We should have never given you up,” she said.

Our reunion continued for over a decade. She eventually found the courage to tell my siblings about me, but the strain of being kept a secret from my father’s family took its toll on me. We were wired differently, my mother and me. She tried not to feel, I can’t stop myself from feeling. I suppose I got tired of “understanding” why I should be kept a secret without receiving any empathy for what it is like to be the family secret. And we suffered from what most reunions suffer from; there is just no way to bridge the gap of all those lost years, no matter how much we cared for one another. Maintaining relationships under the strain of all the issues of reunion is emotionally exhausting.

So our reunion fizzled, and years slipped by. I’ll never know what those years were like for her, if she missed me or if it was simply easier on her. Strangely, I don’t doubt that she loved me in her own way.

On August 6^th, my mother succumbed to cancer. She’ll be laid to rest next to my father and, someday, I will visit both of them there, at the cemetery where my mother and I had our first real conversation. No matter how illogical it is, no matter how well I know the realities of relinquishment, adoption and reunion, at times I cannot breathe with the thought both my parents are gone, taking with them the hope of a little girl who once thought she’d find the contentment of a real family.

Hallmark Moments

2007-06-23T13:56:00.000-05:00

I filled my cart with things I didn’t really need, circling the store several times under the guise of “stocking up.” It was my third such trip in a week and I was aware time was getting short and I could no longer avoid what I’d really come to shop for. So I reluctantly maneuvered my cart into the card isle, my stomach tightening with anxiety.

I hate the card isle. It’s been a source of anxiety for me since I was a child trying to find a mother’s day, birthday or Christmas card that didn’t say what wasn’t true, but was neither insulting. Sometimes, I could manage to pick a card by visualizing its insides dripping in sarcasm “Thanks for the Memories” can mean more than one thing – especially if you were raised by my mother. Not sending a card was never an option. My mother literally kept a logbook of people she sent cards and gifts to. If they did not reply with a thank you or add her to their Christmas list, she added them to a running list of uncouth associates – and was very vocal about the names on that list.

As a result, my literal Hallmark Moments are few and far between.

As fate would have it, my birthmother ended up being a serial card sender too. In the beginning of our relationship, her cards came almost weekly. I, in turn, braved the card isle, trying to pick out something appropriate. When Mother’s Day or Christmas rolled around, I found myself in the same awkward position – it isn’t easy finding a sentiment for one’s birthmother. Not even “Thanks for the Memories” works – because there are no memories.

So there I was again, standing in the card isle with my stomach threatening to leap from my body and tears streaming down my cheeks. It had been years since I’d sent a card to either of my mothers. This time, I was not choosing one out of guilt or obligation. I truly wanted my birthmother, who is dying, to receive something from me. But what? Nothing seemed to fit and I hated that more than the thought of her death.

The tears came from the child in me who would just, for once, like to stand in the card isle and know exactly what to do; the child who would like to read one of those syrupy sweet “for my mother” cards and mean every corny word; the child who would like to have a father to choose a father’s day card for. I’ve given up that dream, but part of me still protests.

I knew what I didn’t want to say to my birthmother in her dying days. I didn’t want to address the past. I wasn’t seeking resolution. I wasn’t hoping for some affirmation of love for me, an apology or even a response. I just wanted her to know I was thinking of her and that I was sorry her life was coming to an end.

It took me nearly an hour, but I finally chose a “Thinking of You” card, decorated in delicate looking leaves. It took another four days to add my sentiment and mail it. These would be my last words, ever, to my birthmother. They needed to matter.

Inside I wrote:

I am sorry to hear of the difficulty you are facing right now. I am thinking of you and I wish you peace.

Love, Rhonda

Father's Day (repost)

2007-06-15T17:17:00.000-05:00

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."
-Sigmund Freud

I’ve never sent a Father’s Day card.

I was never the kindergartener drawing thick, shaky, waxy-rainbow letters on cheap construction paper; never an 8-year-old hovering above a block of wood, jar of decoupage and pile of magazine clippings trying to create the perfect Father’s Day collage. I was never an 11-year-old placing a handpicked treasure from the tie rack upon the gift-wrap counter at J.C. Penny’s. I’ve never poured through Hallmark’s seasonal section, looking for the perfect prose to express gratitude for my childhood.

I remember the projects. I remember the look of pity from teachers as they coaxed me through an “alternative” project. I remember being the only child-of-divorce in my classroom and how the absence of a father in my life was easy fodder for teasing. I recall a sense of deep shame about the secret I kept from my classmates. I was screwed up, but not stupid. I wasn’t about to tell them the father whose absence they teased about wasn’t really my father and that my real father had never even seen my face.

So, I’ve never sent a father’s day card or wrapped a handmade gift in delicate tissue paper, sealing it up with awkward chunks of shiny scotch tape. For me, those childhood rituals went the way of father/daughter dances and games of catch in the front yard. Like having a strong shoulder to cry on upon my first heartbreak, a fierce protector when I felt threatened, or a stern, loving voice when I needed reeling in, these things have never been part of my experience. But, I coveted them. And, at the age of 38, sometimes still do.

I would love to be able to say: “Today is just another day.” But, if that were true, it wouldn’t occur to me proclaim it so. I’ve learned it is better for me to steer into the empty places in my life than to try to fill them with replacements or distractions.

I have a father. I need only to hold the dozen or so photographs of him to know this with certainty. I have his face: his crooked smile, blue eyes, dimpled cheek and slightly weak chin. But that is as close as the two of us, father and daughter, will ever be: a pile of photographs and an unrealized dream.

I am . . .

2007-06-05T11:25:00.001-05:00

One would think it wouldn’t be difficult for me to write the MeMe Mia tagged me with. After all, most of what I share on this blog is all about what “I am,” or, at the very least, what I am trying to become. But writing this is difficult.

My writings aren’t driven by self-importance, but are the result of trying to live an emotionally transparent life; an authentic life. I am trying to lasso my personal truth because it got away from me a very long time ago, under the dictates of the business of adoption.

Sadly, it didn’t occur to me until nearly my thirtieth birthday that I’d been absent from my own life; that I described the bulk of my experiences in terms of how they were prescribed by others – by my adoptive mother, my birthmother and the “adoption professionals.” They all had a lot riding on how I felt. My birthmother needed to assuage guilt. The adoption professionals needed to keep their jobs. And my adoptive mother? Sometimes, there just isn’t enough room in one sentence to cover what needs to be said. But, the easiest explanation is that she needed to feed her narcissism and telling me how to feel, rather than asking how I felt, was the quickest means to that end.

It’s taken nearly ten years to access my feelings, gather them up, explore them and claim them as my own. It’s been a long, painful journey – one which will likely never find its ending. My biggest fear is straying off course and leaving those feelings behind again. Recording them here – throwing them out into the Universe – helps assure that I don’t.

I am many things because of my experience . . .

I am . . .

. . . Estranged from my both my families, because I spoke my truth.

. . . Often afraid of what they will do in reaction.

. . . Worried about what it will be like to grow old without a family.

As I continue to gather my truth . . .

I am . . .

. . . Sometimes frightened what I will find.

. . . Surprised by the depth of my anger in reaction to what I discover.

. . . Proud of what I’ve become in spite of it all.

. . . Sad for the child inside me who wasn’t well cared for.

. . . Feeling more like an orphan than ever before.

. . . More and more committed to staying the course.

. . . Less and less concerned about the consequences.

I am learning so much . . .

I am . . .

. . . Learning forgiveness is overrated.

. . . Learning forgetting is impossible.

. . . Learning that understanding the whys and how’s of what my parents did, then doing my best not to repeat them in my own life, is the better path towards healing.

. . . Learning there is nothing wrong with anger. It is an energy that can be harnessed to make positive change.

. . . Learning the truth isn’t free; it comes at a cost, but in exchange, you get authenticity.

And, because of all these things . . .

I am . . .

. . . Determined.

In the Beginning, Part II

2007-05-20T13:56:00.000-05:00

The social worker had a reputation to consider. She was known throughout the county for facilitating flawless adoption matches. Her philosophy was simple; an adopted child should blend into the family as best as possible. She should look like her new family and share an ethnic heritage whenever possible. That way, she surmised, there would be no observable reminders that the child was any different, sparing both her and her parents any discomfort. The social worker prided herself on her ability to study the face of an infant and envision her fully developed features. She could tell whether a nose would be large or small, a body would be robust or petite and if eyes would change to blue or brown. She examined fingers and toes to predict things like athleticism and paid close attention to temperament.

She did the same when she interviewed birthmothers and perspective adoptive parents; taking stock of their eye color, facial features and body type, scribbling notes onto her yellow legal pad. It was such a focus of her work, her adoption files read like All Points Bulletin police descriptions of fleeing suspects.

I had been in foster care three months when the Gray’s file landed on her desk. She’d been just about to close the case, having found a nice Norwegian couple looking to adopt their second child. But, a home visit changed my fate.

It was an impressive scene at the Gray’s farm. She entered through the kitchen porch, where a petite, well dressed homemaker greeted her. The county sheriff sat at the kitchen table, enjoying a quick breakfast and large cup of coffee. Farmer Gray’s mother busied herself in the kitchen while Mrs. Gray guided her through the immaculate farmhouse, pointing out the nursery and playroom already prepared for a baby. From the nursery window, she directed the social worker’s gaze to a large plume of dust, far out in the wheat field, explaining it was Mr. Gray’s combine, midway through his workday.

The Grays looked first-rate on paper; a large farm in a booming market, horse stables, a spacious house, doting grandparents and even the endorsement of the county sheriff. The only perceivable issue seemed to be that Mr. wanted a boy, but the worker had the grandmother’s assurances he didn’t know what was best for him.

Alone in her office, the social worker’s decision came down to two, underlined notations in her yellow legal pad:

Mrs. Gray is Norwegian.

This worker feels the baby will resemble the Gray family. They appear to have matching noses.

And just like that, because of another family’s ethnic background and the shape of my little nose, my file was transferred, the deal was made and the case was closed. It was just a few days before Christmas.

The event is forever memorialized in the family album, a brand new baby placed beneath a Christmas tree that looked like it belonged in the lobby of Nordstroms, not the living room of a simple farming family. Even the local paper couldn’t resist the perfect human interest story, just in time for the holidays:

In the Beginning . . .

2007-05-10T20:26:00.000-05:00

The interior of the white, craftsman farmhouse was as bland and empty as the lives of the people who lived inside it.

He’d fallen into his life, without giving it any thought at all. He ran the wheat farm owned by his parents. The house belonged to them, as did the crops, the equipment and even the livestock. What little money he made outside of the family dole was through bartering and trading his belongings. New things – campers, cars and trucks – would appear in the driveway then disappear just as fast, each time adding a little cash to his pockets and, perhaps, temporarily making him feel worthwhile.

When he couldn’t produce the capital for his buy and sell ventures, the reality of his life crept back in. It was during those times that he ran. The small town bars knew him well, as did the police who regularly hauled him off to the drunk tank to sleep it off.

Sometimes, he disappeared only for an evening. Other times, he was gone for days. Eventually, always, the phone would ring and we’d head off to the jailhouse to pick him up, or he’d catch a ride home with the Sheriff who boarded his horses in our barn. What followed his homecoming was never a relief. He was a dry drunk and his periods of sobriety were dark, fearful times.

* * * * * * * * * *

She came to Eastern Washington to earn a degree, fully intending to return to the city and set out on her own. It was the late sixties and she paid attention to The Women’s Liberation Movement, picturing herself entering the business world, living independently and not needing a man to feel fulfilled. Though that dream seemed dead now, she still dressed the part, even while cleaning house, mending her husband’s work clothes or watching soap operas. She fit into the Polouse County landscape like a cactus on a ski slope. How she came to be a farmer’s wife probably had more to do with expediting the escape from her own mentally ill mother than any sort of life’s desire.

She resented her mother-in-law’s nearly constant overbearing presence and had trouble relating to any of her relatives and friends. They seemed content with their lives, while her own was an exercise in concessions and sacrifices. The difference between her and them, she determined, was children. As a bonus, she considered, adding a child to the family might force her husband to step up to the plate – and spare her the embarrassment of ever having to confess his sins to anyone; least of all to herself.

By happenstance, these people became my parents . . .

[This sits here as a cliff-hanger because it is the beginning of a book. I’ve decided to take the plunge and put my story out there, in its entirety, damn the consequences. I mention this only to explain why bits and pieces of what I’m putting together, like those above, will likely appear here once in a while. ]

Somebody’s Daughter

2007-04-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

I’ve reached middle age. My children only speak to me when they need money or a ride; my last eye appointment resulted in tri-focals and all my intentions to “gray gracefully” recently washed down the drain in a sudsy swirl of “biscotti blonde” hair dye.

Those, however, are the minor inconveniences of mid-life; the glimpses in the mirror reminding us things change and those changes are, more often than not, outside of our control. Mid-life also asks big questions whose answers cannot be found at the optometrist or plucked from drugstore shelves; questions we all must, at some time, face. Our parents’ age, they get ill, they die. It is then we realize biology and the passage of time are unbeatable foes.

Parents. Death. Biology. Those are loaded words for an orphan; words with a meaning few will understand; words filled with should-have-beens, losses and loneliness.

Somewhere, 3,000 miles away, my mother is dying. The surgeons closed her up, saying “there’s nothing we can do.” I found out days later, third hand. My adoptive mother holds my mother’s contact information hostage, using her eminent death and my emotions as a means to end our estrangement. I won’t sell my soul for a phone number.

So somewhere, 3,000 miles away, my mother is dying. I don’t know how to reach her and am not even sure I want to. There is something fundamentally wrong with this picture. My ambiguity makes me nauseous. In times like these, adult daughters are supposed to hold the family together. Were I not an orphan, these past weeks would have been filled with concern, torturous days in a hospital waiting room, heartfelt conversations traversing decades of memories and visits with unbending grief.

Instead, I will learn I’ve lost my mother when I stumble upon her online obituary. There will be no sibling on the other end of the phone line, sharing the aftermath; no gathering of family finding comfort in a shared experience. There will be no “bereavement flights” because, legally, I don’t meet the qualifications. I will not attend the funeral because my brothers will ask me to sit in the back, keep my identity cloaked and do nothing to further upset those who have come to grieve.

My grief will not be public or acknowledged. I must find a way to say goodbye in a world that thinks I can’t lose what I have never truly had.

I spent the first two decades of my life praying she remembered me; the next decade pressing against a reunion relationship loaded with conflicts and concessions; and the last decade resolved in the knowledge all our missing years carved an impassable chasm between us.

The greatest irony of all in this experience is that, for the first time in forty years, I hope my mother isn’t thinking of me. As she faces her last days on this earth, I don’t want her heart full of anguish and regret. I hope she can spend her last hours revisiting the life she lived rather than mourning the one that disappeared in a decision made in the early morning hours of September 22^nd, 1967. I hope her spirituality is strong enough to relieve her fears. Mostly, I hope she doesn’t, for a moment, feel alone, but is sharing her death with the people who shared her life. That I wasn’t one of those people is now my burden, not hers.

And if she does think of me, I hope she knows that I am okay. I have learned how to be an orphan and ceased looking for ways to fix what is unfixable. I hope she knows that in the process of doing so, I’ve discovered her, the person. I hope she knows that, in my eyes, she is no longer a villain or hero. I see her as she is; a flawed human being. It sounds like something so simple, yet is one of my proudest accomplishments. I am okay; okay with what happened and okay with her.

Perhaps most importantly, I hope she knows that for all the things we couldn’t, or didn’t, share, we do share the wish that things had been different. I will always, always wish I’d been somebody’s daughter. When she takes her last breath, I hope she knows that I wish that somebody had been her.

My Own Drumbeat

2006-09-12T13:29:00.000-05:00

I remember the kitchen in the farmhouse as enormous; tall and wide, the table long enough to host a small army and the counters built for giants. In my mind, I see the room from the child-high perspective from the dining room doorway: table to the left, kitchen to the right.

I couldn’t tell you where refrigerator stood, the stove was placed or if the floor was tiled or linoleum. I just remember one drawer – the top drawer on the far right, so far off the ground I had to stand on my tippy-toes to peer inside. That drawer held the strangest of treasure, an indulgence bringing excitement and guilt, an item provoking a curiosity I neither understood nor could pull myself away from . . .

The Palouse County phone book. It wasn’t the book’s contents I found fascinating but the cover. A photo of Chief Sealth. S-e-a-l-t-h, Sealth. I remember sounding out his name and staring into his face as if he and I shared some kind of sacred bond. I was four years old, stealing away into the kitchen whenever I could to share a moment with the Chief, but never in the presence of my mother. I held no explanation for my fascination with his wrinkled face and knowing eyes, but was sure my interest, in some way, betrayed my adoptive family.

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Ellsworth, was a large woman with smooth olive skin and jet-black hair. She was a Blackfoot Indian. I remember her once taking off her sandals and showing us the bottom of her feet – to prove to a classmate her tribe’s name didn’t derive from their color. “Look,” she said, “normal feet, just like yours.” The day Mrs. Ellsworth brought her son to school was the first time I remember thinking it was possible I could be Native American. He was a toe-headed, light-skinned, blue-eyed kid like me.

At the age of nine, my adoptive mother took my brother and me on a day trip to Tillicum Village, on Blake Island in the San Juans, where Northwest Coastal American Indians perform traditional dances in a cedar longhouse while tourist dine on salmon baked above open fire pits. I was lost in the ambiance, mesmerized by the Nuu-chah-nulth ancestral masks worn by the performers. I didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t until researching this piece I learned that Blake Island was the birthplace of Chief Sealth.

My adoptive family boasts about the immigration of their ancestors to their Pacific Northwest homestead, still in the family more than one hundred years later. They once owned miles of the best land in town, acreage fronting the Snoqualmie River to the South and stretching West to the confluence of the Snoqualmie and Tolt rivers. They carry that history like a badge of honor. But the story never told is that of the land’s original owners: the Snoqualmie Tribe who lived on the banks of the rivers for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

Watered-down history books say the tribe willingly volunteered the land fifty years prior to my adoptive family’s arrival. But it has never escaped me who the rightful owners of that beautiful land are. And, as a child, I never tired of hearing my great-great aunt Gurina, who was born there, tell stories of the Indian women knocking on her front door to trade goods for dairy products and vegetables in the early 1900s.

My attraction to American Indian culture remains unexplained, but unwavering. Certainly, my early years in a rural farming community didn’t lend itself to multi-culturalism, nor did my parents’ insistence I was 100% Norwegian spawn some fantasy about being separated from my tribe. My fair skin and blonde curls implored me to blend in perfectly with my adoptive relatives. Still, at some point I began looking forward to the day I might reunite with my birthfamily and find, somewhere on the family tree, a branch validating a fascination seemingly spawned from nowhere.

But post reunion, when I was given a four-generation maternal family tree and instructed to ignore the obviously Polish name at the top (and also learned I wasn’t a stitch Norwegian), I realized family trees are subjective things. My maternal family is insistent upon being 100% Ukrainian, even if it defies evidence to the contrary.

My paternal family tree remains somewhat mysterious. Third-hand information says I am Swedish and Welsh on that side. My paternal half-brother embraces the Swedish and rejects the Welsh. I seem to be the only one who notices our father’s dark skin and darker hair. If my birthfather carried a secret about a Native American ancestor, he took it with him to his grave.

Family trees are dependent upon what a family is willing to reveal, but new DNA technology offers a truth serum. When genetic testing for ancestral origins became available I considered ordering myself a lab kit, then was crushed to discover that, being female, I carry only the genetic markers to trace my maternal line. Uncovering my father’s ancestry requires the DNA of my brother.

My brother: also abandoned by my father. My brother: with a “proud to be Swedish” bumper sticker adorning his truck. My brother: who happily sits amongst our family, keeping me a secret, complacent in the act of sparing them the knowledge our father fathered a bastard-child. My brother: with whom I share so much but will forever be divided from by his legitimacy. My brother: who hasn’t phoned in six years.

More than stubbornness stops me from picking up the phone. I will not beg him for a thread of my own genetic fabric. The cost of doing so will be a directive to value other things and show gratitude for the smidgens of information he smuggles away from the family gatherings to share with me. My brother is the gatekeeper of my family tree and I simply refuse to sell my soul to get my hands on the key.

I would feel like the women of the Snoqualmie Tribe, forced to beg for bits of the crops grown on land rightfully belonging to them.

That doesn’t mean I must ignore the pull I feel towards American Indian culture. Leaving it isn’t a choice; it steers me.

Last Spring, I attended a talent show at my son’s school. For most of the audience, it was an evening of giggles and applause but, for me, the entertainment stopped when a family walked upon stage – four generations of American Indians wearing traditional dress. The great grandfather took his place at the drum, the lights went down and the fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and children danced around the drumbeat, singing in an unfamiliar language. One didn’t have to understand the words to recognize the passion of their song; to know they were calling out to ancestors and celebrating their roots, their connectedness.

It took my breath away. It wasn’t until the drumbeat stopped and the applause began I realized my body was frozen in rapture and my cheeks were wet with tears.

A DNA swab will not prove or disprove whether or not those tears are real. They speak for themselves.

Echoes

2006-08-05T10:32:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my faithful readers for your concern about my unexplained absence, and I am sorry if I caused anyone worry.

I have been trying to explain it – for days – but the words don’t come. “Writer’s block” doesn’t provide an explanation, as I have plenty of things to write about. I even have articles on standby I could have used to fill in the gap. But they didn’t fit my mood and, thus, looked artificial, plastic and pretend.

I began this blog to work through my own issues – some adoption related, some the product of a traumatic childhood. I throw in the funny, the anecdotal, the rants and raves and feel-good stories too, because I don’t live in my past traumas, despite how often they are able to encroach into my present day life.

There are times, despite all the work I’ve done to address those childhood experiences I still carry with me, despite all the painful “soul work,” the writing, the therapy, the reading, the changes I’ve made in my life allowing me to be who and what I am, the echoes from the past still manage to become so loud their reverberations drown out the sounds of my immediate world.

Usually, when I hear those echoes, I listen, apply logic, visit the past and grieve that which needs to be grieved, and they soon retreat to just a low whisper, losing their ability to deceive me into thinking they are the sound of my present day reality.

But, there is one echo capable of reaching a disorienting, fevered pitch, full of trickery and illusion. It doesn’t come uninvited, but is triggered, usually, by some, accurately or not, perceived violation of trust from someone in my immediate world. It is that echo drawing me away lately from the things I value. It is that echo inviting me into old patterns, those that tell me not to share, not to trust, to build tall walls of self-protection.

One of my former students was an adoptee who reminded me very much of myself at her age. We spoke a lot about her adoption experience. I ached for her as I watched her struggle with growing up adopted. She was skilled at giving the party lines she’d been coached to believe, but the pain in her eyes, the look on her face, always exposed her true feelings. She had echoes too – and I was fortunate enough to be the person she turned to when they became too loud. But, she moved to another school and I moved across country. We kept in touch for a short time, then fell out of the habit. I’ve missed her and think of her often. It’s been six years.

Last week, she found me, making contact through email. She’s now nearly eighteen years old, a grown woman. And, she is struggling. Her life is not going well.

She asked me about trust; wanting to know if my adoption experience had damaged mine, sensing a damaged sense of trust sits at the core of her own struggles. How ironic she found me, asked this question, while I was trying to fend off the sounds of my own echoes.

She is now the age I was when I built my walls.

I was seventeen when my adoptive mother sent me to foster care. I cried for days, wailing, with all the vulnerability of an abandoned child. And, with no empathic ear anywhere nearby, no one to help me see it wasn’t my fault, I finally had to shut it off, flip the switch on the unbearable amount of emotional pain I was experiencing.

I did it by promising myself I would never, ever trust anyone again; I would never, ever love anyone again and I would never, ever allow myself to be loved again. For the most part, I kept that promise. For thirty years. I surrounded myself by relationships that were mostly superficial, designed to guard my vulnerabilities.

With the exception of one person . . . a former junior high school teacher, who took me in, told me it wasn’t my fault, and nurtured me until I got back on my feet. I’d reached out to her, as my adoptee friend is now reaching out to me.

She has learned all the tricks I used to know . . . all the ways to stay numb from the pain. And, here I am, immersed in my own echoes, being asked for help. I hope I am up to the task. I hope I don’t let her down.

Because I want her to learn what took me thirty years to learn – that when you don’t allow yourself to love, you cannot be loved; that when you deny your authentic, feeling self, your life becomes an endless exercise in pretend; that being numb might protect you from pain, but it denies you the beauty of life, of feeling anything.

And I say this in the midst of my own echoes, the temptation of returning to numb pressing against me. I haven’t been here writing. I haven’t been here reading. I haven’t engaged in any of the things I usually do – the things that bring human interaction and feeling. At 38 years old, I am still as vulnerable to turning off my feelings as I was at seventeen. It only takes the right trigger.

So, my friends, that is where I’ve been . . . lost in my own echoes, feeling vulnerable and fighting the temptation to slip into un-blissful numbness for a while.

But, I can’t. I can’t because I want myself available for my adoptee friend, and anyone who reads these pages who might relate in some way.

Most importantly, I can’t because I need myself available to myself.

Twister

2006-07-21T13:17:00.000-05:00

I love a good storm. The lightening, thunder and wind bring with them a humbling message; a reminder we are, in the grand scheme of the Universe, small, insignificant and much more vulnerable than we allow ourselves to believe.

A good storm is like a great mystery novel; alive with action, drama and energy building to its conclusion – a grand finale you hope will spare the heroes and punish the villains. Wednesday night our area had all the storm drama one would ever want to pack into one summer.

St. Louis has been under a heat advisory for the last four days, the kind of unrelenting temperatures and humidity that strains air conditioners and inflates electric bills. I looked forward to the predicted thunder storms last Wednesday, as they bring with them a front of cool air in addition to the spectacle of eerily colored skies painted by lightening.

Every Wednesday evening you’ll find me at our local VA hospital, attending The Philosopher’s therapy group for veterans. What I do there can’t be described as volunteer work or a simple interest in the occupation of my other-half. I care about the people who attend and, unlike my experiences with adoption groups, feel a sense of belonging in their company. I get much more than I give, relating to the veterans and learning much about myself through the process of group. It nearly takes an act of congress to get me to miss a Wednesday gathering.

Last Wednesday, group settled into its rhythm before the winds kicked up, but when they did, accompanied by the instant darkness of a massive power-outage, several of us raced out to our cars to roll up windows. The sky turned an eerie blend of red and black and the sound of snapping branches from the forest of old oaks guarding the hospital lead me to quickly abandon my car and head for cover. I braced myself against a gust of wind threatening to knock me from my feet while watching the same gust snap a beautiful maple tree in half just yards ahead.

Group carried on as the storm gained momentum, our little room lit by emergency lighting. That all of us were willing to sit together in the dark, continuing our discussion as Mother Nature unleashed her wrath outside, bears testament to the power of what transpires every Wednesday night. The only threat to group that evening was the rising temperature of a hospital without air conditioning, but we were all determined to remain until things became unbearable.

Upon hearing metal sheering from the roof of the building, my curiosity did lead me to the lobby for a quick peek outside. Greeting me was a gathering crowd of hospital residents, standing in awe of the scene just beyond the lobby doors. On the other side of the glass, debris raced horizontally across the front of the building, backlit by the lights of police cars stationed to prevent anyone from leaving.

New to Midwest storms, I felt like child who’d just witnessed her first snowfall, excitedly offering group a weather report in what must have appeared as overly exaggerated wonderment.

The Philosopher asked if there were cows flying past the window. “Cows and semi-trucks. It’s a mess out there,” I said, visualizing a scene from Twister and realizing the storm was likely a novelty only to me.

The wind and rain passed. When group dispersed into the parking lot still darkened by the storm clouds and power outage, only the occasional belch of lighting from the dwindling storm revealed the damage. Fallen trees, branches and debris appeared and disappeared with each burst of lightening, like watching a movie one frame at a time.

Our home greeted us with lights and, blessedly, air conditioning, but no traces of bad weather. As my excitement from the storm began to fade, I wondered if I hadn’t been a bit of a drama queen over the whole ordeal. Until I read the news reports.

By morning, St. Louis was in an official state of emergency. The National Guard arrived to move people from sweltering homes to air-conditioned buildings and overturned tractor-trailers were among the debris littering the highways. The VA hospital’s patients were being evacuated and newspaper meteorologists reported one tornado spawned from the storm:

"Wednesday's severe storm spawned what officials say
might have been a tornado at Jefferson Barracks
and Telegraph roads in south St. Louis County."

At our hospital. Outside our group room.

I felt a little vindicated about my, now justified, wide-eyed excitement. But I mostly felt proud; proud that the group of people I spend Wednesday evenings with value their time together to such a degree, not even a tornado diverts them from their duties to one another.

(Photo credits to The Philosopher, who captured the storm fall-out the following morning)

Cat Tales

2006-07-18T19:40:00.000-05:00

I was only eighteen when we found each other. I heard him before seeing him – a tiny meow from somewhere within the tangle of grass and thistle of a countryside field. Eventually, I was able to trace the source of the sound, coming upon a litter of feral barn cats, wild and unapproachable, except for him. I sat down in the tall grass and he wandered away from his littermates, straight towards me, eventually curing up in my lap.

Just like that, we belonged to each other.

I’m not sure Rasta ever knew he was a cat. He possessed none of the arrogance, superiority and aloofness that give cats a bad name. He ate pizza. He liked baths. He appreciated a good belly-rub and he loved car rides.

Back then; long before Expeditions and Hummers, I drove a Ford F250 truck. It was the biggest, meanest looking vehicle on the road, towering above other cars and rarely the type of truck one would see a woman driving. Driving that beast elicited double takes everywhere I went. But I was never sure if people were looking at me, or at the huge tabby-cat with the big, green eyes sitting front and center on the dashboard.

We went everywhere together: Camping on the Oregon sand dunes, hiking in the Cascade Mountains. He’d sit by the campfire, come when I’d call and happily curl up in the tent with me at night. He was my partner for every road trip to every outdoor concert, probably the only cat ever to see Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills and Nash perform live.

For sixteen years, we were a team. He forgave me for bringing home a husband, then a kitten, followed by a puppy and two human kids, too. He was my faithful lap companion through the long nights of studying during night school and my sidekick as I hiked the forests of our mountainside property. When we purchased a small boat, I couldn’t fathom leaving him behind while we vacationed, so he went with – through the San Juan Islands of Washington State and into the beautiful spaces of British Columbia.

We grew up together, Rasta and me. Knowing we couldn’t, and wouldn’t, grow old together was a thought I tried not to often visit, as it nearly crushed me to even consider it.

Rasta outlasted my other pets, many of my friendships and even my marriage. He was there during the best of times and the worst, steadfast, unwavering. One morning, during one of the worst of times, while my divorce proceedings were in full swing, he took his regular spot on the kitchen counter as I readied my day’s first cup of coffee – a morning ritual we’d shared for almost two decades. And then, I saw it . . .

Rasta, seemingly overnight, suddenly looked like the old man he was. And he looked back at me, letting out a half-purr/half-sigh, as if to affirm what I was thinking: our time together was coming to a close.

I don’t miss that cat any less today than I did the day I lost him, six years ago. Though my life is filled with the love of animal companions, I have ached since then for the company of a cat – a little buddy to curl into my lap while I work at my computer or read a book. In the last six years, I’ve visited maybe hundreds of cats and kittens – at the pound, the adoption fairs and pet stores – but, every time, I’ve left empty handed.

Then last week, like Rasta before him, a seven-week-old kitten picked me. And, just like that, we belonged to each other.

Meet our new addition. He is wonderful and I am totally and completely in love. I know Rasta would approve . . .

Screaming MeMe

2006-07-10T16:16:00.000-05:00

Reading Ruth Dynamite’s blog, I was awestruck by her ability to make a MeMe post so magnificently creative. Then I reached the end; the part where she tagged ME.

Two things stopped me from objecting: I adore Ruth and her writing and, because she is a tennis player, I imagine she sports biceps of steel. I want to stay on her good side. Thus, welcome to my MeMe.

Before the kids, dogs and I moved into The Philosopher’s house, his idea of cleaning was giving the floors a good sprinkling of Carpet Fresh. I found this oddly comforting. When I was a kid, my aunt lovingly referred to me as “Pigpen” (of Peanuts fame) because I’d whirlwind through the house in the midst of a project, leaving a trail of disorder in my wake. Not much has changed. If I’ve whirlwind-ed through the kitchen, I have to make a conscious effort to stop, turn around, and close the cabinets before moving on. I do so with about 50% accuracy.

I’ve just never been able to perfect the June Cleaver housewifery thing. I do clean, but in bursts driven primarily by a deep fear of slowly burning to death in a housefire. Because we are so alike, The Philosopher is tolerant of my Pigpen inclinations. But, he does have a few pet peeves. On the top of his pet peeve list is The Refrigerator.

“You have NO refrigerator skills!” he proclaimed one day, while searching through the largely expired collection of our fridge’s contents.

Now, thanks to Ruth, I am forced to come out of my cluttered closet. The world will know I have no refrigerator skills . .

Five Things in my Refrigerator:

1. Two EMPTY pizza boxes: My daughter gets the credit for this one. She’s evidently inherited the pigpen gene.

2. A bottle of V-8 with a 2001 expiration date. It’s unopened. It still must be good, right? I can’t be the only person who hears the “ . . . starving children in Africa . . . “ lecture ringing in my head, in my mother’s voice, when I contemplate throwing foodstuff away.

3. Salad Soup: In the crisper drawer. I didn’t make it. It seems to be the natural evolution of vegetables. Strangely enough, it’s the same consistency of the expired V-8.

4. THREE bottles of mustard: I HATE mustard and, therefore, have no idea why my condiment shelf is apparently hosting a mustard orgy.

5. Health Food: I am the only person in the house who considers this this edible, thus it remains untouched by anyone but me: crushed garlic in a jar, the world’s largest ever portabella mushroom, a pair of veggie burgers, vegan cheese and a package of vegan salami.

Five Things in my Closet:

1. A broken sewing machine: June Cleaver would have rushed the thing to the repair shop. Did I mention I’m no June Cleaver?

2. A box labeled: IMPORTANT STUFF. DON’T THROW AWAY. I have no idea what it contains.

3. My favorite pair of Levis. From highschool. They are the reason my fridge is filled with food so healthy it frightens the children.

4. A Grateful Dead Tie-dyed teeshirt, circa 1986. Ah, the memories. Concerts, hippy buses and hitchhiking on the Ventura Highway. Everyone should keep a reminder of when they were young, free and inexcusably stupid.

5. A Collection of Old Purses: I love finding the perfect purse, bag or backpack. They symbolize hope; hope that I will become organized; hope that no matter what mismatched mommy clothes I am wearing and despite leaving the house sans makeup, anyone who notices my purse will deduct I’ve retained some sense of fashion and style from my days of youth.

I cannot bear throwing out an old purse. Each one is a piece of history, a timeline of my life. The leather back-pack styled purse, sprinkled with the drippings of acrylic paints, was from my art-teacher days, big enough to hold a daytimer filled with lesson plans and a quick lunch for myself in between classes. Its worn straps and used up zippers bring back faces of favorite students. And then there’s the big, canvas satchel from when the kids were little. It’s held baby bottles, pacifiers, treasured toys and blankies. How could I throw it away?

Five Things in my Purse:

1. A bottle of synthroid, with thanks to my malfunctioning thyroid.
2. A spare car key because I’m terrified I will, one day, accidentally lock my dog in the car – with my keys. He isn’t licensed to drive.
3. A pair of tweezers. There is nothing worse than glimpsing into the rearview mirror and noticing a hair sprouting from some place it wasn’t meant to sprout, then realizing you have no tweezers. I’ve got it covered.
4. A bottle of nail glue, from the military ball. I ripped those fake suckers off on the way back to my hotel.

Five Things in My Car:

1. A Kodak Z650 digital camera: This is my little "just in case" camera, so I never miss a picture of, say, the formation of a wall cloud (the precursor to a tornado) taking shape right in front of me on my way home from the store:

2. A Crazy Frog CD: Strategically hidden beneath debris under my seat. Yes, I HID it from my daughter, because if I have to listen to that song one more time . . .

3. A can of mace. Don’t mess with me. And step away from the Crazy Frog CD – NOW!

4. The box in which we brought home our newest pet, Thumper the rabbit.

5. A bag of cleaning supplies: Fantastic spray, sponge and papertowels because, someday, I will bring them in the house and actually clean the fridge – and maybe even the closet.

_________________________________

Oh, and Atilla? Remember when I promised revenge for tagging me, way back when. Guess what? You're it.
_________________________________

The Weekend in Pictures

2006-07-03T19:06:00.000-05:00

I take a camera everywhere I go. Last Friday afternoon, on my way to our weekly basketball game, it sat with me in the biggest traffic jam I’ve ever encountered. St. Louis’ I-270 came to a screeching halt and, like the other unlucky mid-day commuters who sat idling with me for nearly an hour, I cursed whatever accident lay ahead as I imagined yet another tailgating semi-truck spread in bits and pieces across the four lane highway.

When traffic began to slowly creep forward, it was obvious the entire freeway had been shut down. A police car blocked every onramp and, as I crept over the first rise in the highway, I saw a thousand swirling red and blue lights ahead. Whatever ugly scene I was about to encounter, I thought, was going to be god-awful disturbing.

But over the next rise, something totally unexpected came into view: A white hearse followed by 50 flag bearing Patriot Guard Riders, followed by miles of mourners. The freeway had been shut down in honor of a 22-year-old fallen Marine.

"The mourners formed a seven-mile funeral procession and drove 21 miles through empty highways, all ramps shut down out of respect for Cpl. Riley Baker, who was killed last week in Iraq."

Suddenly, where I needed to go, and how quickly I needed to get there became entirely unimportant.

I stopped by the National Cemetery on the way home from our game. The crowd of mourners was heading home and the Patriot Guard Riders were stowing away their flags.

I sat in my car, in the distance, shooting photos of the flag at half-mast and lost in thought, until startled by a frantic tap on my window. Thinking I was about to be asked to leave, I hesitantly greeted the tapping woman.

“Do you want a really neat photo?” she asked. And then, she led me down the road a bit, to a section of WWII soldiers’ graves amongst which a fawn had taken residence. Somehow, the resulting photos said more about the circle of life than those I’d intended to capture:

Saturday evening, my daughter and I trekked down the road to our town's firework show . . .

Happy Fourth, everyone and Happy Birthday to my son who turns 16 today.
I love you, kiddo.

No Comment

2006-07-03T10:48:00.000-05:00

When I posted the video, My Old Friend, I shut down comments. I had my reasons: logical, carefully considered rationales concerning external links from unfamiliar places, my unease with missing someone I’d not seen in two decades and the desire to let it stand, silently, as a tribute to a friend.

While the above is truthful, it doesn’t encompass the whole truth. Making the video was an emotional experience, a journey back into the best times of my teen-hood. And, the decision to disable comments was, really, all about emotions. I did so not because I didn’t trust my readers to be their usual compassionate, gracious selves, but because I wanted to control my experience of the video, without the triggers a dialogue might flip. I wanted to stay in the good memories of youth – not wander into the unmitigated disaster my life became following that summer.

As logic and emotions are two very different things, so too are wants and needs. I may not have wanted to visit those places in my past I tried to shut down, but I needed to. And, after a week of sleeplessness and anxiety, I finally did.

I’ve struggled writing this, not wanting to launch into a timeline of painful events or illicit sympathy. Suffice it to say, I was raised by an adoptive mother whose character was marked by paranoia and emotional cruelty. All of the goodness that happened that summer, she viewed as a symptom of adoption and a sign of terrible things to come.

My mother knew nothing of my pre-adoption history and needed only to fill in the blanks. Adoptees, in her mind, were born of promiscuity, impulsivity and an endless list of social ills and moral deficits. Whatever she imagined my birthmother to be, so too did she fear I would become. That Chris was also adopted only added fuel to her paranoia. My entire life, she’d primed me to resist the temptations of love, consciously or not, to ward off the sins of my biological parents.

While nothing occurred that summer I wouldn’t hope my own children someday experience, my mother viewed my interest in anything beyond the four walls of our home as a violation of our contract to be a family. As a result, she placed me on lock-down – a punishment not fitting the crime, as no crime took place. When high school began, any social or extra-curricular activity I managed to sneak away and participate in were viewed as an act of rebellious disobedience. Tired of policing me, I was, shortly shipped off to live with relatives in another city and, for the next year, I bounced between their home and my own until, finally, I was thrown into a foster home, then aged out of the system. By my senior year I was 18 and homeless, my three years of high school nothing more than a conflicted, terrible waste.

At the end of it all, I’d learned to trust no one – and love no one, most especially myself. A beautiful experience at the beginning of high school resulted in the dismantling of my entire world. Making the video not only brought this all back, but was accompanied by a growing sense of unease that the very act of following my heart would, once again, be followed by the same dire consequences it was back then. Yes, I am an adult and no longer under my adoptive mother’s rule. But, that teenaged girl is still somewhere inside me, and sometimes her experience steers my emotions, especially when I attempt to shut those emotions down.

Why am I sharing this? Because I owe it to those who frequent my blog and discovered my comment section mysteriously disabled, perhaps wondering why my little spot on the web was suddenly under authoritarian rule. And, because I owe it to myself to visit those difficult spots in my past so that I may live more wholly in my present.

Unfinished Business

2006-06-28T02:16:00.000-05:00

Some of the best advice I’ve ever received came from The Philosopher just yesterday:

“Just ride it out, your tears are there for a reason so follow what you're learning wherever it leads . . . "

“It” was a wave of grief for my high school friend, Chris, lost in Iraq earlier this year. Though it was as real and tangible as the hot tears streaming down my cheeks, I felt selfish and undeserving when measuring it against the pain Chris’s wife, children, parents and siblings surely feel.

Precipitating the tears was my stumble onto a site run by a man who goes by the moniker “Q.” Q lives simply and follows his heart. Thus far, his heart has guided him to the memorial services of 71 fallen soldiers. A photographer, Q shoots several hundred photos at each service, quietly from the background. Some of his photos can be found on his site; a reminder our military men and women are not statistics. The remaining photos are given to the soldiers’ families.

Last January, Q photographed Chris’s memorial service. Last week, I discovered the photos. They were both a priceless gift and the provider of a reality I’ve struggled to wrap my mind around: that on a rainy Pacific Northwest day, my friend was laid to rest.

I wrote to Q, sharing a little about Chris and thanking him for bringing back memories – and bringing home realities. He wrote back, telling me he’d phoned Chris’s mother, read her my letter and would be mailing me a disk with an additional 400 photos. I was floored. And grateful.

In the last few days, I’ve poured over those photos and reconnected with the mother of my high school sweetheart, who I was finally able to thank for the best moments of my youth. Because of her graciousness, the time elapsed since my last goodbye with Chris seems just a little shorter.

It wouldn’t have happened had a man named “Q” not followed his heart and a soldier’s mother not opened hers.

Below is a video I put together using many of Q’s photos. It isn’t a political statement. It is just my way of following where my tears lead. And, this time, they’ve led to some pretty neat places and very good people.

Please watch it with Chris’s family in mind – and keep them in your thoughts.

Q's Site: iraqwarheroes.org

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Oh Crap

2006-06-22T14:48:00.000-05:00

Anyone reading here with regularity knows I am not a foo-foo girl. You also know that recently, necessity demanded I make an appointment at a beauty salon to have my hair “done.” I can count on one hand the number of times in my adult life I’ve visited a salon and equate the experience with going to the dentist.

I picked a random salon from the yellow pages, then grilled the receptionist about the stylists as if I was scheduling open-heart surgery. “Give me someone patient and empathic; someone not wild; someone who will listen to my concerns and not approach my head like a makeover show,” I requested, and then booked my appointment.

I have to digress here to discuss my daughter. Like her mother, she is, at heart, a tomboy. Through fourth and fifth grade, she hung out with a pack of boys. They were a neat group of kids who made it their mission to act as ambassadors for every new kid at school, greeting each one, inviting them into their group and teaching them how to navigate the playground and social circles of elementary school. The teachers began to depend on my daughter and her friends to ease the transition of newcomers. And, two years into the tradition, the kids began to realize they were doing something special.

The day Justin transferred to their school, they welcomed him into their group. My daughter happily relayed the days’ events, telling me all about the nervous new kid and how they’d put him at ease. I was a proud Mommy.

But the next day, my daughter came home completely distraught. “I sat alone on the playground today. My friends wouldn’t play with me,” she told me, tears streaming down her cheeks. I prodded for information: “Did you have a disagreement with the boys? Did someone do something mean?” Finally, she confessed. The new kid she’d welcomed into her group was horrified a pack of boys would welcome a girl into their midst. In one recess flat, he’d convinced my daughter’s friends to “ditch the chick,” that “cool boys don’t play with girls.” And, just as quick, the merry band of ambassadors permanently disbanded.

My daughter’s trauma might have ended there had this kid not shortly become the bane of her existence. He teased and tormented. He sat behind her on the school bus, making her ride an elementary school hell with his physical and emotional jabs.

I told my daughter that Justin would, by the time high school arrived, kick himself for treating her so dispassionately; that he’d eventually mature, look at my gorgeous girl and feel like a total shmuck for being such an asswipe. I instructed her to look forward to the day he might sheepishly ask her to a dance or game and she could look him in the eye and say, “Remember fifth grade? Bite me.”

Unfortunately, seat assignments for the middle school bus again placed Asswipe directly behind her and the tormenting continued. My daughter kept it to herself until she could take no more and, finally, asked for my assistance. By this time, I’d lost all compassion for the little twerp and was ready to throttle him. I promised to call the school and report him first thing Monday.

Then, I headed to my appointment at the beauty salon.

As I sat squirming through my “beauty consultation,” I had Asswipe on my mind. I visualized ratting him out to the authorities. I imagined a confrontation with his mother, upon which I’d tell her what a little shit she’d raised. My new perky hairdresser, immune to my mood, animatedly waved her scissors in the air, proclaiming she was about to perform a fabulous transformation. I relented, handing over all authority for the outcome (hey, she was holding scissors!) She began whacking, chopping and chitchatting as I busied myself with fantasies of revenge for the actions of my daughter’s bully.

“So, where ‘bouts do you live?” she asked. Whack. Whack. Whack. I told her the name of our road. “Wow! Me too,” she proclaimed, “Small world!” She shared she and her family had relocated from out of state the prior year, how difficult the adjustment had been for her terribly sensitive and sweet son. Whack. Whack. Whack. I shared our relocation story. We noted our kids were the same age and attended the same school. “I bet they’re on the same bus route,” she suggested, as suddenly, thing began clicking in my mind.

Oh, crap.

“Hmm, probably,” I responded, “what’s your son’s name?”

“Asswipe,” she said.

Okay, she didn’t say “Asswipe,” but she said HIS name, that little twerp, the bane of my daughter’s existence. And she said it as she brandished a lock of my hair and a snapping pair of scissors above my head.

Oh crap! Whack. Whack. Whack. Should I say something? Whack. Whack. Whack.

But I wanted neither short nor technicolored hair. “How long’s this color-thing going to take?” I asked, hoping I could escape without incident.

“About four hours.”

Oh CRAP.

So for four hours, I sat in that chair, at her mercy, staring at the framed photo of Asswipe proudly displayed on her workstation. My fantasies of confrontation (which isn’t my style and would have never come to fruition anyway) faded into acceptance of the fact my appearance had become forever dependent upon a positive relationship with this woman, my stylist.

Once home, I reported my dilemma to my daughter, who reacted with an unmitigated glee that confused me. “Ha! Wait ‘till I tell him his Mom and my Mom are FRIENDS!” she announced.

The next day, she reported his reaction:

“OH. CRAP!”

Sometimes, things have a way of working themselves out.

Father's Day

2006-06-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

Rescue Me, Again

2006-06-13T23:56:00.000-05:00

There are three words that, when strung together in a sentence, grate on my every nerve: “Mom, I’m bored.”

My daughter, twelve-going-on-twenty, has learned to avoid the use of this phrase, not because she is particularly mindful about the state of my nerves, but because she’d rather spare herself my reaction; a reaction so predictable she can recite it herself: “I’ve never been bored a day in my life. When I was your age, I was working at the . . . “

She has spent the beginnings of summer break with a phone attached to her ear and video game controller fused to her hand. I was beginning to worry we’d have to consult a surgeon for removal of both. I braced myself for the inevitable “Mom, I’m bored,” while resisting the temptation to launch pre-emptive suggestions as to how she might entertain herself. As any parent of a ‘tweenager knows, the only good ideas come from the ‘tween herself and any suggestion coming from a parent automatically qualifies as a bad idea, born of the stone age and totally uncool.

Finally, she approached me and asked, “Mom, do you think the pet shop would let me volunteer?”

I think we were in the car and half way to the pet shop before she finished the question. I was thrilled she came up with her own solution, even more thrilled it involved actual work and, of course, proud she chose work involving animals. We met with the owner, arranged a schedule and she became an official volunteer.

Yesterday was her first day. I expected she’d phone for a ride home after two or three hours. She happily stayed six. However, she did phone home halfway through the workday. “Mom, some guy just came in asking how to save baby bunnies. He left his phone number and wants you to call . . . “

The second cardinal rule of ‘tweenhood; the one following “No parental idea is a cool idea,” is “Never let on when you are completely excited about something that thrills your mother.” I picked up my little volunteer, who diligently attempted to hide her enthusiasm about the day’s events. She did, however, let it slip that her new boss proclaimed she worked harder and faster than any of his paid employees. I saw her sideways glance as she covertly studied my face for signs of pride. Rest assured, she found what she was looking for.

“So, are we going to help the bunnies?” she asked, as if she didn’t already know the answer. We picked them up from the home of rather intimidating looking tattooed man who was absolutely beside himself with worry for the tiny little creatures found in his yard when their nest was disturbed. His rough exterior all but disappeared as he described his dusk to dawn vigil for a mother rabbit who never appeared.

These babies wont be with us long. Despite their tiny size, they are near the age their mother lets them fend for themselves. But, they were dehydrated and lethargic, so we will rehab them until they gain their strength. After only a few hours, they are looking bright-eyed and perky, thanks to an animal-loving tattooed man and my daughter, who facilitated their rescue.

Did I mention I’m proud of that kid?

Rescue Me

2006-06-11T14:18:00.000-05:00

Explaining my absence is simple. Summer “break” provides moms with lots of summer and little “break.” And my workload reached a fevered pitch as an eight-month project reached fruition last week. I could leave it at that, but it wouldn’t embrace the entire truth.

Two weeks ago, I locked and loaded a touching animal rescue story into my upload window, the guts of the tale inspired by my anticipation of a little one being delivered all the way from Indiana. The article simply awaited an ending; an ending, I figured, the tiny six-week-old raccoon – and my camera – would provide, without a whole lot of effort from me.

Rehabbing an orphaned wild animal is an enormous task involving ‘round-the-clock feedings, cleanings and medical attention. With a raccoon, one also has to teach him to forage for food in the wild to prepare him for his eventual release. Beyond the physical demands and commitment of time, a rehabber faces the constant pull on her heartstrings as she tries to resist the temptation to totally domesticate whatever needy animal is temporarily under her charge.

Still, I imagined me and my little ‘coon spending hours at the pond and in the creek bed playing hide-and-seek with fish, nuts and berries as I acclimated him to his natural habitat. And, I hoped and prayed I would, eventually, experience the satisfaction rehabbers know when they encounter “their” animal in the wild and it looks at them without familiarity, going about it’s business as a wild animal. There is something both satisfying and magical about seeing first hand that, even when nature’s course is interrupted by the stupidity of human beings, it can be restored.

Human stupidity is what brought this little critter to me. A speeding motorist hit his mother and five siblings on Memorial Day weekend. The only survivor, he might not have made it at all had someone not witnessed the accident, scooped him up and brought him to me.

I fell in love the moment I peeked into the cardboard box in which he’d been delivered, the moment he scrambled into my arms, purring like a kitten. Unfortunately, upon inspection, it was cleared he’d not been spared contact with the speeding car and wouldn’t survive his injuries. We spent five hours together. I kept him warm and hydrated and he purred in my arms until his last breath. When he lost his struggle, I felt crushed. And mad: mad at human beings, so busy with their weekend plans, they could neither slow down nor stop for a mother raccoon crossing the road with her babies. And, however irrational, mad at myself for my inability to stop the acceleration of death.

A few days later, still carrying the feeling of disappointment with both humanity, and myself, I awoke to two stray golden retrievers romping through our yard. I corralled them into our fenced area. They were big, sweet dogs. But, they stunk to high heaven, their fur was matted and filthy and their collars dug dangerously into their necks. Their tags directed me to animal control, which steered me towards their owner. He didn’t pick up his phone, so I drove to his house where I discovered the dogs’ dwelling – a fenced back yard they’d dug out of so many times I stopped counting the holes after 30 or so. I left a note on his door telling him where he could find his dogs.

Again, I was in no position to help these creatures. Their owner broke no laws. They were licensed, vaccinated and well fed. They were neglected by my standards, but not animal control’s. Just as I was preparing to bathe and groom them, their relieved owner arrived to fetch them. It was clear he loved his dogs, but felt overwhelmed by their needs. He said he was taking them to be groomed and trying to address his fence issue. I had no choice but to return them. But, again, I felt I’d failed.

So, these two failed rescue attempts left me both in a funk and in conflict about how to process them. I could blog about my disgust with most of humanity, but I worried it would appear insulting to my readers – all of whom, I assume, are of the human variety.

I could fault myself for being moved by the plight of animals more so than people, but I’ve too long accepted it as one of my eccentricities – and, frankly, it is something I am proud of. So, I’ve been waiting: waiting for a positive rescue experience to come along and reduce the sting of the last two or for a solution to my sense of failure to present itself.

Then yesterday, driving home from the park, both options occurred almost simultaneously. On a busy boulevard near our home, a mother duck attempted to marshal her eight babies through 40 mph traffic and into a nearby pond. We stopped and provided an escort. They reached the pond unscathed.

Not a block away, we happened upon several baby rabbits engaged in a similar journey. We blocked traffic until they made it safely across the road. My daughter and I wondered aloud whether we’d encounter yet another bunch of critters in need of assistance before pulling into our driveway. Fortunately, we didn’t, though we joked about encountering two litters of critters in a row seeming a little Twilight Zone-ish.

Once home, I made contact with a non-profit animal rehab center. The philosopher and I registered our country property with them as an official wildlife release site, promising to keep our forested area in its natural state and even feed transitioning wildlife when need be. I suspect my relationship with this organization will continue in other ways. I’m excited about the prospect – and have lost a bit of the helplessness remaining from my experience with our little raccoon.

[Note: The raccoon photo is not of “my” raccoon, but looks just like him. I took the duck and rabbit photos following their journey through suburbia.]

It's in the Details

2006-05-23T11:21:00.000-05:00

It wasn’t my first trip to this small Midwest town, once the biggest city west of St. Louis. Then, it was steeped in the riches of farmers and manufacturers. Now, the ghosts of the Battle of Lexington haunt the intricate porches of its Victorian mansions. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the echoes of a thousand footsteps upon its 150-year-old cobblestone sidewalks. This place is American history.

Six months ago, upon my first trip here, I didn’t notice. I saw only a long, windy road dividing cornfields that stretched into the horizon. The quaintness of the town escaped my radar. I hadn’t come as a tourist. I didn’t want to be here at all. As we headed towards the military academy, as old as the town itself and assembled on its outskirts, my heart and mind were too fatigued by the months of stress leading us here to notice the details.

The boy in the passenger side of the car, my son, wasn’t having fun either. At that moment, the two of us had more in common than he would ever believe. As his protests reached a fevered pitch, I struggled to stay in the present, to remain an adult, a parent. While he saw his mother sitting next to him, determined to complete this journey and, hopefully, steer his life back on track, I was reliving the singularly largest trauma of my own teenage-hood – and having a hard time keeping my perspective.

Am I doing the right thing? Will this lead to the preservation of our family or forever damage us all? Will he, one day, reflect on this moment with understanding or will this break his spirit?

The answers to these questions were certain a day before. But the moment that long, winding road came into view, I became, again, the teenaged girl being escorted by an apologetic and empathic police officer to a foster home in the middle of nowhere – at the end of a long, windy road dividing acres of cornfields.

Logic demanded the circumstances here were different. My adoptive mother sent me back to the state while her boyfriend sat in handcuffs in the local jailhouse, an abuse charge hovering over him. He couldn’t return home if I were to stay, so she chose to return me to state care. Reason said I was parenting my son as she hadn’t parented me. But when your head fills with the sights and sounds of past trauma, the voice of reason can become nothing more than an annoying whisper.

It’s hard to see details when ugly memories bubble to the surface, when the voices of the past – those that told you what a disappointment you were, what a failure you’d be, what a mistake it had been to bring you into a family – distort your adult decisions. Those voices can undermine a lifetime of soul searching, growth, learning and understanding in an instant, if you don’t turn around and face them.

What my son didn’t know, as he cursed my decision to send him to a military academy, was that my past traveled with us on this journey. He was, in essence, sitting beside a teenaged girl who had just lost her entire world as his mother struggled to remember the details of their present lives. He didn’t know I fell to pieces when we said goodbye.

The six ensuing months brought perspective. The details of our present life came back into focus. Last weekend, I returned to the town. This time, the long, winding road welcomed me into a place of American history. I wandered the cobblestone walks. I appreciated and absorbed the details of the grand historical homes. I sat on the lawn of city hall, wondering how many civil war soldiers had fallen nearby. I marveled at the intricate molding on the Victorian homes and buildings. I saw all the details I’d missed before.

And then I attended my son’s dismissal ceremonies. His dress blues proudly displayed his new rank of “Private” as he stood at attention on the parade grounds amidst a sea of cadets. When the General ordered “Dismissed!” and the cannon fired, sounding the end of the school year, the 126th Corp of cadets threw their hats in the air and ran from the field, towards their parents – and home.

Our drive home was our best moment in recent years. The difficult months leading up to this decision seemed a million miles away as he shared his school adventures, boasted of his new rank and beamed with pride over his accomplishments. We talked about how difficult our drive to this place had been – and I told him about the teenaged girl and her ride to a foster home.

“You made the right decision, Mom,” he said. And, I knew he was right.

--------------------
[you can visit the weekend's photos here]

How Much is that Doggy . . .

2006-05-16T18:50:00.000-05:00

Nervous, scrawny, obedience school flunky. Does not play well with others. Cannot wag tail. Requires medication (canine prozac). Allergic. Flea-bitten. LOVES cats. Rarely responsive to affection. VERY vocal–barks and whines all day. ATHLETIC – Can climb, jump, dig under or otherwise squeeze through any make or model fence. Dependable – will always let you know the location of nearest cat. Almost housetrained! Requires muzzle.

RESPONDS TO THE FOLLOWING COMMANDS:

“Run”, “Don’t stop”, “Lick the cat”, “Chase the cat”, “Eat the cat”, “Pee on my favorite throw rug”, “Roll over and play neurotic”

IF YOU PURCHASE THIS TREASURE, WE'LL INCLUDE AS AN ADDED BONUS:

Enormous veterinarian and pharmacy bills!; Her favorite chew toys(what remains of our couch, socks, shoes, bedspread and plastic tableware.); Certified vaccination and quarantine history; Registration with the AKC/WCTDA(AKC Won’t Claim This Dog Association); Muzzl; County permits authorizing the harboring of dangerous and/or stupid animals; Whatever remains of our bottle of tranquilizers (for you, not the dog.); Earplugs(see: VOCAL, above); My favorite throw rug.

Remembering . . .

2006-05-14T18:38:00.000-05:00

Charlie wrote two soul-stirring pieces about the consequence of trauma upon the human soul. They carried my mind to a thousand places. I visited my own traumas, sitting a while with the child in me who can still feel abandoned and unloved, the walls of a foster home closing in upon her and the words of her abusers echoing in her mind until her very being accepts them as truths.

His essays took me to the heart of each of the combat veterans I know and love; To Mitchell, my traveling friend who wanders the globe, looking for a way to love himself; To each of The Crawfish, warriors of soul-battles and slayers of personal demons; To Carrie, the daughter of a vet living with her alcoholic mother while struggling through college and self-acceptance. Without words passing between us, I know all about the screaming, tyrannical words echoing in her mind.

They took me to my high school friend, a 101st Airborne Combat Team soldier, killed by an explosive device in Iraq on New Year’s Day, 2006. At this place, I lingered a while. I thought of his wife, who will face her first Mother’s Day without the presence of the father of her children. I thought of the teenaged boy I knew – and the difference I saw in his eyes in the photos displayed beneath newspaper headlines. Those eyes witnessed the killing fields of Bosnia. Those eyes witnessed the atrocities all human beings are capable of committing. Those eyes gave passageway to a soul battered by the horrors of war. And I finally understood why he returned, after an eleven-year hiatus from the military, to lead a team of soldiers through the desert of Iraq. It wasn’t about love of country. It wasn’t about patriotism. It was about his desire to spare his charges the horrors he had seen, to simultaneously face his own demons and return his men, undamaged, to their families. And in that act, he became a both patriot and lover of his countrymen.

Charlie’s words took me to the second story bedroom of a nondescript house in a quiet Wisconsin neighborhood, painted in the illegal offerings of a black market baby ring, to the birth of my soulmate whose life changed forever when an exchange of dollars was made for a baby – for him. His war wasn’t fought with M-16s or mortars, but it was a war just the same. And he’s fought it with courage and conviction few people possess.

And then, strangely enough, Charlie’s essays took me to Mother’s Day. To every mother, left with no place to visit her child but memories and war memorials. And to every young woman who vowed her children would never experience the pain she suffered – and kept that promise. To my own mothers, who are absent from my life but rarely removed from my experience of life. Remembering helps me keep my promises.

And, finally, to my own children, who I hope and pray will never have to question the meaning of their childhoods.

[for my friend, Charlie, with thanks for the ruminations]

The Key to a Good Relationship

2006-05-13T11:46:00.000-05:00

When I began blogging a few months ago, I kept the endeavor to myself. I wanted to get my feet wet, to see if my efforts would catch momentum and morph into a new pastime before embarrassing myself by promoting something that died before going to press.

Around my thirtieth or so post, it became clear I’d crossed the barrier between fading interest and enthusiasm. I’d personalized my page, linked to my photography and even bought myself a small digital camera – for those moments one just has to capture in effort to write the perfect essay.

I adore the dialogue in my comments section and the sense of community this format provides. I’ve connected with some incredible people, feeling so grateful our paths have crossed. After leaving my job teaching art, I’ve discovered an outlet for my creativity – the lack of which has been gnawing on my psyche since my cross-country move. And, I’ve regained a passageway to understanding myself in relation to the world. Starting this blog has been a good thing for me, in the spiritually fulfilling sense.

But the one thing missing was the presence of The Philosopher.

I began dropping casual hints: “What did you do today?” he’d ask.

“Wrote an article for my blog,” I’d answer, waiting for him to ask how he might find his way here. Silence. Hmm.

I tried luring him in with flattery: “That’s the most clever thing you’ve ever said, I think I’ll steal it and put it in my blog.” Silence. Again.

I tempted him with the brilliance of others, telling him about the comedians, the thinkers, the activists and all other brands of fabulous writers I’ve encountered. No bite. Not even a nibble.

Then I pulled out the big guns and began firing off threats: “If you don’t stop that right now, Mister, I’ll blog about it! Ten million people could discover what you just did!” No tremble or cower. Not even a whimper.

Finally, I came right out and said it (who says women are hard to figure out?): “I am waiting for you to ask to see my blog.” Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. My feelings were hurt. I didn’t understand his disinterest. I began obsessing about it. Had our relationship reached an impasse – I mean, when your beloved doesn’t want to see your blog, doesn’t that mean something . . . something bad?

I distracted myself by writing a piece about The Philosopher’s basketball games. And then I waited, as women do, for those three little words they need to hear when feeling insecure, unworthy or both. Just a little affirmation was all I needed. And finally, those three words passed his lips . . .

“Where’s your blog?”

Be still, my heart! I sent him a link and he dove right in. He loved it. He loved the layout, the photos, the writing. Redemption! He told his friends and co-workers. My stat meter was soon registering hits from his office. Shortly thereafter, he presented me with my dream camera, saying the three words I really wanted to hear:

“Love your blog.” Awww.

So, of course I asked, “How come you didn’t want to see it before?”

He told me he thought I’d been spending my hours in a chat room or message board. “I had no idea what a blog was,” he said.

Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

The Menagerie

2006-05-09T15:10:00.000-05:00

If there is such a thing as parallel Universes and life after death, when I die I want to return as one of our pets. The hounds, spoiled to their rotten cores, sleep on memory foam beds when they choose not to crowd us from our own. Car rides usually include a stop for ice cream – for them. Their grocery bill is larger than our own and they see a doctor more frequently than any of us. The Philosopher complains they are better fed than him. And he’s right.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been bringing home strays and orphans. As a child, it wasn’t easy. My mother had a nose for anything out of place in her home and usually found whatever critter I’d smuggled into my bedroom. The end result was usually the humane society. It followed suit that as soon as I found myself free from her rules, I’d begin building my own private menagerie. In addition to pulling dogs from their death row quarters at the pound, over the years we’ve rehabilitated baby birds, rabbits, turtles and even squirrels.

My children have followed in their mother’s footsteps, though my son prefers bringing home slithery things and my daughter has perfected the sad, pleading-eyed pet shop beg. Our basement has hosted tanks full of all sorts of critters who are brought back to health then returned to their natural habitats, including the hungry duck my son rescued from a storm drain last summer. When my daughter’s guinea pig failed to land a dismount from his own personal jungle gym, he was rushed to the vet, x-rayed and put in an itty-bitty traction device. And our bearded dragon is about to move into a condominium fit for reptile royalty.

Lately, things have been quiet in our little animal kingdom. Turtle Town has no new inhabitants. The basement rehab tanks are empty. Even the dim-witted robins, who insist on building a much too small nest on our front windowsill every year, then squawk in disgruntled screeches when their naked little offspring fall from it, have moved to more suitable dwellings. Though I’m sure our acreage is bustling with the new life spring brings, thus far none have needed our assistance. That is a very good thing. Wild animals fare better without human intervention.

Sunday, I mounted The Beast and headed toward the pasture for an afternoon of mowing. The Beast is the Hummer of lawnmowers; a churning, grinding machine able to pulverize a grassy field at 10mph. It is the perfect solution for people like me, who have lost the will to do manual labor. I compensate for the fact it is about as delicate as a bulldozer in the rainforest by making sure its cutting deck is well above rabbit nest level and paying careful attention when I’m in areas that may harbor critters.

I’d nearly finished when the rain started. I decided to call it a day – after just one more sweep. I rounded the corner of the pasture, got ready for the straightaway and, suddenly, up from the grass burst a female mallard duck. She hobbled off a ways, looking sick and broken. Having no idea ducks play possum to distract predators from their nests, I burst into tears, apologizing to her while rushing to her aid. She made an immediate, miraculous recovery and flew off. Then I saw her nest. Inside were 11, oval white eggs, warm to the touch and still in tact.

We spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the internet, trying to determine if she’d return to her nest and what to do if she didn’t. We found no Disney movie endings. Incubating, hatching and raising the ducklings wouldn’t pose a problem, but they need momma duck to teach them predator avoidance. Being nearly the last remaining oasis of acreage in our corner of suburbia, our wooded area is crawling with predators and our pond serves as their feeding ground. In short, our potential ducklings were doomed, and my conscience heavy with guilt. We returned to the nest, constructed tall walls of cut grass around its edges and camoflaged it with branches and weeds, hoping momma duck would return.

And she did. With any luck at all, we’ll soon witness her escorting her ducklings to the pond.

At the Park

2006-05-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

If the park is void of either ice or 120-degree heat indexes, Friday afternoons it hosts the friendliest basketball game in town.

It’s a welcoming place, the trees bowing over the court protectively, shading its occupants. When they drop their leaves in preparation for winter, they offer a view of the Mississippi River as an apology for their nakedness. And in the spring, they welcome us back with random blossoms, as if anticipating our arrival.

Rows of unkempt little houses grace the park’s sidelines, but rarely do their occupants visit. It’s as if they’ve grown so accustomed to it’s presence they overlook its beckoning changes in the same way one fails to notice the aging of their beloved dog or the baby fat disappearing from their child’s cheeks.

It began three years ago, the result of an unlikely pairing. A doctor and his client reminisced about their high school basketball days. A week later, one brought a ball and they spent the lunch hour at the local gym. The following week, one led the other to this little park, its aged court and welcoming trees. They liked it so much they decided to meet each Friday for a friendly game of one-on-one and the journey back in time to high school.

Others soon joined. They brought friends. Wives and children arrived to cheer, but instead joined the game. Soon, the weekly event drew spectators, who spend their time on the sidelines in companionship with their dogs.

At the park, everyone is welcome, no matter if you’ve never held a ball or if you scored the winning goal of your high school championship. Everyone gets a jersey. Everyone gets to play.

The view from the nearby homes might suggest a group of old buddies, trying to reclaim their youth, but the experience of each person on the court tells a different story. A common thread connects these people: a war fought thirty-some years ago, one they didn’t leave behind. They’ve fought their war in different ways, in different places, throughout the decades. Some were workaholics; some have seen the innards of a prison cell. Some lost years sheathed in a fog of addiction. Others passed as untouched until the dam broke, releasing the memories and pain. They are CEOs, business owners, farmers, salesmen and long-haul truckers. They are husbands and fathers. And every week for an hour or so, they are friends.

Their war created feelings of comradery they’ve not been able to replicate in civilian life. And it generated warrior instincts rarely proper in this world. Each player experiences the court – this game – differently. For some, it bridges the gap between the mind of a 16 year old and the body’s evolution, taking them back in time to a place filled with the memories and music of their youth. For others, it is the practice ground for understanding themselves and their interactions with the world; a taste of the comradery they long for. For me, it is the chance to observe and to spend a moment in the past of the man I love – a place I wish I’d been, but wasn’t. For all of us, it’s about winning private battles, not literal basketball games.

They could have named themselves after a ferocious jungle dweller. They could wear jerseys emblazoned with the moniker of “Warriors” because, each of them, no matter their history, has battled demons of one kind or another. But, they didn’t.

They named the team after a creature that tends to its own business and the daily responsibilities of its own survival; a creature that doesn’t display its inborn weapons of defense until backed into an inescapable corner. They chose this creature because it represents who they are striving to become.

They call themselves The Crawfish.

For all of us, there is an unspoken magic created in this park – something words cannot capture in the same way one cannot describe with adequacy the patterns on a butterfly’s wings or the feelings generated by a favorite song. It follows us home, churning around in our minds until it is silenced by the rigors of daily life.

And so we return, week after week, hoping to recapture it.

-----------------------------------

(This one's for The Philosopher)

The Joy of Self-Employment

2006-05-04T18:56:00.000-05:00

I’m in the second phase of my working life: the one where I walk away from teaching to pursue a dream of a home-based business, void of everything staff related. No more staff: meetings, luncheons, picnics, parties, in-services, appreciations or, god forbid, “strategy planning retreats.” In this phase of life, I will work without meetings, make decisions without administrators, set my own schedule and achieve financial independence, still with plenty of free time to nourish my spirit with writing. What could be better?

I fulfilled all the obligatory requirements of starting one’s own business: license, investments in tools of the trade and portfolio building. Things are coming to fruition. Soon, I will knock some poor IRS agent right off his chair when he reads a number higher than zero on my tax returns.

I’d like to share a day of my bliss with you. Perhaps it will inspire you to break away from the corporate world and bask in the glory and fulfillment of self-employment. Yesterday is a good example . . .

The school bus pulled away from the driveway, carrying my youngest off to school. On the way back to the house, I noticed my clematis was in bloom, my hostas were coming up and the wisteria weaving itself through the porch rails looked prettier than ever before. I made my way into the house and towards the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee and settle in for the day’s work. 8:15: an early start.

To my horror and surprise, in my brief absence, my tile floors sprouted several large, canine-induced lakes of green bile. An urping, burping German shepherd stood in the center of her creation, her watery eyes peering up at me as if to say Well lady, don’t just stand there, get a mop and get busy.

I found the source of her discontent (a bag of molding duck bread), cleaned up her mess, inspected her for damage then handed her over to my other-half, who was enjoying a morning off. He claimed to be so engrossed in a new philosophy book he simply didn’t hear the dog redecorating the living room. Suspiciously, I returned to the coffee pot. 9:00: Still plenty of time left to get to work.

The phone rang – my daughter begging me to deliver a forgotten science book. I quickly tossed on the clothes piled atop my laundry hamper, threw my hair into a ponytail, grabbed the book and ran out the door. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the floor to ceiling windows of the school entrance, I realized I looked like every middle-schooler’s most embarrassing moment, right down to my bare footed Birkenstocks. Fortunately, she met me at the drop-off site without detection from her peers. I checked my watch. 9:45: I’m not too far behind.

A small hallway separates our bedroom (herein referred to as The Philosopher’s Chamber) from my office. Void of inhabitants when I left the house, the space now overflowed with bedspreads, sheets and blankets. Evidently, the shepherd was still blowing her breakfast. “I’ve fallen in love with Spinoza!” the philosopher proclaimed, waving his newest book in the air at me.

“That’s great honey,’ I answered, “Does he do laundry?” He questioned what bug crawled up my nether regions while I hauled his catch of the day to the laundry room. 10:30: The morning a complete waste.

As I reheated my stale coffee, I caught a strange odor, realizing it came from me. I not only looked like a vagrant, I now smelled like one. A warm, relaxing bath was out of the question with the washing machine sucking the life from the water heater. I did a quick cold-water dance in the shower, cursing the yurking dog and the laundry impaired Philosopher. 11:00: All is not lost.

Fresh, dressed and holding my thrice-heated coffee, I attempted to stealthily sneak past The Philosopher’s Chamber en route to my office. You see, when The Philosopher is high on Plato, Kant or his new love, Spinoza, he is also convinced his soulmate shares his eagerness, no matter her obligations. One glimpse of me and I’d be snared into an hour of philosophical alliteration. “Listen to this,” he announced as he waved me into The Chamber. Snagged. I’d be lucky to reach my desk before noon.

From the porch, I kissed him goodbye as he headed off to work. Dark clouds rolled in, thunder rumbled in the distance and a breeze kicked up, shaking the wisteria. Rejuvenated by the quiet of an empty house and my favorite weather, I fired up the computer and dove into my work. 1:35: Time to get a few hours in before evening.

The hours passed quickly. I reveled in my productivity while outside my window, the storm gained momentum. As I put the final touches on my project, a tremendous strike of lightening simultaneously flared and bellowed, immediately followed by the sound of power draining from the house. My computer monitor spit out a dying blip and my office went dark.

There I sat. No boss telling me to go home for the day. No tech guy on the phone assuring me he could recover my work. No emergency staff meeting called to announce things would be right by Monday. Not even a co-worker to bitch and complain to. 5:00 and I hadn’t accomplished a damn thing all day.

The Philosopher burst through the door enthusiastically. “How’s work?” he asked.

They tell me he’ll make a full recovery

On Writing

2006-05-04T10:04:00.000-05:00

I hate the word "blog." It rolls of the tongue sounding suspiciously like the wretched noise my dogs make immediately before they decorate my bedspread with yesterday's kibble. And in any of its incantations (blogging, blogesphere, blogger, et al) it especially minimizes the beauty and creativity of some of the fabulous writing one can find in this little corner of the world wide web.

The last few days, I've stumbled across some of the most touching, inspiring and beautiful writing I have ever encountered. And, that's what it is: Writing. Good stuff. Brilliant stuff. Stuff that makes you feel and think.

So, rather than ruminate on something in my life today, I want to share the places I've been the last couple days. Please go visit. Pack a kleenex and an open mind. You'll be glad you did.

Charlie Callahan's Travelling Man | Clew's ANGEL | Mia's Blog Against Disablism essay

Blogging Against Disablism

2006-04-30T17:58:00.000-05:00

As a child, I attended an experimental inclusive elementary school. Half of the campus hosted students with Down’s Syndrome. The remaining classrooms housed the neighborhood kids and children from across the district who had various disabilities.

There was no teasing, not because we were instructed to refrain, but because it didn’t occur to us to do so. If a newcomer uttered a negative word, it was put to a halt immediately – usually before any adult had to intervene. Like many of the students, I spent my mornings before school assisting in the physical therapy room and my recesses with a boy named Paul.

Paul’s wheelchair didn’t confine us to quiet play. We spent most our recesses together with a pudgley playground “Duty” (that’s what we called her) chasing after us, yelling, “Stop right noooow! You’re going to killllllll him!” upon which Paul would yell, “Go faster!” as we scram-tailed it down whatever decline we’d chosen to tackle. Scenes like this happened all over the playground. They were neither noteworthy or exceptional, nor were any of the students. It was our life. It’s how we learned, played and interacted.

The announcement came towards the end of my fourth-grade year. State officials decided to shut down our school. They told us most of our friends with disabilities would be routed to a new school, designed for “them” and a few would transition into another school with “us.” No one had ever sorted us according to our physical abilities. Formerly not part of our vocabulary, the words “us” and “them” became our first indicator that life outside our campus was different.

Our determination to keep the entire student-body together vamped into a fourth grade protest. We cared about each other. We did not want to be separated. Counselors arrived to “help with the transition.” Through their counsel, we learned the outside world was not like our world. We were warned our friends might not be treated well at our new school and encouraged to become “voices of change,” to stand up for our friends, teach students at our new school what we already knew and forgive their ignorance.

By the close of the year, we were optimistic, inspired and out to change the world. On the last day of school, local reporters converged on our classroom, selecting a few children to interview and photograph. I landed on the front page of our newspaper, quoted as stating “we’re gonna change [our new school]. The atmosphere will get better.” (Precocious little brat, wasn’t I?)

The new school year began without my friend, Paul, and many other friends who now rode buses to “their school.” But, it also began with my little brother. Like Paul, David had cerebral palsy.

They called him “cripple,” “sped,” “gimp” and “retard.” He was poked and prodded, kicked and pushed over (the latter happening especially often because it was so easy, given David’s difficulty keeping his balance.) And me, the eleven year old who planned to change “the atmosphere” at my new school, learned about hate, ignorance and apathy.

Hate spreads. It spread from a small group of bullies to a larger group of kids who discovered taunting my brother was a one-way ticket to social acceptance. It spread to our new school “Duty” who turned a blind eye. It spread even to the principle, who found paddling and suspending my brother following an assault easier than suspending the assaulters – or addressing the root of the problem.

Finally, after months of rushing to the playground every recess to stand guard over my brother, the hate spread to me too. When I saw my brother lying on the ground crying, the lead bully standing above him with a satisfied grin, I pounced. He wasn’t much bigger than me, but he was a boy.

And I pulverized him.

I’ve never been proud of that, mostly because I didn’t change the world as I’d been directed to do – as I believed I could do. I didn’t change the school. I didn't change one bully. My brother transfered to another school and I was instructed to make nice with his tormentors. I didn’t, but there was no more bloodshed.

My brother and I are now in our thirties. I went on to teach children with disabilities; he headed off to L.A. and carved himself a nitche in the music industry. Neither of us forget the contrast of what came before, and after, our inclusive school. I suppose it serves as a reminder to those of us who parent, teach, counsel, love or are, ourselves, persons with disabilities, both the power of compassion and the danger of apathy.

Meet the Turtlesons

2006-04-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

One of the first signs of impending Missouri summer is the emergence of box turtles from their winter hibernation. I get a first hand view, being host to “Turtle Town,” my little turtle rehab center.

When I first moved to Missouri, my inner-animal rescuer couldn’t ignore the turtles. They wander across highways, looking for turtle tail. Some make it. Some don’t. When I find injured survivors, I bring them home where the kids and I nurse their injuries. Those that can’t be returned to the wild (turtles have a homing instinct and cannot simply be deposited in the closest field) become official Turtletown citizens.

Yesterday the Turtlesons, our current residents, dug from their hibernation holes, poked their little heads out and toddled off for a nice lunch. Fortunately, I was just cruising through Turtletown and caught it on film.
(Aw, quit complaining. You’re lucky I didn’t videotape it – now that would be really boring.)

My friend, Mitchell

2006-04-27T23:57:00.000-05:00

Though he was headed for a quick trip to Bangkok, my last email from him came from a cyber-café somewhere in Calcutta. We have a deal, Mitchell and me – I understand why he wanders the globe and he promises to check in occasionally to let me know he’s breathing, wherever he is. A couple times a year, I am lucky enough to receive from him a long, poetic letter about a moment of peace he found laying in the morning sun on a rock in the desert; bathing under a waterfall in a foreign country or digging his toes into the warm sandy beach of a tropical ocean.

And, every two years or so, I’ll pull into the parking lot of the local VA and catch a glimpse of a very tall man leaning against a little, old red pick-up truck, with a big-ass grin on his face. Those are always jubilant and bittersweet hellos because I know he will disappear just as quietly and quickly as he arrived. But, I am grateful for the visits. They make the long stretches between each one seem to fade into insignificance.

Everything he owns fits in the back of his tired and worn little truck. It doesn’t amount to much: boxes of books, personal files a few changes of clothes and a lawn chair or two. The books tell the story of where his mind has been – philosophy, psychology, literature, religion and history. The files hold degrees, certifications and employment history: elementary teacher, gallery owner, counselor. But mostly, he is a seeker – of what, he isn’t sure – so he keeps wandering.

He makes friends wherever he goes. Likely, in every city in every country he visits there is someone like me, looking forward to the day he arrives in town, wondering, upon goodbye, if they will ever see him again and missing him when he’s gone. He isn’t aware of the imprint he leaves upon the hearts of those he connects with. He doesn’t see himself as others see him: a beautiful, brilliant, compassionate soul.

He spent much of his service in Vietnam living and communing with the Montagnard people. He remembers them fondly, his face swilling with emotion when he recalls their abandonment by his government and, by proxy, himself. He talks less about what happened at the Cambodian border, but it filled his mind with demons and his body with Agent Orange. These things combined are what he runs from.

He’d be the first to tell you “wherever you go, there you are,” that you can’t outrun yourself, all the while a one-way ticket to some foreign land tucked into his pocket. He laughs at his own irony. Sometimes I think he should just bunker down, invite the demons in and face them square on. Most of the time though I understand that his quest is as much about running away from something as it is about holding on to hope. His hope is magnificent in light of the traumas he’s suffered. He wouldn’t be my friend, Mitchell, without it.

His last brief note arrived two months ago: “Can’t wait to tell you all I’ve seen – Your friend, Mitchell.”

I can’t wait, either.

Weekend Perspectives

2006-04-24T23:38:00.000-05:00

Since it is quite easy for me to write three hundred words about the view from a park bench, putting a whole weekend into one essay might prove difficult. Telling you about the weekend is much more complicated than writing a travelogue. It was not just about a wallflower attending her first formal dance. It was also about a mother discerning if the most difficult decision she has ever made concerning her child was the right one.

Being in close proximity to my ex for three days also made it about putting my former life in perspective. I am happy to report, I made the right decision on that front many years ago – and also that the ex and I are now well practiced for the future graduations and weddings we’ll have to share. No bloodshed occurred. All sarcastic commentaries remained in my head where they belonged (a greater accomplishment than me winning the war with a pair of pantyhose.) And, I must have phoned home twenty times, elucidating my renewed appreciation for the character of my other-half.

The school sits in a tiny Midwest town established during the civil war era. The military ball is likely the town’s bread and butter as well as its bane. Hundreds of families arrive for the weekend, filling its hotels, restaurants and beauty salons. By Saturday evening, the outsiders are bedecked in tuxedos and expensive gowns and limousines share the streets with pickup trucks and tractors

From the outside looking in, it probably appears affluent, snobbish and show-boaty. But the reality is that most of the attendees aren’t much different from me. They didn’t aspire to send their children to a military academy. Their year has been marked by worry, stress, sacrifice and financial strain. And for many, like me, the weekend becomes a celebration of the turn-around their child has made—one gigantic sigh, full of relief and pride.

The highlights . . .

My Son:

A kid who once made slouching and slacking an art form has transformed into a young man in who takes a leadership position in his unit and is the first to come to attention when his commanding officer approaches. Yet he retains the goofy sweetness that makes me love him and his teachers forgive him,

The Ball:

While I remained true to my wallflower nature, I witnessed both my children stepping onto the ballroom floor for the first time, a bittersweet, yet prideful moment.

I must wear my wallflower on the center of my forehead. I about fell off my heels when another cadet’s mother approached me and asked, “Is this seat taken?” and followed-up her question with the statement, “I hope this is the wallflower table because this is sooo not us!” We became companions for the night – not surprising to our sons, who have become best friends in the last few months.

The Military Parade:

Lately, my life is about finding parallels in unexpected places. An older gentleman sat next to me in the stands and, while I was enthralled with the parade – and amazed by my son’s role – he provided a running commentary of each happening on the field and the military meaning behind it, complements of fifty-five years of attending the annual event. At the parade’s conclusion, he shook my hand and I thanked him for sharing the parade with me. He told me he was a Word War II Navy veteran. Given my history, and my son’s recent identification with the grandfather he never knew, I suspect the Universe had something to do with the seating arrangements.

He walked away before seeing the tears streaming down my cheeks.

And, of course, it was a gleeful moment when I returned to my hotel room, shed my pantyhose and pulled 52 bobby pins from my “up-do.” Still, I’m looking forward to doing it all again next year.

(You can find more photos of the weekend here)

It's a Girl!

2006-04-20T14:00:00.000-05:00

Dear Foo-Foo Girls,

You know who you are. Your hairdresser, nail artist and tanning salon are on speed dial on your cell phone. You wouldn’t dream of going to the grocery store in flip flops with yesterday’s hair in a sloppy ponytail. Your makeup bag is bigger than my suitcase and is organized by seasons. You carry a second bag full of objects of bodily torture: things that curl, poke, tweeze and exfoliate. You have things in your underwear drawer unrecognizable to the likes of me: bras that look like suction cups, underwear that lifts, spreads and flattens – or claims to be invisible. Speaking of underwear, you don’t just wear underwear, you wear under ensembles; you are color-coordinated from the skin up.

I don’t understand you. I used to laugh at you. Now, though, I am in awe of you. How do you do it? Where do you find the time? And, more importantly, how do you afford it? Do you take out a 30-year ARM to finance the girly-girl stuff? Borrow from your parents? Pilfer from your children’s’ college funds?

In preparation for the military baawwl I have shopped at the mall for the first time since 1987. I’ve been cut, colored, tweezed, mani and pedi-cured. I’ve shaved, buffed and bronzed. I am exhausted. The house is a disaster. I can’t remember my name. This foo-foo girl stuff is a full time job and I am putting in my resignation first thing Monday morning.

There is a reason I belly laugh through Miss Congeniality. I am “Gracie” – without the kick-ass FBI job and concealed weapon.

If, when I return next week, you see a post titled: All I Want is World Peace, you’ll know the damage done this week is irreversible.

Observations

2006-04-15T23:14:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite pastimes is people watching. Give me a park bench to plop down upon, a line to wait in or a flight delay and I can endlessly amuse myself observing people and building scripts in my mind of their entire lives.

The habit is likely a hangover from growing up adopted, from endlessly scanning faces in crowds, looking for someone familiar and from feeling like an alien observer of normal people, studying them that I might obtain the key to normality.

Sometimes, I don’t like what I see. Sometimes, I see a child in emotional pain; a single mother, stressed and distressed; a father, burdened with and worried about responsibilities; an old man whose loneliness weighs upon his shoulders, pushing them down.

Sometimes, I see beautiful things: A teenager not embarrassed to kiss his mother goodbye in the school parking lot; an elderly couple holding hands with a cadence that tells you this is the hand she reached for when he returned from war, the hand he reached for after she brought his children into the world. With just one effortless gesture, you know that for more than fifty years those hands have clung to each other through happiness and pain, the decades unable to shake their love for one another.

Friday night, I hit an observer’s goldmine.

The train was due to arrive at the Amtrak station at 10:30pm. I’ve never been to this little town, and felt a bit nervous about sitting at a train station, in the dark, awaiting my son’s arrival. I packed my camera and my mace, not sure which I would need.

Entering this town felt like stepping back in time. Hundreds of little shops and restaurants nestled into turn of the century buildings. The corner parks and sidewalk cafes bustled with the Friday activities of the twenty-something crowd. The sidewalks and crosswalks filled with foot-traffic – silhouettes of young lovers backlit by antique streetlamps. And through the center of it all, a roaring freight train, seemingly miles long, made its way slowly through town.

The passenger train was delayed an hour. Thrilled with the ambience of this place, I happily settled down on a bench for the wait – and the observing. Across the tracks, a young woman played fetch with a golden retriever under the glow of a streetlamp. At the corner, a couple tangled up together, deep in conversation, leaning against a red and white train crossing sign. To my side, an older gentleman, triggered into times past by the setting, told his son about “riding the rails” during the ‘40’s.

Experiences like this once found me projecting myself into a different life; the life I might have lived. In that life I might have been a street artist or a young lover in a quaint town, without a care in the world. Or I might have simply been a girl tossing a ball to a golden retriever – a girl with a real family. Now though I am content to remain on the outside looking in. It’s a familiar place, a place I’ve always been. But even that seems to be changing.

She plopped down next to me, a Starbuck’s in one hand and cigarette in the other, asking me if she’d missed the 10:30 train. She told me her twins were coming home from college. I said, “That sounds expensive,” and suddenly we were engrossed in the kind of conversation usually reserved for lifetime friends. For fifty minutes we shared our lives, discovering amazing parallels and speaking with an honestly not usually exchanged between strangers. We connected. It was real. And the time went by so quickly, the rumble of the approaching train startled us both. I saw disappointment in her face, recognizing it because it mirrored my feelings.

Our children emerged from the swarm of offloading passengers. She touched my arm and said, “It was really great talking to you. Maybe we’ll run into each other Sunday.” I told her I hoped so. And I meant it.

This is the third time in as many months I’ve been shaken from my usual position as observer and dreamer into making a real-time connection with another person. Maybe the Universe is matchmaking kindred spirits. Or, perhaps, it is the product of feeling comfortable in my own skin.

Whatever it is, I think I like it.

Update: We returned to the train station today. You can view the photos here.

Wait a Minute, Mr. Trashman

2006-04-08T00:04:00.000-05:00

The company is named Christian Curbside. They claim to be a hardworking Christian-based company with “strong moral values." Now, I am a non-secular utility service chooser. I don’t give a rat’s hiney if the guy who picks up my trash worships the devil as long as he shows up Monday and Friday mornings and makes it disappear.

What my garbage man doesn’t know is that I can hear him from my window every garbage day. As good Christians do, he prays a lot. Through my window, I hear his prayers:

God,

Damn, stupid, bitch doesn’t listen to a thing I say – can’t put the f*$#&in’ cans in the right place.

~~~

Jesus Christ,

On a f#$&@in’ stick! What’s that bitch got in this can?

~~~

Holy Mary, Mother of Christ,

Can’t the stupid bitch understand English? I told her ‘put the f*$&%in’ cans on the other side of the driveway!

~~~

Amen, my brethren. I feel your pain. Not.

We are at war, the garbage man and I. For a year, we’ve been leaving notes for one another. He explains the garbage cans are to be exactly three feet from the road, on the left side of the driveway. I explain such placement will cause them to role down the hill, into the road and cause either a disastrous mess or traffic fatality. He tells me he is not contracted to walk the extra one foot to the only level place I can put them. I explain his supervisor has instructed me to leave them where they are. He tells me to put them on the other side of the driveway, exactly three feet from the curb. I put them there. In the ditch. The ditch exactly center of three feet from the curb. He throws the cans into the middle of the street, upon which they are smashed to smithereens by a dump truck.

I call and complain. I carefully explain the theoretic improbability of cans on wheels remaining in place on a hillside. I lay the entire history of the Great Garbage Can Wars before Miss Christian Customer Service. I even share with her the prayers of her good, Christian soldier of refuse. She says she’ll “ask him what he wants you to do,” and get back to me. What the hell?

She got back to me, all right. In a formal letter:

“Please leave the garbage cans three feet from the curb on the left side of the driveway.”

Bless you, and thank you for choosing Christian Curbside.

I tossed the letter in the trash and said a prayer:

God,

Damn good for nothing psychopathic, control freak garbage man. You are fired. I am changing companies.

Can I get an "AMEN!" ?

The Wallflower Ball, Revisited

2006-04-07T09:52:00.000-05:00

What could possibly be worse than the Dance of Doom? Well, okay, nothing. But, coming in a close second is . . .

Getting on a plane, traveling 2,000 miles, changing into a dress and pantyhose for the second time in less than six months and attending your 20th high school reunion. That’s right. Today in my mailbox, wedged between my “excused from jury duty” notice (there is a god) and a reminder to vaccinate the dogs, I discovered my invite to The Bellevue High School, class of 1986, 20th reunion.

Before any fellow pantyhose commiserates send sympathy cards, I am happy to announce this RSVP will be returned with the “not attending” box checked and an annotation stating: sorry I couldn’t make it, but I have exceeded my pantyhose limit for the decade. While my classmates are giggling about baldheads, beer bellies and plumped-up prom queens, I’ll be home in my comfy jammies with my feet propped up and my nose in a good book.

Related to the above reminder of how rapidly I am aging is Kim’s post, PE Teachers Are Demons From Hell and Charlie’s stroll into school day traumas, Wimmin’ Troubles. It seems a few of us have been triggered into recalling the not-so-better days of our youth. As the men shared their adolescent women and locker room angst, I was reminded of my own middle school’s real life version of the book/movie Carrie.

Our Carrie was an incredibly scrawny, frizzy haired girl with the disposition to collapse into fits of sobbing hysteria in the middle of the classroom. She was mercilessly tormented by nearly everyone. I was always kind to her, never participating in the teasing, but still carry guilt for keeping quiet while her tormentors went to work.

My memory of her sparked, I googled her name and found a swimsuit model/actress with quite an impressive resume and a body to die for. I’m not 100% certain it’s her, but if it is, she’s a far cry from the girl who forgot to wear her gym shorts and ran from the locker room in baggy, floral bloomers to be greeted by jeers from the entire student body. She’s hot. All I can say is: you go girl; you deserve it.

So, while “Carrie” does her next swimsuit calendar I am left to ponder why I remain a wallflower. I cringe at the thought of any event following a formal invitation. I am blessed my Seattle friends understand my disposition, never exclude me from their gatherings and don’t criticize me for failing to attend. They take me as I am and are pleasantly surprised when I show up.

I am not entirely hopeless. I did accept an invitation recently. I will be joining several friends for a formal dinner and an evening in a famous St. Louis mansion/bed & breakfast. They’ve been trying to drag me from the house for four years, so my enthusiasm to attend the all-night excursion was met by utter shock.

The attraction to this event? The Lemp Mansion is deemed one of the top ten most haunted places in America. Following dinner, we’ll have the entire place to ourselves for the night, accompanied by paranormal researchers.

So all it takes to get me out of the house is an invitation from people who have been dead for a century whose sole purpose is to scare the ever-loving crap out of me. I should probably question why that sounds like a better experience than reuniting with schoolmates – or perhaps I should immediately book an appointment with a therapist.

One thing is certain, however. When I arrive at the Lemp, I will not be wearing pantyhose.

The Wallflower Bawl

2006-04-02T17:35:00.000-05:00

Someone just shoot me. Please. The gods are conspiring against me. The Universe has spied upon my worst nightmare, making it materialize, probably just for the entertainment value. I have entered the realm of Wallflower Hell.

My son’s school is having a Spring Dance in conjunction with a Parent’s Weekend. Cool, I thought, imagining a weekend getaway in a comfy hotel and some good old-fashioned family time. We needed a little retreat.

The official invitation arrived last week:

Your Son’s School Invites You to

The Spring Ball

Attire: This is a black tie event. Men, please wear tuxedos. Women, please dress in formal gowns. And, be prepared to dance!
See you there!

What the fuck???

I do keep up on my children’s school events. Nothing about “Parent’s Weekend” on the calendar suggested to me it would include shoving my badly bunioned feet into shoes two sizes too small, a dress costing more than this month’s mortgage payment and wearing the evilest invention in the history of mankind: pantyhose.

I envisioned my role at this shindig as something akin to chaperone. I pictured parents sitting in the bleachers, taking a few photos, drinking punch and patrolling dark corners for wandering teenagers with hands to match.

Let me share my history with dresses, uncomfortable shoes and pantyhose. There are only two occasions upon which you will see me sporting any of the above: weddings and funerals. I have even left specific instructions to my beloved for my own funeral: If you insist on a viewing, I insist on being dressed in flannel jammies and 100% cotton socks. If you defy my wishes and shove my pasty dead legs into a pair of pantyhose, I WILL come back and haunt you mercilessly.

Who came up with this brilliant plan, anyway? Being a former teacher, I am quite sure the teachers aren’t looking forward to spending their weekend at work, wearing clothes costing more than a week’s salary. I am certain it wasn’t the kids’ plan. What teenager wants to see their decrepit mother all dolled up, sharing a dance floor with his peers? Surely, I can’t be the only parent facing this weekend with an impending sense of doom, can I?

Just as I am about to swallow my last ounce of wallflower dignity and seal my fate with my signature on the R.S.V.P., settled in the knowledge there is nothing capable of making this event worse than it already is, the phone rang.

Caller ID informs me it is my ex. Because our children are at school, I know no good can come of this call and consider not answering at all.

“Hello,” I say, but am thinking: Hello, asshat.

“I just got my invitation to the ball,” says he, audibly chuckling, “you’re going aren’t you?”

“Of course,” I say, whilst thinking: of course I am going to the ball, at the school I spent my life savings on with no help from you and because I am the parent who does ALL the parenting, you moronic twat.

“Hahahahaha!” he proclaims, “You have to wear a dress! Hahahahaha!”

“Fuck you,” I say, but I am thinking, well, I’m thinking: Fuck you!

And this is where things do get worse. This is where a wallflower’s worst nightmare morphs into The Dance of Doom.

My ex informs me he is flying in (in his typical arrive for the glory, hand me the bill, then disappear into the ethers fashion) for the shindig. In eight years, I’ve only had to see him twice – and both times were in a courtroom with two lawyers acting as buffers.

Pantyhose, a formal gown, fancy shoes, dancing, socializing and my ex for an entire weekend? What the hell have I done to rack up this kind of bad karma?

If I disappear following the third weekend in April, someone should probably notify the authorities. You’ll find me hanging from a noose crafted of pantyhose and chiffon.

Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley and Me: II

2006-03-30T11:16:00.000-06:00

Wyatt Earp, the great, great nephew of the Wyatt Earp of American West legend, is a man whose heritage enters a room ten feet ahead of him. But aside from being the Midwest’s living link to Tombstone, Arizona and the OK Corral, he is a former coworker and dear friend of my Other Half.

Not surprisingly, he is also a master of firearms – a self-defense and safety trainer. Our reasons for wanting to meet one another were twofold: he wanted to meet his friend’s love interest and I wanted to overcome a fear of guns that was nearly phobic, compliments of a childhood trauma.

Wyatt arrived at the shooting gallery ahead of us. We entered the building and he emerged from the shadows at the far end of the room. There was no piano music in the background or swinging saloon doors. He wasn’t bedecked in a ten-gallon hat or spurred boots. But, he did sport a .45 caliber aura and very Earpish mustache. The small, humid gallery was, obviously, his playground and comfort zone. And, the staff made it clear he carried something like celebrity status there.

He and the Other Half exchanged sarcastic quips, introductions were made and the three off us settled into a plush sofa in the trophy room. As the two men visited old times together, with the kind of comfort and ease good friends share, I was happy to simply observe, in awe.

I’ve had similar experiences – and perhaps other adoptees have as well. There is something about seeing the physical resemblances between family members that will sometimes strike me as simply amazing. I perceive it almost like it is an anomaly, perhaps because it is so foreign to my frame of reference. While no one would pass my Wyatt Earp on the street and make an immediate connection to his uncle, connecting the genetic dots was easy for me to do. You could see it in his eyes and in his mustache-framed mouth. But more substantially there was just a cadence to his whole being; his speech, his mannerisms, the way he carried himself that simply dripped history and heritage.

I was probably cured of my phobia before we ever entered the shooting range. Nothing inspires one to leave their gun fears at the door more than having Wyatt Earp hand you his shotgun and say, “lets see what you can do.”

But, prior to my first trigger pull, we shared an hour of training: the psychology of using a gun, the way to do it safely and within the law, the idiocy of bluffing and the power of conviction. And as he shared his philosophy of gun ownership it was obvious the wisdom he imparted was from more than training or experience. His knowledge was also rooted in biology and history, the culmination of growing up an Earp, surrounded by tradition and the story of his elders.

While I made tight patterns on targets and blew away silhouettes, it was clear I’d accomplished more than overcoming a fear. I was good. I kept up with my experienced companions, much to their surprise. But bringing home my trophy targets was the least substantial experience of the day.

When Wyatt looked at me and said, “I think I’ll have to start calling you Annie Oakley,” it finally happened. Time collapsed and, for the first time, with Wyatt Earp unknowingly loaning me his heritage to use as a bridge to history, I felt grounded in both the past and present in the same moment. The experience is now filed away as one of the most memorable of my life.

Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley and Me

2006-03-29T13:33:00.000-06:00

PART I

Heritage: adoptees covet it, are puzzled by it and even sometimes dismiss it. People who don’t lack a bloodline, who simply harbor it, like blue eyes or broad shoulders, might never consider heritage because it’s always been there. And they don’t always understand an adoptee’s quest to connect with their own. “What’s the big deal?” some ask, “It never mattered to me.”

I question that.

Perhaps heritage is something not missed until it’s lost; not coveted until it’s been taken away, isn’t even considered because it doesn’t have to be. It’s like breathing. One doesn’t think about taking a breath and then exert the effort to do so. It just happens, it just is – until it isn’t. And then, suddenly, it becomes the most important thing in the world.

Growing up adopted, claiming a heritage has never been a rote exercise for me. It has always been a surgical, copy and paste exertion. The experience of feeling simultaneously grounded in history and existing in the present has always evaded me, despite all the mental gymnastics I’ve attempted to make it otherwise.

My adoptive relatives were gurus of their heritage. Every household was a shrine to it, every wall and bookshelf a museum of photographs, family trees and memorabilia. My aunt and uncle – who I lived with much of my childhood – lived in the same farmhouse and worked the same land built and cultured by their Norwegian ancestors. I grew up in a literal historical landmark . We even had tourists.

I pasted myself into their bloodline, in part because it is human nature to want to connect in such a significant way and, in part, because it was expected of me. I was chosen for this family based almost solely on my purported Norwegian background. They, perhaps, needed to legitimize our connection as much as I did, so insisted somewhere back in time our respective ancestors merged, thus legitimatizing our connection to one another. So I called myself Norwegian, and when the tourists rang I could impart the family history pitch as well as my legitimate cousins.

In my first conversation with my natural mother, I learned I wasn’t one stitch Norwegian. Of all the fictional character traits of my father she’d given the social workers to throw them off track, this one carried the steepest consequences. As an infant, I’d been slated to leave foster care for adoption by another family. But when my very Norwegian adoptive parents’ file landed on the social worker’s desk, she changed plans. She was a woman revered for creating the perfect adoption matches, for blending families by their physical and biological similarities so well that a smooth transition for the adoptee was almost guaranteed.

I struggled with the realization the abuse I suffered in my adoptive home might not have occurred had the word “Norwegian” never been uttered in front of a judge. But the bigger struggle was managing the erasure of something that had become a central part of my identity. No longer Norwegian, I tried to adapt to learning I am instead Ukrainian, Swedish and Welch (while being told to “pay no attention” to an obviously Polish name on my new family tree – or to my birthfather’s unmistakably German name.)

When my birthmother prepared a traditional Ukrainian meal to celebrate my first post-reunion birthday, the maternal side of the family gathered around a table scattered with traditional fare. They shared memories of gatherings past. They told stories. They knew how to pronounce the names of the dishes we ate (and giggled at me uncontrollably when I continually botched attempts to do the same.) They spoke of their Ukrainian grandmother, the old farm, the Old Country. Their words filled the room around me like a thousand snapshot images. I grasped for something recognizable, something to seize and call my own.

The idea I would ever feel legitimately connected to my heritage slipped away somewhere between the borsch and the knydli. I felt like an intruder, an imposter. Sitting in the midst of birthfamily tradition, I felt no less disconnected that I’d felt with adoptive family.

Growing up, my adoptive family graciously shared their traditions with me, but I lacked the bloodline to solidify it into a heritage. In reunion, my natural family genially accepted me into their bloodline, but I lacked the history bloodlines are meant to entail.

There are some things relinquishment and adoption tear apart that reunion just can’t piece back together. Part of the “adoption journey” entails letting go of the things we’ve lost, sorting out the carnage from the clash of fantasy versus reality and finding a balance between the person you might have been and the person you’ve become. At some point in the journey, you come to realize you can’t be given the things you are missing by an external force – or family. And, you learn to cherish the moments you are able to capture the sensation of historical and biological connectedness, even if its delivery is non-conventional.

That connectedness eluded me until the day I met Wyatt Earp . . .

(continue reading this piece here)

An Epiphany, of Sorts

2006-03-24T10:24:00.000-06:00

I am touched. I really am. My email box and comments sections filled with words from people who understand when I posted about our loss of Scout. Your collective words truly moved me. Some of you reached into your own memories and accessed the hurt of your own losses to share in ours. It would have been easier not to do so, I know. But, I am glad you did. And to those of you who truly understand the value of not reducing an experience to an anecdote, I am grateful.

Our dogs are central to our lifestyle. We’ve lost as many as we’ve loved and, each time, it both challenges our faith in the gods’/goddesses’/Universe’s plan and inspires us to commit even more fully to having some part in caring for the critters and creatures of this earth. It may seem like a small thing, but it is meaningful to us. Kant says the meaning of life is being a part of something larger than yourself. He also says most people find their meaning within family. Since this is a loaded proposition for two adopted people, devoting ourselves to our critters works for us, however unconventional. I used to feel we were totally alone in this endeavor. But, since Scout’s diagnoses of hermangial sarcoma (cancer) eleven weeks ago, I have learned differently. I learned a lot about dogs. I learned a lot about cancer and its treatments. I also learned a lot about people.

I learned all it takes to screen a good veterinarian from a bad one is what happens when he enters the exam room. If he sits on the floor with you and your dog, petting, scratching and cuddling your furry friend while talking to you, you are in the right place. My thanks to Dr. Ulbright, Dr. Bryan and Dr. Buss for doing just that.

I learned not to judge a book by its cover, or more specifically a pet supply store by the elite neighborhood it sits within. I went there in need of an immune boosting food for Scout, dragging my feet and expecting expense and snobbery. Instead, I met Pat, the owner, who herself has ten dogs and took to Scout’s plight like she was one of her own. She repeatedly went above and beyond her job description to aide in Scout’s recovery. She brought in supplies for Scout on her day off and we never left the store without a jar of cream, an extra bag of food or just a whole lot of empathy – free of charge.

I learned there are others like us. I sat on vigil at the University of Missouri Animal Hospital, sometimes for days at a time, sharing a waiting room with people doing the same. There, I saw a family offer their home to another family, knowing nothing about them other than that they love their dog. I met an elderly couple who just wanted one more month with the last pet they will ever own. I met a breeder who couldn’t bear the idea of euthanizing a litter of puppies born with cleft lips, so brought them all in for surgery, knowing her breeder peers would call her crazy for doing so – and not caring at all.

And, one day, I spent twelve hours with the family of a 180 pound, limping, mastiff. As each of us received updates on the testing of our dogs, we laughed together, cursed the gods together and cried together. And we shared a hug of joy at the end of the day when we were both able to bring our dogs home with enough good news to carry us through the next few weeks. I never even knew their names, but I think of them often.

For a thousand reasons, I am often guilty of underestimating other human beings. The past three months have challenged many of my stubborn suppositions and offered a kind of therapy. While I can’t parlay that feeling into giving Scout’s loss meaning, I do hope to hang on to it.

Still No Words

2006-03-22T09:57:00.000-06:00

I don’t feel like writing. I’ve started several pieces the last few days, none of which are flowing, none of which are finished and most of which are going to end up in the recycle bin.

I could declare “writer’s block” and buy a few wordless days. But, it isn’t writer’s block. What’s keeping me from writing is that the thing I want to write about sounds silly and dramatic. I don’t expect people to relate. There is only one solution, of course: turn into the skid and write the very thing I’m avoiding.

Our household is wracked with grief. When we aren’t doing something to distract ourselves, we are close to inconsolable. We’ve lost a family member – not someone who is “like a family member,” or “like one of our children,” but an integral part of our unit, our team. We buried Scout in the midst of a spring snowstorm, then couldn’t sleep because it felt wrong to leave her outdoors, in the cold she so hated. I spent yesterday fighting a no longer necessary routine. I cried in the grocery store because I didn’t have to hurry home to check on her. I cried every time I looked at her empty spot in our bedroom. I cried when I fed the rest of the pack and her empty bowl remained on the counter.

Nothing seems to work. I can’t “let go and let god,” find solace in a poem about a rainbow bridge or dedicate a park bench in her honor to subvert this experience.

I could get philosophical about why our pets are so important to us, but I don’t want to digress into some intellectual rubbish to explain away our feelings, or Scout’s importance to us. I refuse to write off our reaction to losing her by basing it on our own pathology.

And, I don’t necessarily want to feel less miserable right now. Our tears are a symbol of our love for her – and her love for us. Each tear is a memory. It will all fade soon enough.

The Box

2006-03-19T17:45:00.000-06:00

In Ghosts of My Fathers, I wrote about the box in my closet. A box containing the memorabilia of my father, a man I never knew but have tried to meet by collecting pieces of the one tangible thing I know about him: that he was a decorated WWII veteran.

The box contains an incomplete collection of his medals, replaced by the U.S. government on the basis of my blood connection to him; a strange event in and of itself considering the same government does not permit me access to my original birth certificate or adoption files.

Alongside the medals is his complete service record, a cruise album from the aircraft carrier he served upon, an aerial movie of his ship entering the invasion of Iwo Jima and several long, hand-penned letters from men who served with him. These sweet men, all closing in on 90 years old, wrote to me, sharing their photos and stories, on the basis of my blood connection to a soldier they served with. They call themselves his “brothers” (although none of them literally remember my father) and call me his “daughter.” They feel it is their duty to answer my questions because of this brotherhood. They feel I am part of a legitimate connection to them, one of their own.

It is a strange experience for me to be embraced by these men and their families. I would love to say “they welcome me with open arms and I feel at home,” but that would be a half-truth. They do genuinely welcome me, but I feel like a fraud. I am his daughter, but not. I don’t feel deserving of acceptance into this brotherhood. I don’t feel legitimate because I am not. It is conflicting, complicated and bittersweet to know so much about a short period in the life of a man I should know everything about.

And so the box containing my father’s memorabilia sits in the closet, incomplete. I treasure everything in it, yet neither complete the collection nor display it. And, for the most part, I have ceased my quest to add to its contents. Everything about my father and his belongings is conflicted for me. It is never simple. It is never natural or normal.

And, the more I fill the box, the less full it feels.

My son returned home from his first semester at military school last Thursday. How he got there is a story in and of itself. To make that story short, I dropped off a kid at military school three months ago – a kid with no confidence in himself; who walked with slumped shoulders, staring at the ground; a kid who has struggled with learning disabilities his whole life and, despite my fierce advocating from preschool forward, entered high school not believing in himself or his ability to accomplish anything of significance.

I expected to pick him up and be immediately met with old behaviors and routines. I figured within moments of getting in the car, he’d be on the phone making plans with friends. Once home, I imagined he’d be playing videogames, cranking his stereo and turning his room into a disaster area in three seconds flat.

We were barely out of the parking lot of his school when he said, “Mom, when we get home, can we get the box down?”

“The box?” I asked, not thinking he was talking about the box. My box. My father’s box.

“My grandfather’s box,” he said. He has never referred to my birthfather as his grandfather. He has never shown any real interest in my birthfamily or my adoption, other than express bewilderment about how such things come about in the first place.

“Sure we can,” I said, “What do you want to see?”

And with total conviction he said, “I want to read his citations and see his medals. And, tomorrow, I want to go the military supply store, buy the missing medals and put them in a case. And I’d like to bring them back to school with me.”

I had a moment of thinking I couldn’t part with them, couldn’t risk losing them. And then I looked at my son, bedecked in his uniform, looking me square in the eye, sitting there with his shoulders back and his chin up. A young man full of confidence. “Okay,” I said, “We’ll go first thing tomorrow.”

We coordinated the trip with a good friend. Sam did two tours in Vietnam and is a decorated former prisoner of war. He wanted to see my son’s transformation and to help us figure what we needed to complete my father’s collection.

My son was up pacing the floors, ready to go before bugle call hour. And he was wearing his uniform.

We pulled into the military supply store lot. Sam got out of his car. My son got out of our car and they walked towards each other in the parking lot, stopped and saluted one another.

I cried.

It took about an hour to piece together the collection and place it in its order in a display case. We left a spot to add my father’s photo in the center. My son carried it on his lap on our drive home, all abuzz about where he was going to display it in his room at school and whom he would show it to.

I asked him why it was suddenly important to him. “Because he’s my grandfather. Because my teachers and commanding officers will see it and tell me I came from a good man who served his country well. And because I’m proud he did.”

I cried again. And then, I started to explain why it isn’t that simple, how I never really knew him. He quickly interrupted. “Mom, it is that simple to me. I’m his grandson. He’s my blood. I’m just like every other kid who didn’t have the chance to know his grandpa. I don’t have to think about all that stuff you do. It just is.”

He was right, of course. It is that simple. He can connect with his history, and with his grandfather, without the conflict I experience.

They can simply be family.

There is no longer a box in my closet. I’ve passed its contents down to the next generation, sooner than expected, with a little bit of sadness over seeing it go.

And a whole lot of pride for the grandson of a veteran.

No Words

2006-03-19T16:39:00.000-06:00

Artificial Intelligence

2006-03-19T00:50:00.000-06:00

Grab a bottle of bean-o and pull up a keyboard, it’s time for the first installment of . . .
Reviews are subjective things. I have a history of loathing movies that later become Oscar nominees, so I write this fully anticipating being the voice of dissent among my fellow gasbags.

The message (that artificial intelligence is – or perhaps one day will be – the spawn of natural stupidity) wasn’t lost on me. I can even appreciate the creators’ ability to make robots seem more human than humans. I just have a natural aversion to movies based upon disposable, replaceable children. I know what you’re thinking: C’mon, Rhonda, this isn’t a child – it’s a robot, lighten up, you issue-laden bastard.

But he isn’t a robot – he’s a roboy, a futuristic Pinocchio capable of human love and heartbreak. Procured by a grieving mother desperate to replace her comatose son, David joins the family. Plot logic blunder number one: if they could create almost real children from a pile of medical waste and a few computer chips could they not fix her kid? Cram a microchip into his brainmush or something? And frankly, they should’ve pulled the plug on the real kid. When he returns home following a miracle, we learn he’s a sociopathic little shit.

So what is a mother to do when her real kid doesn’t like his expensive store bought brother? Why, drop him off in the middle of a dark forest to be bot-napped and sold into the future’s equivalent of the tractor pull, a grizzly freak show where unwanted robots – even little boybots with human emotions – are sprayed with acid, impaled by machines and shot from cannons.

That BITCH!

Fortunately, boybot is rescued by Gigalo Joe, who leads him on a journey to find The Blue Fairy – a magical creature rumored to possess the ability to turn boybots into real boys. Gigalo is, as the name implies, a boytoybot for hire. Okay, this is a concept I can wrap my mind around – a handsome manbot programmed to please who will never leave the toilet seat up, fill the bathroom sink with shaving stubble, snore or launch deadly gasbombs under the covers. Ahem, I digress.

So robokid spends the next 237 years waiting to become a real boy in effort to win back his mother’s love. As the storyline drags on, you begin to wonder if AI doesn’t stand for Artificial Idiocy and start rethinking your initial repulsion with tossing boybot into an acid bath. When the movie finally ends (it’s almost three hours long), you’ll feel like you really sat through 237 years of tail-chasing frustration.

So, next weekend, if you think to yourself: I’m really in the mood for a movie that views like Brothers Grimm meet Robocop at Moulin Rouge where they steal ideas from Pinocchio, Wizard of Oz and Peterpan and write a sadistic screenplay with an ending so syrupy I’ll vomit, then Artificial Intelligence is your tub of popcorn.

Otherwise, skip the trip to the movie store and do something less painful and annoying – like running your fingernails across a chalkboard or standing beneath the hum of bad fluorescent lighting until your eardrums implode.

**************************
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The Perfect Match

2006-03-15T11:26:00.000-06:00

di-vor-ce n

1. The ending of a marriage by an official decision in a court of law
2. A complete separation or split

Well, Webster is half right. But, when you are divorced with children, there is no such thing as a complete separation. Despite a filing cabinet full of legal documents saying you are split, kaput, finished, your lives remain intertwined. You are court ordered to cooperate, to include your ex in all major decisions impacting the children.

For example, I cannot move out of my zip code without giving my ex the chance to contest the decision. If I hire a babysitter, send the kids to camp or bring in a tutor, he must approve. I’m not complaining. I think co-parenting is important and having input on where your children are and who is spending time with them is vital to their wellbeing.

Recently, my ex’s fiancé called off their engagement. I don’t know who was more upset, him or me. It isn’t that we were buddies. But, I knew what I was getting with her – more specifically, I knew what my kids were getting and she was decent step-mom material, not ideal, but decent.

Now, my ex is one of those people who can’t be alone for a minute. He’s ferociously loyal when he’s partnered and ragingly desperate when not. He’ll choose warm body over alone every time and wonder later what went wrong with the relationship. Since he’s on the market again, and since I love our children, this concerns me.

Recently, the ex boasted he’d registered for match.com and that his broad partnering criteria returned 3,700 potential matches within a 30-mile radius of his home. Great, I thought to myself. 3,700 opportunities to guarantee my children will need therapy well into their fifties.

So, I did what any concerned mom would do – checked out his match.com profile.

When my sides stopped hurting from gut-splitting laughter, I picked myself up off the floor, crawled back into my chair and thanked the gods and goddesses that I am in a relationship and don’t have to sort through the self-appreciating bullshit on match.com.

My ex’s profile displays him bedecked in his Sunday best, standing in front of a crackling fireplace. 3,700 women are thinking this is what they’ll get. He “loves travel and the ocean,” “owns a boat,” is a “meat and potatoes kind of guy.” While all of this is true, I can guarantee you reality wont match the visions these words put in the minds of his potential matches.

Let me paint a clearer picture, ladies. That dapper man in front of the fireplace, when not posing for a match.com portrait, can normally be found walking through the house wearing only tighty-whities and socks, with one hand scratching his ass and the other shoving “meat and potatoes” into his mouth and letting the spillage dribble down his chest. His claim to fame in high school was clearing out a whole classroom with one enormous fart. Yes, he has a boat. It was built in 1972. It sits on a trailer in storage with its transom rotted out. Oh, and the ocean travel? It’s his job. He’s a fisherman who is gone 9 months a year. Still interested?

Suddenly, it dawned on me. Custody law harbors a glaring inconsistency. If divorced parents have joint decision making authority in all areas impacting the care of their children, how then can exes be excluded from deciding who becomes their child’s stepparent? In the child’s best interest, I submit, the laws need tweaking.

Just think of the possibilities. Were I in charge of my ex’s match.com profile, I could scare off 2,699 women with my experience and honesty. The single remaining woman would be his perfect match! She’d tolerate the ass scratching, the money dumped into a boat that will never again float and the lonely months he’s gone “traveling.” She’d probably even be into the tighty-whities with white socks look.

With this in mind, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce the launching of a new internet dating site, scratch.com:

I Was in the Neighborhood . . .

2006-03-14T15:27:00.000-06:00

Suburbia, with both its conveniences and irritants, has completely encroached upon our five little acres. Being a transplant to both Missouri and the suburban lifestyle, I spend a lot of time griping about suburbanites and dreaming of retreating to a mountain hideaway – a lifestyle I am much more accustomed to.

Despite all my complaining, I secretly cherish the convenience of suburbia. When a convenience mart was built two blocks away, I wondered how I ever survived 30-mile emergency runs for toilet paper. Now, I can leave the house and return with a steaming cup of fresh coffee faster than it takes to brew my own.

I’m a regular. They know I like my coffee with cream and sugar, prefer Coke to Pepsi and suffer the occasional midnight hot chocolate craving. I’ve been a faithful customer since their grand opening.

Concern washed over my beloved convenient mart upon groundbreaking of a Super Convenient Mart a block away. The owner worried about losing revenue and the clerks worried about losing their jobs. “You’ll still shop here, won’t you?” the owner asked me. Of course, I promised my loyalty, asserting something about how I couldn’t be romanced by a super sized store. I simply am not that shallow.

All I did was stop by for their grand opening. They were giving away coffee, for god’s sake! Who can blame me?

I’ve been unfaithful. I’m a miserable cheat, a louse. It’s been two weeks since I’ve gone to the old convenience mart. Guilt stops me from pulling in their lot. I don’t like conflict and know I’ll be confronted. As I drive by my old haunt, I practice my excuses.

But, it was just so young and fresh. I was just curious, is all.

I think they spiked the coffee. I don’t remember what happened.

It tempted me, lured me in with its deli and ice cream bar.

Of course I don’t like it better there. It just happened. One thing led to another and . . .

It isn’t serious. Hell, the place is servicing the whole neighborhood!

Confessions of a derelict

2006-03-13T10:44:00.000-06:00

There’s a reason I’m not in a bowling league, book club or even a therapy group.

I’m a derelict. I don’t play well with others, never read the directions, forget all about deadlines and sometime run with scissors.

Consistant with my flawed character, this post is overdue.

Announcing a new club, imprudent enough to accept me as a member, so therefore willing to accept anyone – even you! I bring you:

Join Now! And receive the above tasteful banner and your very own Proud Member button, free!

I Can Quit Anytime

2006-03-13T01:33:00.000-06:00

I like to think I keep my mind busy, exercise my imagination, stay up to date with current events, do a lot of reading and am, generally, well informed about current happenings in my world.

Just this week I learned how it feels being the product of donor conception and that Arizona has had a 143-day drought. I enlarged my vocabulary with the words absailing and potholing, discovered there is a brand of toilet paper on the market that is to die for and studied up on which saints to pray to when.

I joined a club, did some artwork, visited both Scotland and England and learned and laughed about relationships. I wrote about my life and even took the time to open the windows and enjoy a little thunderstorm.

Then, yesterday morning, a friend called. She wanted to know if I was okay.

I’m thrilled that anyone cares enough to pick up the phone and check in. It calms my fears of dropping of a heart attack and not being discovered until the dogs have picked my bones clean. And, well, it’s just nice to be loved.

“Of course I’m okay,” I tell her, “why do you ask?”

“I was watching the news,” she said, as if that was self-explanatory. I considered uttering the things one utters when they have no clue what their part of the dialogue should be: ummhm, ah-ha, oh that’s right, you don’t say . . . but I opted for honesty instead. Well, sort of. I told her I’d been busy writing, as I realized I’m not sure I’ve left my chair all weekend. I had no clue what was on the news.

Evidently, the thunderstorm I celebrated yesterday was something close to a natural disaster. That’s right folks, I blogged through a tornado warning. Fortunately, touch-down was nowhere nearby.

Clearly I have a problem. I’ve hit blogging rock bottom. And, I know what I need to do:

Go wireless, so I can blog from the storm cellar.

Search

2006-03-12T00:13:00.000-06:00

[Preface: My search began with a quest for my father, but it was a relentless dead end, based on a file full of lies about him, nearly resulting in me contacting the very real person his “profile” was modeled after in my records. I’ve purposely left that part of my search out of the following tome, mostly for pragmatic reasons.

Despite diligent editing, this is a long post, so my apologies for being verbose. I’ve divided it into sections and will soon post a complimentary reunion piece.]

I have only told my search and reunion story in contextual, fragmented bits and pieces on message boards and to the curious friend or stranger. Perhaps it’s never made its way to paper because it is accompanied by emotions impossible to capture; nuances of obligation, guilt, excitement and hope. Maybe it’s because after all these years, the strength in which the journey grabbed and held me seems silly in the way only hindsight can illuminate something, or because I grieve the hope I carried then, sometimes finding it preferable to the reality into which it all has settled.

The birth of my son washed away the defenses programming me against search. Those defenses; some built by me and some by my adoptive mother, always offered answers to “Don’t you want to find your real parents?” They were planted so long ago, and at a time I was so vulnerable and readily willing to exchange my needs for any sense of security I could latch onto, my answer was always ambivalent, at best.

But my natural parents became real the moment labor pain subsided and I held my son in my arms. My need for answers; to connect with myself, my people and the circle of life that pushed my son into the world, finally emerged from the dark, private place where I kept them secluded and protected.

For me, the decision to search was a war between terror and desire. On the threshold of such a journey, I stood to lose everything; my very identity, shabbily constructed as it was. My volatile relationship with my adoptive mother was functioning for the first time years, though it was only pasted together by my fear of being entirely alone in the world. The truth – my truth, my story – threatened to dismantle the foundation upon which I’d built my sense of self. I knew I’d constructed a house of cards, adorned in fantasy and hyperbole. And, I knew the truth would send them tumbling down.

Sheer will might begin a search, but indignation propels it forward. In one conversation with the clerk playing gatekeeper with your sealed records, you are reduced from being the adult who finally emerged from her childlike dependence on her adoptive family, grabbed hold of her desires and set a course for her future, to an infant again. For the first time, it hits full force that society views you as a perpetual child, incapable of making her own decisions about the adult relationships she’d like to pursue; because you are adopted and because society views adoption as a fairy tale of saviors and waifs.

Worse, you discover this soul-journey; this thing of courage you thought you’d never muster; is viewed as an act of selfish rebellion reeking of ingratitude and dripping in insensitivity. You are lectured and questioned. You are dismissed.

Back then; search began in a phone book. It involved phone calls, letter writing, networking and long waits by the mailbox for packages carrying the potential to deliver a clue capable of unraveling a lifetime mystery. I am grateful the clue that cracked my case wasn’t delivered over high speed DSL. Once your clue arrives, you are swept up in an unstoppable current.

I poured over my package: six pages of twenty-two year old court records with names scribbled over in sharpie marker, in my “own best interest,” of course. I learned for the first time I had siblings – three, at least. It never occurred to me I wasn’t a firstborn. I stared at the details, the story of my coming to being and having my life inexplicably changed in the same moment. I tried the information on like pieces of new clothing: Daughter, little sister, Ukrainian.

When the shock of new awareness began to ebb, tiny clues within the paperwork began to come into focus. Either by oversight or compassion, someone left enough fragmented information in my “non-identifying” records to form a clue. The missing piece, on it’s own insignificant, looked like this:
Ten minutes elapsed from the time I entered the courthouse research room to when I returned to my car with the copy of a divorce decree providing me the name and birthdates of my mother and three siblings. I stopped at the closest phone, dialed information and spoke my mother’s name out loud for the first time. Her number was unlisted, but the numbers of my brothers were not.

I did not pick up the phone and dial. I needed to think; to plan; to breathe for a while. I carried the numbers around with me for at least two weeks before making a move.

[to be continued . . . ]

Kiss The Rain

2006-03-11T19:05:00.001-06:00

It is pouring right now.

Rain coming down in delicious buckets, chasing the unseasonable humidity that leached in this morning away. Thunder cracking. Lightening striking. My windows are open.

It smells like Seattle. It sounds like Seattle.

I wouldn’t care if it never ended. It is my favorite sensory experience.

Turning Over a New Leif

2006-03-10T19:57:00.000-06:00

Fourth Grade, circa 1970’s:

Bell bottom jeans, Teen Beat Magazine, Love’s Baby Soft perfume and Pop Rocks.

But, mostly, the seventies were about the Farrah Feather and our beloved boy pop stars.
For those who don’t remember the Farrah Feather, it involved big, round brushes and turbo hairdryers. The result: hair so flawlessly feathered it formed what looked like a butt-crack, right down the back of our nearly shellacked with hairspray heads.

On good hair days, we put our comically large Goody combs in the leg pocket of our bell bottomed painter pants and walked off, oh so cool, in our Nike Cortez sneakers, our satin jackets swishing. We’d find a place on the playground and talk and giggle about Andy Gibb, Leif Garrett and Shaun Cassidy.

We bought their albums, wore their tee shirts and plastered our walls with their posters. We never imagined what time would do to our beloved one-boy bands.

Now we know.

Just a Moment

2006-03-09T13:40:00.000-06:00

I can trace my first thought of adoption to when I sat with my adoptive parents in a cheap motel waiting for a social worker to deliver my new brother.

The visuals associated with the memory are only three feet high. I see dresser drawers, but not the television that must have been perched on top. I see my adoptive fathers knees, flanked by the legs of the chair he sat upon, protruding from a dark corner of the room. Looking down, my feet hang above a shag brown carpet and my legs rest upon a garish orange and brown bedspread. My mother’s arms come into view as she places a pillow – a pillow almost bigger than me – upon my lap, telling me to wait. Be patient. I will be the first to hold him.

When the door opens, I see sensible black pumps, legs wrapped in shiny, thick nylon and a tan, wool skirt. This is it, this moment that’s been promoted as my moment. The day I am getting a brother.

And then, he’s in my lap, perched precariously atop the pillow. Two things happen as camera flashes light up the dark room: I become a sister and I realize babies don’t fall from the sky into their families, that I wasn’t plucked from a bassinet, in a row of other bassinets, to come home with my family. I became a sister and realized I came from other people, somewhere else.

It was just a split moment, a heavy feeling of responsibility for the squirming baby in my lap combined with a huge sadness that his people – and thus my people – were elsewhere. In the midst of my brother’s transition from one life to another, I realized I came not from some heavenly place with winged cherubs, fluffy clouds and flying storks, but from people. My people.

I was three and a half years old.

Home Improvement

2006-03-08T13:15:00.000-06:00

Co-habitation is an entirely new concept for the other-half and me. I’ve been, essentially, on my own since sixteen, followed by a decade of marriage to someone who worked out of town up to nine months a year. The other-half built the house we live nearly 20 years ago and has been a bachelor all that time.

He hadn’t done much to the place before my arrival. He had no furniture, unless lawn chairs and exercise equipment count. The walls were white. Not Dutch Boy semi-gloss antique-white, but the primer dry-wallers shoot from pump cans like insecticide white. That’s okay. I’m an artist and starting with blank canvas suites me just fine.

I soon discovered my Mr. Wonderful is not Mr. Home Maintenance. His maintenance plan is simple: If it’s not working right, throw it out and buy a new one. His back-up plan: If it’s not working right, take it out back, shoot it and leave a gaping hole in the spot it used to occupy. His alternative back-up plan: If it’s not working right let it sit there and call it furniture. So, what happens when one moves into a never touched by repairmen bachelor pad closing in on its twentieth birthday?

She gets blamed for EVERYTHING that goes wrong, as things are likely to do in a 20 year old home.

Some little gems over the years:

***

Me: Um, the county is coming out to inspect the septic tank. Guess the construction workers next door suspected a drain-field problem.
Him: *#$&#!@!! It’s your fault! With all the showering, cleaning and flushing you do. I didn’t have a septic problem until you moved in!
Me: (Contemplating my conservative flush-only-when-necessary, turn the water off between rinsing nature) Maybe it just needs to be pumped. When is the last time you had that done?
Him: Had what done?
Me: Had the septic tank pumped.
Him: You’re supposed to pump septic tanks?

***

Me: (Pushing random buttons on the dishwasher the week I moved in): The dishwasher doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to be getting any power.
Him: Well, it had power before you started pushing random buttons.
Me: (Opening dishwasher) It did? These dishes look like they’ve been here since the advent of the Bee Gees.
Him: Well, it just never worked right. I’ve thought of getting a new one but it’s brand new. I’m not sure I’ve even used it once.
Me: (Realizing he just got a new dishwasher – me!) Can we get a new one?

Me: (Two years of hand-washing later) I had to pull the dishwasher out to grout the kitchen tiles. You’ll never guess what happened.
Him: What?! What’s broken now?
Me: Um, nothing. I fixed the dishwasher. It works!
Him: How’d you do that?
Me: Did anyone tell you dishwashers actually require a power supply?

***

Me: Is it getting hot and muggy in here or is it just me?
Him: It’s 100 degrees out. Even with the air on, it isn’t going to be comfortable. I’m fine. It’s just you.
Me: (From the mild Pacific Northwest and totally uneducated about air conditioners, having never had one): Oh.

Me: (An hour later, miserable and dripping in sweat): I think the dogs are dying.
Him: &$%*)! Did they get into something?!
Me: They are panting and their tongues are hanging out. Does it feel hot and muggy in here or is it just me and all the dying dogs?

Me: (An hour later, talking to the a/c repairman.) Well, what’s wrong with the thing?
A/C Man: Can’t find a thing wrong, but the fan doesn’t seem to be working. Why don’t you check the inside unit and make sure the filters are clean.
Me to Mr. Home Maintenance: A/C man says nothing’s wrong and that I should check to make sure the filters are clean.
Him: We have filters that are supposed to be cleaned?

I could continue this, but I love the guy too much to be so cruel. And, he does so many things for this household and our wellbeing; picking on him for his home dis-improvement doesn’t seem fair. But, stay tuned for the next episode, Honey, Why is There a Bullet Hole in the Refrigerator?”

[Interesting factoid: Spell-check doesn’t recognize the words “adoptee’ or “blog,” but it corrected my spelling of the “Bee Gees.”]

In Other Words

2006-03-07T15:16:00.000-06:00

Relinquishing Renee may read like fiction, but it is true. From the name of the nun, to the song on the radio from which my mother chose my name to the tears my father shed on my birthday, it is true. It is my story. It is my father’s story. It is my mother’s story – as she told it to me. I was merely the narrator.

But, I did some editing. I left out many of the realities that were, for me, hard to swallow. Or, perhaps I left them out because they are realities about the relinquishment experience during the “Baby Swoop Era” that are, in some adoption circles, vehemently denied. Maybe I excluded them because they are so often met with disbelief or the accusation of skewed perception on my – and my mother’s – behalf.

My mother chose, free of coercion, to relinquish me. There were no potential adoptive parents with greedy arms waiting by the phone to hear she’d delivered. There was no social worker touting the advantages of walking away from her fourth child. She didn’t have a lover threatening to leave her if she “didn’t take care of it” or an absent baby’s daddy. There were no parents threatening disinheritance or clergy threatening excommunication.

My mother was, in her words, “hell bent” on relinquishment because she “didn’t want another teenager to raise.”

Not one person who counseled her during the pregnancy believed adoption was the right thing for either of us. So determined was she to disregard her counsel, her second and third trimester were spent tangled up in a web of lies she created to keep her goal within reach.

She told the ladies at her new job she was married to a soldier fighting overseas. She showed them her ring. And, when they threw her a lovely baby shower, she opened each present and oooh’d and awwww’d as expectant moms should. When the hospital nun snuck me into her room against procedure, hoping to change her mind, she resisted.

She told the social worker her lover, a married man who drank too much, had left her. And, when the judge insisted she at least provide the background of the unnamed father, she invented his profession, ancestry and attributes because she was “afraid someone would find him waiting in the parking lot and ask if he wanted to parent.”

And then she went on with her life, married my father and tried her best not to think about it.

Did she have regrets? Oh, yes. When she saw me place a rose on my father’s grave twenty-two years later it was so painful she couldn’t remain in the cemetery. She had dreams in which he came to her saying, “why didn’t you tell me she’d come back?” She was angry with him for missing our reunion. And, with the hindsight of more than two decades she said, “I wish we’d raised you.”

Am I angry about the lies, about her sheer determination to walk away? I have been. I sometimes still am. But as my children enter their teens, I can almost wrap my mind around what happened. Almost. Mostly I see my mother as human and am sad for everything we missed – and all the things we can’t regain.

Because of a choice.

[My late night/early morning blog travels resulted in something unintended: this post. I had other things in the works, dammit. Serious things, less serious things, non-adoptiony things. At any rate, you can find what flipped my trigger in the comment section of fauxclaud's blog, Musings of the Lame - a read-worthy blog, by the way]

An Honor to Serve

2006-03-06T16:38:00.000-06:00

I have won the civil service lottery. Pack yer bags, Rhonda, you’ve been called to serve your country! Yes, that’s right folks; from now on please call me, victim of involuntary servitude, juror number 0086.

I entered “jury duty” in the blog search mechanism, to see what other people are saying about their anointment into the world of $6.00 pay and $7.00 parking. In return, I received a plethora of nauseatingly positive adjectives:

From the patriotic: duty, honor, pride, privilege and opportunity. (duty to sit there, pride of mastering sleeping with your eyes open, privilege of getting screwed out of the ability to pay your bills and the opportunity to see how many hours it takes your ass to go completely numb.)

From the painfully naïve: exciting, dramatic, suspenseful and challenging. (Turn off CourtTV, drop the remote and step away from your televisions, people.)

Pardon my judicial pessimism. The likelihood a summons will result in actual deliberations isn't overwhelmingly great. Still, the moment I saw the summons staring menacingly at me from the mailbox, I was searching for an excuse. It isn’t that I take citizenship for granted or harbor the narcissistic belief my time is more valuable than anyone else’s. It’s that I am a hopelessly odd duck. If you’re looking for a “jury of your peers,” I am not your gal.

Years ago, some friends and I took the Keirsey Temperament Test. It revealed the essence of my personality matches less than one percent of the population. Another personality test done in a clinical setting (and no, the setting wasn’t a psych ward, for those of you wondering) ranked me unusually off the charts in the area of abstract thinking. What that means in a nutshell (or nut-head, as it were) is that I see infinite forests but fail to notice trees. I think in metaphors and abstractions. And, sometimes, I am so busy contemplating every intricate nuance of an issue I forget all about my obligations in the literal moment.

Keirsey considers me an Idealist/Healer. Citizens, you don’t want one of those in your jury pool, especially one lost in abstract thought. While my fellow jurors and I might agree the plaintiff is an unsalvageable sociopath deserving no mercy, I’ll be wondering: How does it f-e-e-e-e-e-l to be an unsalvageable sociopath? And, I will not feel any bit of contentment until I have unearthed the holy grail of sociopathology itself. In fact, I’ll . . . Vote? Verdict? What verdict? Huh?

Your honor, my presence in this courtroom cannot possibly benefit society. I am a hung jury waiting to happen – and I have the test results to prove it.

That’s my excuse and I am sticking to it.

Ghosts of My Fathers

2006-03-04T21:07:00.000-06:00

I grew up with two fathers, but my interactions with both were mostly limited to fantasies.

My adoptive father abandoned us when I was only five or six years old. He left behind a mental filing cabinet of contradictory images: sitting together on the back porch during a thunderstorm while he explained how lightening worked/pointing a hunting rifle at my head and threatening to kill my mother and brother; letting me ride shotgun on the combine and overflowing the catch bin so peas filled the cabin like green snowdrifts/bringing him home from the police station drunk tank; watching him shave in the bathroom mirror/hearing my mother cry all night when he disappeared for days.

When I was a little girl, my adoptive father was my hero. He was also my terrorist.

But, for the most part, the filing cabinet of my early childhood is full of empty folders. In all honesty, those empty files scare me more than the ones stuffed with terrors.

Until my late teens, I explained my disconnect with the world by the absence of my adoptive father and presence of my crazy mother. Issues surrounding my adoption bubbled beneath the surface and, though they boiled over occasionally, they didn’t wear labels, so would simmer down, unidentified.

At 17, I searched for, and found, my adoptive father. We met at his kitchen table and the room filled with cigarette smoke and excuses. I walked away from the meeting fatherless. Not connected by blood, and lacking history, the small man in the smoke filled room put an end to my fantasies. I suppose that was the kindest thing he’d ever done for me, even if it wasn’t intentional.

Also unintentional was the rattle in my subconscious, shaking loose thoughts of my birth father. Following the meeting with my non-father, fantasies of my birth father grew larger-than-life. Over the years, he’s been many things: a Vietnam Veteran, taking his last breath on a hill at Khe Sanh, never knowing I existed; a Woodstock hippy, high on LSD, making love to my birth mother in a flower-painted van; a married man of affluence who abandoned my birth mother in her hour of need. I have loved him, hated him, blamed him and forgiven him, sometimes all within the same moment.

Of course, my father was none of those things. He was married – to my birthmother. He was a military veteran – in World War II, not Vietnam. He probably never experimented with drugs and he definitely didn’t abandon my mother.

My search for my natural father ended at a tombstone, but my quest for him did not. All these years later, I am still guilty of chasing his ghost. The result is a collection of memorabilia: Navy photos from the battle of the Pacific, the cruise album from the aircraft carrier upon which he served, his ribbons and medals (courtesy of the U.S. Government), his military records, a few photos and even a video of his ship, taken from one of the ship’s bombers during the invasion of Iwo Jima.

Each of these trinkets has come to me via U.S. mail. Each arrival follows giddy anticipation – the sense of something wonderful, even miraculous, about to happen. I tear open each package and pour through its contents. Then, it happens: I am taken over by the heaviness of disappointment and the anxiety of things unsettled. Whatever I was hoping to capture through this ghost hunt slips through my fingers. I add my new trinkets to the growing collection – in a box, in the closet – and his ghost fades away again, for a while.

I have been through this little exercise enough times to have learned my lesson – and resolve a thing or two about my birth father. While I haven’t come to know him any better, I have discovered what I am looking for: some sign he didn’t want to walk away.

Rarely, is healing about filling a void – or a box in a closet. Mostly, it’s about letting go.

January's Karmic Ka-Ka

2006-03-03T11:29:00.000-06:00

I hate January. It is, traditionally, the month when bad things happen in my world. This January, for instance, my son had a major crisis, my high school sweetheart was killed in Iraq and my dog was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And, this all happened before the 15th; the anniversary of a fishing accident resulting in the death of six friends. Happy Effin’ New Year. But, this post isn’t your personal invitation to my pity party. As my January subsides, I can usually find some humor in whatever karmic ka-ka I’ve managed to step in. And, since I’ve shaken my emotional hangover from January ’05, it is probably time to make lemons, find silver linings and all that shit people who live charmed lives say to people who don’t.

So I take you to January ’05. I was beyond stoked for an upcoming trip home to Western Washington. Four years prior, I’d put my life in boxes and moved halfway across the country to shack up with my soulmate; the love of my life; the ying to my yang. Under the hard-to-argue auspices of returning for the ten-year anniversary memorial for my fishermen friends, we’d managed to coordinate schedules and holidays to make the trip happen for me. That isn’t easy when your soulmate is a busy physician, you are a single mother and the two of you keep a virtual zoo of animals at home.

My girlfriends and I planned a weekend on the ocean (following the memorial, of course). There would be catching-up, pampering, a bit of drinking and some high-caloric dessert eating. Then, introverted loner that I am, I planned to escape the socialization, head to the mountains and commune alone with nature for a few days; soaking up my fill of fresh air, cedar trees, Pacific Northwest wildlife and solitude before returning to the barren-by-comparison Midwest. I couldn’t wait. I packed a week before the trip and tucked my plane ticket into my brand new luggage. With a vacation in my future and not a funeral notice in sight, I pretty much forgot that silly thing called Rhonda’s January Karma.

A few days before my trip, I joined above-mentioned soulmate and some friends for a little game of pick-up basketball. Playing posed no threat, even with bad karma considered. I was the youngest person on the court and the only female. My teammates and opponents were a bunch of ex-jocks who had already come to terms with their aging joints. No one was aspiring for the NBA. All of us were simply hoping to avoid leaving the court in an ambulance – or hearse. For the uninformed spectator, the games look like The Senior Citizen Special Olympics.

My opponent was the recent recipient of a brand-new, titanium knee. The guy who plays center gets from car to court with the aide of a cane and gut load of vicodin. The team captain is awaiting a hip replacement. We have a blast on the court, despite the fact our games probably look like slow-motion replays.

I’d give a play by play, but the ball wasn’t in play when it happened. Someone on my team aimed, fired and missed the game-point shot. I turned around to locate the guy I was guarding (Mr. Knee Replacement) so I’d be ready when the action started. But somewhere between turn and around, something went horribly wrong. My leg bent in a direction legs are not meant to bend. My calf momentarily pointed north while my thigh pointed northeast. Simultaneously, a loud POP! reverberated through my body. I was down. I was in a world of hurt. I knew my knee was blown to bits and my trip cancelled. Hello karmic ka-ka, goodbye vacation.

My concerned teammates gathered ‘round; one ran for an ice pack. I was less concerned about my injury than I was totally frustrated about losing my vacation. Then, I noticed my soul mate making his way across the court to come to my aide.

I’m a pretty independent chick. This would be the first time in our relationship he could play the hero and I could be the damsel in distress. This thought provided a mental image to lift me from my cancelled vacation funk. I saw him pampering me through surgery, recovery and rehab. I saw my knee propped up on freshly fluffed feather pillows and heard him say, “Can I bring you another cup of coffee? A newspaper? Would you like a backrub?” It wasn’t a Pacific Northwest vacation, but with pampering still in my future – and from the man I love – I grabbed hold of my silver lining and wrapped it around me like a blanket. (Okay, that warm, fuzzy feeling was probably shock setting in, but I’ll take euphoria any way I can get it.)

He reached my side, I grabbed his hand and braced myself, knowing when he carried me off the court it would be painful, but romantic . . . oh so romantic.

My soul mate; the love of my life, the ying to my yang, my hero, leaned over me and looked into my eyes, witnessing the twisted expression of pain chasing the color from my face. He glanced at my rapidly swelling knee, put his hand on my shoulder and returned his gaze into my eyes. His face carried an expression of concern and urgency I’d never before seen. It was a tender moment; one of those times you just know you really are the center of someone’s universe. There was an audible “awwww” from my teammates. God, I love this guy, I was thinking as he leaned in close, so close I thought he might kiss me, and said:

Hey, are you playing or not!? For God’s sake! It’s game point!

Deadliest Catch

2006-03-01T11:45:00.000-06:00

Last week, I purged my soul of a dark secret: the time I spend watching true crime. It’s time for a full confession: I have been known to watch Discovery Channel. More specifically, I have a fascination with Deadliest Catch.

But, unlike the wannabe adrenaline junkies; the teenaged boys dreaming of quick money and life on the wilds of the Bering Sea, the dreamers who think Midwest bass fishing with uncle Joe qualifies them for a position as deckhand on a commercial crab boat, my interest is personal.

I can’t sit through a whole show. I catch re-runs in bits and pieces; they hook me as I pass through the living room. As soon as the initial “Hey, I know that guy!” reaction wears off, a knot of emotion begins to travel from my stomach, to my chest; catching in my throat.

My fifteen-year-old son doesn’t miss an episode. As I watch from the kitchen, his silhouette becomes part of the show. His father is a crab boat captain. I was, for fifteen years, a “fish-wife.” The Bering Sea has taken six of my friends; my ex-husband’s sister-ship; my best friend’s husband, and left too many children I know fatherless.

As much as crab fishing has slipped into my past, I’m afraid it will be part of my future. My son has the fishing bug. Worse, he’s been to Alaska, worked all summer, and not shaken the bug – a sure sign that he has what it takes to be a Bering Sea cowboy. I suspect my days of hoping the coast guard doesn’t call my house are not over.

On the lighter side of the issue, a quick browse of the internet for Deadliest Catch fodder unearthed a disturbing reality – groupies. Aside from the teenaged boys smitten by the danger and profits of crab fishing, a plethora of women from all age groups are going ga-ga over captains and deckhands alike.

Ladies, let me tell you something. There is something television – even reality television – cannot convey.

Crab stinks. Bait stinks. Boats stink. Things that rise from the bottom of the ocean stink. Therefore, fishermen stink. That grizzly outdoorsman you first saw on Discovery who has now been cast as the main role in your fantasy? If he were your man, the first sign would be the intermingled smell of diesel, ground herring and old, warm crab entering your front door ten feet ahead of him. Worse, that smell will remain long after he’s returned to his real love – The Bering Sea.

If that doesn’t dissuade you; if you are still waiting and hoping for your ship to come in, I have some advice: make sure you use your own restroom before you leave home.

Imagine. Six men sharing a bathroom; a very small bathroom. Now, imagine those men, sleep deprived and in a nearly hypothermic stupor, trying to aim their manthings at an 18” target while the ship reels up and down, back and forth, in 25 foot seas. It ‘aint pretty. It’s downright scary.

Discovery film crews must do some housekeeping. The galley table on every edition is strangely void of standard commercial fishing vessel contraband. What contraband? The kind that keeps a young man faithful to his girlfriend or wife while they live apart 6-9 months a year: good old porno movies. It isn’t the porn that’s disturbing, it’s that it generally is kept in the common area – the galley table, where the men gather to eat, drink coffee and shoot the shit during the rare break from hauling crab pots. So, if your dream comes true and a burly fisherman invites you for lunch on his vessel, I have this advice: volunteer to wash the galley table. You really never know where it’s been. And, you don’t want to.

If you are still on board, remember, you’ll have to live with another woman – the Sea. She will come first. He’ll run to her when she offers up her profits no matter if you are in the kitchen scrambling eggs or in the delivery room bringing his firstborn into the world. He’ll spend more time with her than you no matter how poorly she treats him, no matter if she causes him physical pain and financial hardship. If you’ve snagged your fisherman hoping someday he’ll get a desk job, put that idea to rest. Once a man has survived his first crab season and returned for another, it is what he will do until the day the Sea has beaten his body into submission or swallowed him for all eternity.

These aren’t the ramblings of a bitter divorcee. The Bering Sea didn’t sink my marriage. I actually liked the lifestyle – and even miss it sometimes. But, I can’t tell you how many times a new deckhand brought his enthusiastic young girlfriend aboard and she’d turn to me and declare “as soon as he saves some money, he’s going to give up fishing and stay home with m-e-e-e.” Those relationships never worked. I have never met a crab fisherman who voluntarily gave up fishing – ever.

So, if a Deadliest Catch groupie is reading this – and hasn’t yet given up the fantasy – good luck to you. I hope your ship comes in. And, if it does, may it travel safely and without incident, especially if one of the men aboard ends up being my son.

Addendum: I wrote this full aware I was avoiding writing the difficult article I need to write – promised to write – about losing The Northwest Mariner and the men aboard her. Sarcasm is easier. Still, look for a tribute post in the near future.

Flossed Flankage

2006-02-28T22:13:00.000-06:00

“Mom, math was horrible today!” my daughter, a middle-schooler, announced as she blew through the front door, tossing her back- pack aside. She looked completely exasperated; almost traumatized.

Was it a test?

No.

An assignment?

No.

Is that snobby girl picking on you again?

No! It wasn’t anything like that!

Then what?!

Mrs. Smith dropped her eraser.

Uh-huh? And?

And bent over to pick it up.

Yes, and?

And we all saw her THONG! It was HORRIBLE!

She had my sympathy. I carry a few traumatizing teacher moments from middle school in my own psyche. My assigned front and center seat in Mrs. Thorp’s math class kept me at eye level with her ample cleavage for an entire year. Mrs. T’s cleavage didn’t just accidentally pop out and wave at the class once in a while. She wore swoop-neck tee shirts designed to show it off. In fact, she wore the same tee shirt, in a different color, everyday. Show it off to whom, you ask? The pubescent boys in her class? I don’t know. Maybe she was trying to teach us girls with our perky “new” breasts the laws of gravity and importance of wearing a good support bra.

The new generation of middle-schoolers has much worse than old cleavage to contend with. They have the visible thong. The problem isn’t that people – or even teachers – wear them, it’s that they wear them above low-cut jeans designed to show them and, sometimes, even have tattoos designed to emphasize them, just in case you failed to notice their acreage of flossed flankage the first time they bend down to pick up a strategically dropped item. Seeing your teacher’s thong is about as disturbing as stumbling across your pastor’s porno collection. It simply shouldn’t happen.

Ladies, butt cracks have never, ever been in fashion. Your plumber wouldn’t be less disgusting if he tried to conceal his with forty-weight fishing line and your aren’t faring much better. Slapping lace on a butt-crack is like putting lipstick on a pig. And, before I am accused of just being a jealous middle-aged woman, wishing I too could show off my post-partum posterior with unabashed confidence, let me assure you, my concern isn’t personal – it is concern for all womankind. The visible thong has ruined the feminine mystique. If this fashion trend continues, will we soon be expected to wear our bras over our sweaters?

As for my traumatized daughter? Parents everywhere, heed my words:

D.A.R.E. to keep thongs off teachers!

Addicted to Crime

2006-02-23T10:52:00.000-06:00

True Crime, that is.

The last sitcoms I watched with regularity were Home Improvement and Married with Children (back when the content of the latter was considered “daring” television entertainment.)

This dates my television viewing days to the early ‘90s. I didn’t swear off television. I wasn’t making a statement. Perhaps my fading fascination with the boob tube had more to do with raising young children during the Barney era. The large, purple androgynous dancing dinosaur annoyed me into permanently misplacing the remote control – for a decade.

I have never seen “Reality TV.” I don’t care what people dropped off on remote islands are doing. I think it’s insane anyone has won a cash prize for eating pig snouts and leeches (where exactly does that fit on a resume, anyway?). Is anyone truly surprised by what happens when “seven perfect” (young, attractive, college-drop-out) “strangers” move into a house together and “start getting real?” Hint: they start getting real drunk and, later, they start having sex. Sorry for the spoiler.

One can only hope our satellite images are not being intercepted by space aliens conducting a study of life on Earth. Or maybe reality teevee is life on Earth. If so, don’t be surprised when those aliens hand us a bucket of pig snouts and pitcher of kamikazes as an intergalactic olive branch.

We do have television in our home. We have television because America has football and I live with a football fan. We have a television because Disney and Discovery are, sometimes, the answer to “Mo-oooo-o-oo-m, I’m BORED.” But, until a year ago, I resisted.

In preparation for my recovery from ACL reconstruction, I stocked my bedside with books, my laptop and art supplies. I planned to catch up on writing, re-discover my flare for drawing and study philosophy, economics and psychology. Thrown in for entertainment were some true crime and thriller books and a few DVDs.

Then, it happened. Painkillers made me cross-eyed, so reading, writing and drawing quickly fell off the to-do list. I watched all the DVDs during the first two days of recovery. So, one morning, I gimped into the living room, grabbed the remote control and (gasp!) channel surfed.

If prime-time reality TV somehow tickles the psyche of the average American, satellite TV must have been designed for the average American adoptee. Perhaps we are all touched with a bit of Adopted Child Syndrome. Those of us who don’t pick up a knife or flamethrower, can pick up our remotes and live vicariously via the world of the macabre beamed down from satellite into the comfort of our living rooms.

It’s all there, between channels 220 and 300: serial killers, homicide detectives, love triangles, forensic labs, bounty hunters, medical examiners and the world of abnormal psychology.

I can no longer proclaim myself a television snob. I now own my own Universal Remote. I have even been known to waltz into the living room, armed with my remote and zap off Disney saying “Sorry, but it’s time for Cold Case Files.” The only thing slowing me down is football season – but I’m working on that.

For the reader questioning my pathological makeup: Don’t worry.

I can quit any time.

I can.

Really.

Relinquishing Renee

2006-02-21T11:47:00.000-06:00

Originally appeared here .

She lay, legs spread and draped in paper, staring at the ceiling while the doctor did his work. She didn't want to think so she distracted herself with the song she'd heard on the radio on her way to this dreaded appointment. Hell, she was nearly forty and should be used to these exams by now, but this one was different. Hugely different.

Just walk away Renee, you wont see me follow you back home . . .

She couldn't remember the whole song, so sang the first lines of the chorus over and over in her mind.

Just walk away Renee . . .

The snap of rubber gloves popping from his hands as he stood over the garbage with a satisfied grin. “Congratulations! You’re going to be a mother again!” When the announcement was met with confusing silence, he filled it by sharing he believed she was having a girl. After all, he’d accurately predicted the sex of her first three children and though fourteen years had passed since the birth of the last boy, it was time for a girl.

Just walk away . . .

“What’ll you name her?” he asked.

Still staring at the ceiling, “I think I’ll call her Renee,” she said.

It came as no surprise. She’d already done the math. Counting backwards from this moment to New Years Eve, 1966, added up to baby. The song played twice more on her drive home. She cursed herself; a middle-aged divorcee widow with a baby due days before she’d welcome her first grandchild into the world. She ran scenarios through her head. Get married? To that she heard her orthodox mother, yelling in broken English about the shame of three marriages. Don’t get married and keep Renee? To that, her mother abandoned English and ranted in her native Ukrainian.

Her thoughts shifted to her children. Two weeks prior, her pregnant nineteen-year-old daughter climbed from her bedroom window in the middle of the night to elope with the baby’s father. Her sixteen-year-old son already had a criminal record and she worried her fourteen year old would follow suit. She’d done her best with her kids, but right now best wasn’t looking so good.

She tried to envision the baby . . . Renee . . . but all she could see was another difficult teenager. She decided on adoption before reaching her house.

The next day, she put her beauty salon on the market. For her friends, family and Renee’s father, Robert, she concocted a story about an irresistible job offer on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. A month later, she filled her 54 Chevy Belair with suitcases and boxes and set off to make the round of goodbyes. She saved the hardest for last. Renee’s father leaned through the opened driver’s side window. Without any idea the weight of his words he asked, “Grace, will you stay if I ask you to marry me?”

When she said she couldn’t and drove off to the life of pretend she’d live the next six months, he had no idea she was taking his baby with her.

The apartment was furnished in 1960s cheer: turquoise walls, yellow kitchen, shag carpet and orange vinyl furniture perched upon chunky wooden legs. It came furnished, the pictures on the wall not even belonging to her. That was just as well. She wasn’t here to make memories. She was here to forget.

Towards the end of her fourth month, she slipped on her light blue Capri’s; realizing the struggle it was now to fasten them. Soon, she’d be showing. The ring of the doorbell surprised her. Had she forgotten another appointment with the social worker?

But instead stood Renee’s father. A full foot taller than her, he was nothing but muscle and skin highlighted by the roundest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. No one would describe him as handsome. His features were too large for his lean frame. But there was something about his quiet reserve, something mysterious, and perhaps sad, behind his liquid eyes. He kept so much to himself she felt honored by his interest in her.

In his hand was a bouquet of Skagit valley tulips, reminding her life on the other side of the mountains continued without her. He’d made the six hour drive unsure if she even wanted to see him again, but determined to at least let her know he loved her and was waiting. She did love him, was crazy about him in fact, and hoped he’d still be interested when she told him about Renee and the plan for her future.

They spent the next few days deep in conversation, snuggled together on the orange vinyl couch. They chain-smoked and drank too much, but it helped the conversation flow. She told him about Renee. He told her about the son he’d surrendered rights to eighteen years prior. In the end, they were on the same page. Her fear of raising another child and his guilt for not raising his first combined to seal Renee’s fate.

They thought it was for the best. They rationalized that a 44 year old WWII vet with no parenting experience and a forty year old burnt out mother of teenagers couldn’t do the job as well as a young couple with a desperate desire for a family. The social worker, a woman in her late 50s, was the best in the field and she’d promised a perfect match for Renee; so perfect, in fact, she’d never miss the two of them.

She went into labor on Renee’s due date. Eight hours later, weighing only five pounds, Renee entered the world with neither incident nor celebration. She was whisked off to the nursery, cleaned, swaddled and placed in a bassinet in the back of the room – away from the glass through which aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents welcomed their family members into the world.

Unmarried mothers recovered together in a room as far from the nursery as possible. Hospital staff meant to assure they didn’t hear the cry of newborns or the gushing of visiting family. Here, they were un-mothered. They were given drugs to dull their senses and drugs to stop mother’s milk from filling their breasts. Their only visitors were social workers and attorneys, who arrived with paperwork and accolades.

Sister Mary Agnes was on nursery duty that morning. She couldn’t take her eyes off the petite newborn in the rear of the nursery – or the words “ADOPTION” written on the chart hanging from her bassinet. Relinquished newborns were not uncommon. She was used to praying for these orphans and the frightened young girls who brought them into the world. But, this morning she prayed for herself; for forgiveness for the rules she was about to break. This baby’s mother looked like the typical American housewife and, somehow, she couldn’t fathom why she was relinquishing. She scooped the baby up and headed towards the un-mothering room, hoping to change fate.

She lay the baby in the crook of her mother’s arm. Grace spent the next five minutes staring at her perfect, tiny baby girl. Her left arm; the one that should have naturally risen from the bed covers to unswaddle Renee, count her fingers and toes, then pull her into a loving embrace, stayed at her side. She willed it to stay there, rejecting nature’s design.

By the time Sister Mary Agnes returned to the room, chaos had erupted. The social worker had arrived. Grace’s roommate, having watched Grace hold her baby, demanded to see her own child. The social worker shot Sister Mary Agnes a scathing look and handed her Renee. She looked at Grace, trying to determine if her moments with Renee succeeded in changing the course of this baby’s life. She saw no hope, but God works in mysterious ways. By the end of the day, the other mother from the un-mothering room refused to sign relinquishment papers and checked herself out of the hospital with her baby.

Renee left with the social worker; taken to the foster home she’d reside at until a suitable placement was arranged. Three months later, the file of a farming couple crossed her desk. There were home visits and interviews. The match was perfect – this family shared a Norwegian heritage with the baby. Had the social worker delved further, she might have discovered the adoptive father was also the town drunk.

While Renee’s adoptive fate was sealed by the Department of Public Health, across town her father sat in the courthouse parking lot. It was finalization day and he’d driven Grace to meet with the judge. He stared at the ashtray full of cigarette butts, collected since Grace left the car. He’d never laid eyes on his baby girl; his name would not be placed on her birth certificate and he would never quite forgive himself for this decision. There was time to stop it all – walk into the courtroom, announce his presence – but he couldn’t move a muscle. Grace now wore his ring on her finger. There was a wedding to plan and it just seemed too late to take it all back now.

Just walk away Renee, you won't see me follow you back home . . .

He turned the radio off when the song came on . . .

It was Renee’s father who would wake each year on September 22nd and ask Grace, “Do you know what day it is?” she’d reply a quiet “yes, I do,” and he’d return to the bedroom for the rest of the day. Shortly following Renee’s thirteenth birthday, long after Renee’s adoptive father disappeared from her life, he’d succumb to cancer.

Just nine years later, Renee would learn this on the day she thought she found him. Later, with her mother by her side, she’d place a single rose upon his grave, saying goodbye forever to the chance of saying hello.

Lyrics from Walk Away Renee:

And when I see the sign that points one way
The lot we used to pass by every day

Just walk away Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You're not to blame

From deep inside the tears I'm forced to cry
From deep inside the pain I chose to hide

Just walk away Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
Now as the rain beats down upon my weary eyes
For me it cries

Your name and mine
Inside a heart upon a wall
Still finds a way to haunt me
Though they're so small

Just walk away Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
Now as the rain beats down upon my weary eyes
For me it cries

Just walk away Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You're not to blame

Dropping the Ball -- A Vent

2006-02-20T14:07:00.000-06:00

Pet owners who find themselves in the waiting room of the University of Missouri-Columbia Small Animal Clinic are die-hard animal lovers. They have traveled across state lines, cashed in stock to pay their bills and set up temporary residence in hotel rooms. They probably can’t tell you the late-breaking National news story, but can site every back-issue article of Pet-Fancy from the waiting-room magazine rack.

They talk to each other like incarcerated criminals: “What’re you in for?”

“German Shepherd. Cancer. MRI. CSCAN, you?”

“Lame Labrador. Ultrasound. Myelogram.”

“How long you been in?”

“Three 12 hour days, but might be getting out soon. Waiting for word from the main ward.”

Few enter this place voluntarily – doing so would be like making an appointment at the Mayo Cancer Center for a sliver. People come for the state-of-the art technology, groundbreaking research and the possibility of a medical miracle. In exchange, they get a lesson in the bureaucracy of a teaching hospital. Every procedure occurs on University time i.e., if it should take two hours, plan on ten and be grateful for seven. You’ll get an update on your pet if “your student” isn’t in class, on rounds, observing a surgery or having a bad hair day. Don’t piss off the secretary, who can make your life miserable by adding hours to your wait and be nice to the lady in the financial office. Very nice. Oh, and don’t expect to meet your veterinarian. They don’t always make an appearance.

Our Australian Cattle Dog was paroled two weeks ago, following surgery and time in ICU. Hemangiosarcoma – an aggressive and almost always terminal cancer - was our ticket in. But, compared to my battle-weary comrades in the waiting room, I was fortunate. Our veterinarian was Dr. Wonderful, a man who imbued compassion. He’d arrive at work early, just for a pre-operative snuggle with Scout, answer calls within the hour and e-mails late into the evening. He didn’t stick to a 9-5 schedule. If I was there for twelve hours, so was he. He was honest, dedicated and worthy of trust. Without him on board, we might not have made the series of difficult decisions allowing Scout’s last biopsies to come back negative. When we first arrived at the clinic – with a very bad diagnoses and a lot of uncertainty as to whether we were doing the right thing – the man grabbed the ball and didn’t let go.

So, when faced with the choice of where to bring Scout for chemotherapy, the answer was obvious. I wanted her under the watchful eye of Dr. Wonderful. He made University bureaucracy tolerable, if only because it annoyed him as much as his patients. But, during Scout’s recovery from surgery, Dr. Wonderful left clinical practice and entered a research project. No worries, he was still on campus.

I should have run when I met our new student – a pretty, petite woman with the personality of plywood. Our new oncologist couldn’t be bothered with introductions.

About the time I should have been getting the call that Scout was starting treatment, Ms. Plywood called to tell me she was sure Scout’s feeding tube had become infected – and that she could die. “Her abdomen is very painful, she screamed in pain when I picked her up.”

I reflected on the number of times I’d picked Scout up that morning, without a whimper; the daily incision inspections; the cleanings. “How’d you pick her up?!” I asked.

“With two arms, fully supporting her stomach.”

“Um, did you forget her incision from the still-healing spleenectomy?” When she called with the test results (negative for infection, of course) there was no sense of humility regarding the prior phone call, and in a quick attempt to minimize her mistake, she mentioned Scout’s drastic weight loss (with the implication, of course, we’d slacked off on her aftercare and round the clock tube feedings.) That, of course, was straightened out once it was realized she’d forgotten to translate her weight from kilograms to pounds, recording her as half her actual poundage.

Paging Dr. Wonderful! Help!

The secretary fended off my requests to consult with Dr. Wonderful. Dr. Wonderful failed to return my calls and our new oncologist couldn’t be persuaded to consult with us.

Ball. Dropped.

The next call came from the ever-illusive new oncologist. “We need permission to anesthetize Scout,” she proclaimed.

Huh? We were there for a feeding tube removal (Easy. Pull it out. We’d been told several times by several different vets it was an easier procedure than trimming toenails) and a chemo treatment. “Anesthesia for what?”

Evidently, a surgeon had been called in to remove Scout’s feeding tub via her esophagus. I didn’t buy the explanation, as it had never even been presented as a remote possibility. Logic dictated her tube had been lost inside her in the effort to remove it.

Ball. Dropped. Again.

Finally, ten hours from our arrival, Ms. Plywood escorted Scout into the waiting room. She was heavily drugged. She didn’t recognize me. And, when I went to put her in the car, she screamed, snarled and attempted to take a piece out of my arm as a souvenir for the day’s trauma.

Ms. Plywood informed me “Sometimes morphine has that effect on them.”

Morphine? Scout cannot have morphine. Scout has a warning in her chart not to administer morphine. MORPHINE?

Ball. Dropped. For the last time.

With quiet thanks to Dr. Wonderful for his previous care and roaring indignation to our next set of oncology team members, we left the parking lot vowing never to return. Ultimately, Scout is none the worse for wear. She is currently cancer-free and receiving chemo treatment locally.

Sometimes, a Picture Says it All

2006-02-16T09:21:00.000-06:00

My Old Friend

2006-02-02T12:05:00.000-06:00

I stared at the unfamiliar address in my e-mail in box, cursor hovering over the delete button. But before making a fatal error, the right synapses fired and the fragmented name @ somethingdotcom connected to my past. I clicked “read.”

The e-mail contained a link to my hometown paper.

“Soldier who grew up in Washington killed in Iraq.” I knew who it was before his picture loaded. It was news I’d feared since hearing, almost twenty-years before, he’d joined the service. But the passage of two decades met with logic – he couldn’t possibly still be in the military, right? Desert Storm, and smaller conflicts across the globe, had come and gone, without his name appearing on our high school memorial wall. At the onset of the Iraq War, a google search told me he’d found a career in the civil service; a safe, nine-to-five, career.

He was the first war casualty of 2006, his armored vehicle meeting an improvised explosive device in As Sinia, Iraq. In 100 words or less, the paper described a soldier, father, son and husband; a man who, after an eleven year break from the military, re-enlisted and joined the troops in Iraq.

As the hometown headline blurred beneath tears, I watched snapshots of my teen years from a memory projector in my mind, switched on by grief. I couldn’t find the off button.

We were fifteen-going-on-sixteen. It was summer. And, we had just given in to two years of drama-club and football field flirtation. It was that magical, transitional time of life when teens leave behind childhood and take a big gulp of autonomy, still oblivious to the realities of adulthood.

Each morning, I’d lay awake in bed, waiting for the sound of my mother leaving for work. I’d be dressed by the time the wheels of her civic crunched into the gravel driveway and riding off to the transit center on my blue schwinn ten-speed before she made it to the stop sign at the bottom of our street. I’d board the Metro bus with the reader board flashing “Beaux Arts,” walk the short distance to his house, and our day would begin.

When I saw the news video of his grieving parents, I realized I’d probably never seen his mother wearing anything but a floral nightgown. I wondered why, after the passage of twenty years, his parents looked exactly as I remembered them, although I am now the age they were when I’d arrive at breakfast hour each morning. Time has a funny way of collapsing like that.

Beaux Arts is a waterfront community on Lake Washington. We spent our days with friends, cruising about the lake on his speedboat and our evenings in front of a bonfire. Chris and I would inevitably sneak away from the group, find a Douglas fir to lean against, hold hands and talk about life. Like me, Chris was an adoptee. Adoption probably provided the basis of our connection, our lakeside sunsets bearing witness to the first time either of us verbalized our feelings about being adopted, wondered out loud where our natural families were and questioned why we were given up. Together, we each scratched the surface, for the very first time, of thoughts and feelings bottled up since our relinquishments.

Beaux Arts Beach is viewable as one crosses the Mercer Island Floating bridge. Many times in my adult life, I would steal a mid-commute glance at the beach, remembering those talks, that summer and first love. It was the final summer of my childhood. The growing dysfunction in my home-life disrupted the remainder of my teen years, leaving me to cherish my time with Chris all the more.

Like most teen loves, the relationship didn’t last. My mother was leery of two adoptees sharing a romance and viewed the intensity of the relationship as a symbol of bad things – things perhaps only reserved for teenagers from unknown origins – about to happen. I’ve always said Chris broke my heart. But, in reality, expecting him to do otherwise was too much to ask of a teenaged boy.

The last time I saw Chris was graduation day. We sat together, apropos, on the drama-room stairs. We made amends, said apologies for the hurt our breakup caused one another and signed each other’s yearbooks. We shared a hug and promised to keep in touch. That never happened. I wish it had.

Hindsight can be cruel. I’d give anything for one more beachside sunset; to catch up on two decades, share pictures of our children and families, and talk about life. We’d probably share a laugh over learning both of our birth families resided in the same town, only a few cities away – after all that fantasizing of them off in foreign lands. And, I would probably thank him, for something he never knew he provided: the last summer of my childhood.