In my previous post, I told you all about my summer of 1973, and my dad's 'intervention' in my young life, and how I lived on my own, at the YMCA in OurTown, and learned to make my way in the world in a non-fatal manner. It really was a watershed in my life - an experience that left me changed forever. A few more thoughts occur to me, about things I learned that summer, that I thought might be worth sharing with you all. . .
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Growing up Up North, I really did have a fairly 'sheltered' upbringing. Life was pleasant, and for me at least, pretty easy, adoptions and parents' divorces, and things like that notwithstanding. I never lacked for anything, and I pretty much lived in the midst of congenial people. We weren't rich, but solidly middle-class, for sure. Really, for me, growing up was pretty easy. Even when we moved toward the end of my senior year, we moved to the suburbs of a large metropolitan area, which is a different form of 'congenial comfort' than what I'd grown up with, but still pretty easy, all things considered.
But living at the Y in downtown OurTown, and working for Manpower, I was rubbing shoulders with very different sorts of people than the ones I'd grown up rubbing shoulders with. There were guys with drinking problems, for whom Manpower was their last hope of showing they could be disciplined enough to hold a job. Then there were guys at the Y, who lived on the 4th Floor, which basically amounted to a minimum-security jail. Other guys treated women vastly differently than anything I'd ever seen from my dad, or any other man I'd grown up around. . .
One time, I got a job for a whole week (which was nice, knowing on Monday that I was gonna be working every day that week), setting up a fabric store in a vacant building. The trucks showed up on Monday morning, full of all the fixtures and displays, and we had the week to get everything unloaded and set up. The air conditioning in the building went out about noon on Monday, and that entire week was a record-setting scorcher, with temperatures above 100F every day. The AC was finally repaired on Friday afternoon, just as we were finishing the final cleanup. The other thing I remember, is that our 'boss' - the guy from the store who was supervising us - was only on-site with us for about 2-3 hours every day, just to make sure we knew what we were supposed to do, and then to check out what we'd done at the end of the day. About ten every morning, a woman would show up at the worksite, and before long, the two of them would leave together. Then, about three or four in the afternoon, they'd reappear, and he'd pick a few nits on our work for the day, and then the next day, we'd do it all again. It took me a couple days (naive 17-year-old that I was) to figure out what he was up to. But even so, it was something I'd never seen before.
Another time, I got a job working in the evening, moving some furniture in a high-rise office building (in OurTown, 'high-rise' means anything over four or five stories). As I walked back to my room at the Y, sometime after dark, I noticed a couple of fairly seedy-looking women standing on the street corner, across from the Y, directly in my path. Now, I had recently read The Cross and the Switchblade (which was one of the Christian 'hot reads' of the early 70s), and so, with a couple minutes' concentrated thought, I deduced that these were hookers. And there was no way for me to avoid walking past them. What was I to do?
Fortunately (or at least, so it seemed to me at the time), I'd recently read The Cross and the Switchblade, and so, inspired by David Wilkerson's example, I smiled, and walked straight up to the women, saying, "Do you ladies know Jesus?" Which was not really their first choice of conversation-starters right at that moment. One of the women, who was black, asked me, in a challenging tone, "What color is He?", and things went downhill from there. But only for a minute or two. Before long, a police car drove up, and the officer rolled down the window and told me to run along and be about my business. (It wasn't until many years later that the penny finally dropped all the way, and the realization dawned in my brain that the women weren't 'real' hookers after all. . .) That was another experience unlike anything I'd ever seen growing up. . .
Even apart from anything 'sexual', though, living where I lived, and working some of the jobs I worked, exposed me to a whole different, uh, shall we say, socio-economic than what I'd grown up with. One time, I was sent to work at a small machine shop. The owner was a heavy-set man whose hawaiian shirt nearly covered his massive gut, while he chomped on the remnants of a cigar he'd lit maybe three days previously. That day, the shop was making weldments that fitted on the back deck of UPS trucks (I still see them on UPS trucks to this day, and they make me smile). The 'temporary help' that day (there were two of us) had two jobs - one of us had to take the freshly-welded parts and chip the 'slag' off the welds, and then load them into a wheelbarrow and take them back to the other 'temp' who was painting them in the 'paint room' in the back. We'd trade jobs every couple hours.
I started out painting. The 'paint room' was a pretty fair working model of a dungeon. The walls - in fact, everything in the room - were coated with black paint. There were no windows; in fact, no ventilation at all, as far as I could tell. From the ceiling, a single bare light bulb dangled, providing the only light. And along one wall was a large 'bathtub', full of black paint. A wheelbarrow-load of parts would be brought to me; I had a supply of hooks. I would pick up a part with one of the hooks, drag the part back-and-forth through the bathtub of paint, then hang it on an overhead rack to dry. Not terribly difficult. But after you've spent 20 minutes or so dragging parts through black paint, you've pretty much mastered the art of it, and you're ready to move on to something more challenging and interesting. Besides which, 'black paint on everything' is a pretty depressing decor. So, I was more than happy when it was time to 'switch places', so I could try my hand at something new.
The other job, 'slag-chipping', was a tad more mentally engaging - you had to at least check each part you'd chipped, to make sure that you'd gotten all the slag chipped off. And every 5-10 minutes, when the wheelbarrow was full, you got a quick break from slag-chipping to run the load back to the poor schlepp in the paint room. The downside of slag-chipping was that you had to work directly with the owner of the place (Mr. Hawaiian-Shirt-Beer-Gut Guy), who kept up a steady, crude banter the whole time. And when I told him I was headed to college in the fall, he seemed to take that as a particular provocation. So that, when I returned with my empty wheelbarrow from the paint room, I found about 20 parts piled up on my table, waiting for the slag to be chipped, and the Boss was angrily chiding me that I had to keep up. So I went to grab my chipping hammer, and it wouldn't move. I tugged at it harder, while the Boss kept welding more and more parts, and hollering at me. Finally, I saw it - he had welded my hammer to the table, and the joke was on me. He roared with laughter as I broke my hammer free from the table, and then he enjoyed the 'break' he'd afforded himself while I caught up with the backlog, by deriding me and all 'college boys who thought we were so goddamn special'. . .
As I said, that summer was just crammed full of education for me, of the sort for which you can't just write a tuition check. . .
Showing posts with label backstory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label backstory. Show all posts
Friday, August 21, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
The Summer of Growing-Up
The summer of 1973 was a watershed in my life, packed full of changes and transitions, life-lessons and tons of other stuff. And I've never blogged about it, which is a little odd, since it was such a pivotal time in my life.
Several factors in my life all converged in that summer of '73 (I was all of 17 years old). In April of that year, two months before I was due to graduate from high school, my dad took a new job, and our family moved from Up North, Michigan to a huge city a couple states away. Culture shock does not begin to describe it. I lobbied hard for my parents to let me finish out my senior year with my classmates Up North, stay at my grandma's house, whatever, but they weren't buying, and when the family moved to Urban Megalopolis, I went with them. (My one small parenthetical victory was that I was able to get such credits as I earned at the New School transferred back to Up North High, so I was able to graduate with my class, albeit after a couple months away; but my diploma properly says 'Up North High School' on it, so I was happy enough.)
But leaving my home Up North, and every friend I had, threw me into a deep funk, and once I'd gotten back from my Graduation Reunion Tour, I spent a lot of my time being depressed and basically doing nothing. Which wasn't my dad's vision for how I ought to be spending my time. He had thoughts more along the lines of getting a job, and putting some money in my pocket for when I went off to college in the fall. But my depressive funk was pretty deep, and my motivation level stayed accordingly low.
And so it came to pass that, at the beginning of July, my dad made perhaps the single most significant parental move that he ever made in my life, short perhaps of adopting me in the first place. My orientation at Mega-State University was coming up, and so Dad handed me $50 and a round-trip bus ticket. "When orientation is over," he said, "I don't want you to come home; I want you to stay in OurTown and get a job. You can stay at the YMCA. Hang onto the return bus ticket, just in case you need to come home. But I want you to find a job and stay there, if you possibly can."
Holy shit! He wasn't exactly kicking me out of the house, but that was the 'existential effect' of it. And it scared me shitless. Which was not such a bad thing, all things considered. I mean, when you have to focus your mind on where your next meal is coming from, there isn't a lot left over for feeling sorry for yourself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. . .
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I went to my university orientation, and when it was over, I duly made my way to the YMCA in downtown OurTown. What I didn't understand, at least at first, was that it was roughly five miles from the university to the YMCA downtown. I had no clue how to use the bus system (uh, we didn't have buses Up North), so I ended up walking five miles. Once I found the Y, I booked a room for a week (for something like $20, which was almost half of what I had in my pocket), and tried to think about how I was going to go about procuring employment the next day.
As I lay in my bed that first night, in the sweltering summer heat, I heard police sirens off and on for most of the night, which was another thing we never had Up North. It seems almost funny to look back on it. OurTown is what might be considered a 'medium-sized' city; maybe even small/medium. It's a long way from a place like Detroit or Chicago. But, from where I was coming from, OurTown was a scary big city, and I remember crying myself to sleep that night.
Next morning, for lack of anything better to do, I started walking around donwtown OurTown, popping into various establishments and asking if they had any jobs available. Nobody did, but they all told me I should go check with Manpower. I had no idea what Manpower was, but by the end of the afternoon, I was running out of other ideas, so I found the Manpower office and went in to apply. And the gentleman told me to be there the next morning at six o'clock. It was just that easy.
Except, you all being older and wiser than I was that summer of '73, you know that it wasn't that easy. I showed up at the appointed time, along with 15-20 other guys. I joined a Euchre game to pass the time, and a few of the guys got called up to the desk and given some instructions, and then they left. By around nine o'clock, the guy at the desk said, "OK, that's it for today." I really had no idea what was going on, so I went to ask him what he wanted me to do. "Come back tomorrow," he told me. "Maybe we'll have something for you tomorrow." And I suddenly had an uneasy feeling that this 'job' I'd gotten for myself might not be quite all I might have hoped for.
Still, I showed up the next day at six, and the day after that, and the day after that (oh, my horns in those days were very, very green). That first week, I actually worked two days. Which, for $1.80/hr, netted me about $28. So, after I paid another $20 for my room for another week, left me $8 for anything else. Which included food.
Now, I don't know where I got the idea from (the church I'd grown up in certainly didn't teach it), but I had the conviction that I should tithe. So, I sent $3 to Billy Graham, which left me with $5, plus what was left of the $50 Dad had given me, for food and other sundry expenses. Now, urban downtowns are not known for their abundance of grocery stores, so it was a bit of a trick to come up with economical ways of procuring food. In fact, I burned through my 'Dad money' pretty quickly, eating burgers at the restaurants I could find downtown. So I pretty quickly found myself in a serious cash crunch. I recall one day, it was about a Wednesday or so; I was due to get paid on Friday, and I had 50 cents in my pocket. And the only thing I could think to do was to buy an ice cream sandwich from the vending machine at the Y, and hope it would last me for two days. One day, I think the job I was on gave us free Coke; so that was my 'nutrition' for those couple days. . .
But then, I wasn't quite left alone in all the world, either. One day, as I walked through the lobby of the Y, on my way up to my room, the desk clerk called me over and handed me a letter. Which was odd, because my family, and one or two of my closest friends, were the only ones who even knew my address. The letter was from John, my best buddy from high school, and a fellow Jesus-freak. "I was praying for you the other day," he wrote, "and God told me I should send you $20." And enclosed was a crisp $20 bill. Which was food for a week, at least. I wrote him a letter back, thanking him, and encouraging him to keep listening to God.
Another day, I didn't get sent out to work, so I grabbed my guitar (I get a certain amusement, looking back, that the 'worldly possessions' I saw fit to carry with me that summer included enough clothes to fit into a pillowcase, and my guitar; how very hippie-like of me. . .) and went to the park across the street from the Y, to play and sing, and watch the squirrels. A fellow came and sat on the bench next to me, and we started talking. I think he meant to be 'witnessing' to me, but once we ID'd each other as fellow-Christians, we had a wonderfully warm conversation. As it drew near to lunch hour, he invited me to join him for lunch; I initially demurred, but he pressed me. I finally had to admit that I didn't have any money until Friday, and so he bought my lunch for me. And then, when we'd finished our lunch, he handed me $20 to tide me over until payday. All through that summer, in ways small and large, I experienced what I can only think was the hand of God, providing for my daily sustenance (and protecting me from my own naivete).
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This is a good place for me to mention another of the factors that was shaping my experience that summer of '73. A couple years previously, my stepbrother, who was essentially the same age as me, had run away from home. And he hadn't returned. It was a painful episode in the life of our family, but it also formed in me a grudging admiration that my brother was actually living on his own. I was really too young and inexperienced to understand everything that it meant for his life, but I really admired that he could make his way in the world, and not die. I wasn't at all sure that I could do that, if I had to.
So, part of what was percolating in the back of my mind that summer of '73 was that I was being given a similar opportunity, even a 'test', to prove to myself, or whoever, that I could make my own way in the world, like my brother, and not die.
And so, as the summer wore on, I slowly grew in confidence, as I saw that, scuffling though the summer as I was, I wasn't dying, either. As I kept faithfully showing up every morning at six o'clock, the dispatcher started giving me more work, and I could usually count on getting three or four days of work in a given week. I wasn't quite at the point of positive cash flow yet, but I was getting close. And so, when I got to a point, about halfway through the summer, where I was coming up just short of what I needed (and lacking another 'last-minute miracle'), I decided to cash in my return bus ticket, in order to cover the shortfall. It was, in some ways, a gutsy and risky move, but by that point, I had confidence that, when I needed to have a bus ticket, I'd be able to get one. So, I cashed in my bus ticket, paid my bills, and finished out the summer in OurTown, always having enough work to meet my daily needs (and, as the summer wore on, sometimes even a small surplus besides). Then, the last week, instead of renting my room again, I just bought a bus ticket instead, and returned to my parents' house.
And when school started up that fall, I was there. Minus the depression I'd been nursing at the beginning of the summer, and with a freshly strengthened sense of myself, reinforced by the knowledge that I could live on my own, and not die. . .
Several factors in my life all converged in that summer of '73 (I was all of 17 years old). In April of that year, two months before I was due to graduate from high school, my dad took a new job, and our family moved from Up North, Michigan to a huge city a couple states away. Culture shock does not begin to describe it. I lobbied hard for my parents to let me finish out my senior year with my classmates Up North, stay at my grandma's house, whatever, but they weren't buying, and when the family moved to Urban Megalopolis, I went with them. (My one small parenthetical victory was that I was able to get such credits as I earned at the New School transferred back to Up North High, so I was able to graduate with my class, albeit after a couple months away; but my diploma properly says 'Up North High School' on it, so I was happy enough.)
But leaving my home Up North, and every friend I had, threw me into a deep funk, and once I'd gotten back from my Graduation Reunion Tour, I spent a lot of my time being depressed and basically doing nothing. Which wasn't my dad's vision for how I ought to be spending my time. He had thoughts more along the lines of getting a job, and putting some money in my pocket for when I went off to college in the fall. But my depressive funk was pretty deep, and my motivation level stayed accordingly low.
And so it came to pass that, at the beginning of July, my dad made perhaps the single most significant parental move that he ever made in my life, short perhaps of adopting me in the first place. My orientation at Mega-State University was coming up, and so Dad handed me $50 and a round-trip bus ticket. "When orientation is over," he said, "I don't want you to come home; I want you to stay in OurTown and get a job. You can stay at the YMCA. Hang onto the return bus ticket, just in case you need to come home. But I want you to find a job and stay there, if you possibly can."
Holy shit! He wasn't exactly kicking me out of the house, but that was the 'existential effect' of it. And it scared me shitless. Which was not such a bad thing, all things considered. I mean, when you have to focus your mind on where your next meal is coming from, there isn't a lot left over for feeling sorry for yourself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. . .
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I went to my university orientation, and when it was over, I duly made my way to the YMCA in downtown OurTown. What I didn't understand, at least at first, was that it was roughly five miles from the university to the YMCA downtown. I had no clue how to use the bus system (uh, we didn't have buses Up North), so I ended up walking five miles. Once I found the Y, I booked a room for a week (for something like $20, which was almost half of what I had in my pocket), and tried to think about how I was going to go about procuring employment the next day.
As I lay in my bed that first night, in the sweltering summer heat, I heard police sirens off and on for most of the night, which was another thing we never had Up North. It seems almost funny to look back on it. OurTown is what might be considered a 'medium-sized' city; maybe even small/medium. It's a long way from a place like Detroit or Chicago. But, from where I was coming from, OurTown was a scary big city, and I remember crying myself to sleep that night.
Next morning, for lack of anything better to do, I started walking around donwtown OurTown, popping into various establishments and asking if they had any jobs available. Nobody did, but they all told me I should go check with Manpower. I had no idea what Manpower was, but by the end of the afternoon, I was running out of other ideas, so I found the Manpower office and went in to apply. And the gentleman told me to be there the next morning at six o'clock. It was just that easy.
Except, you all being older and wiser than I was that summer of '73, you know that it wasn't that easy. I showed up at the appointed time, along with 15-20 other guys. I joined a Euchre game to pass the time, and a few of the guys got called up to the desk and given some instructions, and then they left. By around nine o'clock, the guy at the desk said, "OK, that's it for today." I really had no idea what was going on, so I went to ask him what he wanted me to do. "Come back tomorrow," he told me. "Maybe we'll have something for you tomorrow." And I suddenly had an uneasy feeling that this 'job' I'd gotten for myself might not be quite all I might have hoped for.
Still, I showed up the next day at six, and the day after that, and the day after that (oh, my horns in those days were very, very green). That first week, I actually worked two days. Which, for $1.80/hr, netted me about $28. So, after I paid another $20 for my room for another week, left me $8 for anything else. Which included food.
Now, I don't know where I got the idea from (the church I'd grown up in certainly didn't teach it), but I had the conviction that I should tithe. So, I sent $3 to Billy Graham, which left me with $5, plus what was left of the $50 Dad had given me, for food and other sundry expenses. Now, urban downtowns are not known for their abundance of grocery stores, so it was a bit of a trick to come up with economical ways of procuring food. In fact, I burned through my 'Dad money' pretty quickly, eating burgers at the restaurants I could find downtown. So I pretty quickly found myself in a serious cash crunch. I recall one day, it was about a Wednesday or so; I was due to get paid on Friday, and I had 50 cents in my pocket. And the only thing I could think to do was to buy an ice cream sandwich from the vending machine at the Y, and hope it would last me for two days. One day, I think the job I was on gave us free Coke; so that was my 'nutrition' for those couple days. . .
But then, I wasn't quite left alone in all the world, either. One day, as I walked through the lobby of the Y, on my way up to my room, the desk clerk called me over and handed me a letter. Which was odd, because my family, and one or two of my closest friends, were the only ones who even knew my address. The letter was from John, my best buddy from high school, and a fellow Jesus-freak. "I was praying for you the other day," he wrote, "and God told me I should send you $20." And enclosed was a crisp $20 bill. Which was food for a week, at least. I wrote him a letter back, thanking him, and encouraging him to keep listening to God.
Another day, I didn't get sent out to work, so I grabbed my guitar (I get a certain amusement, looking back, that the 'worldly possessions' I saw fit to carry with me that summer included enough clothes to fit into a pillowcase, and my guitar; how very hippie-like of me. . .) and went to the park across the street from the Y, to play and sing, and watch the squirrels. A fellow came and sat on the bench next to me, and we started talking. I think he meant to be 'witnessing' to me, but once we ID'd each other as fellow-Christians, we had a wonderfully warm conversation. As it drew near to lunch hour, he invited me to join him for lunch; I initially demurred, but he pressed me. I finally had to admit that I didn't have any money until Friday, and so he bought my lunch for me. And then, when we'd finished our lunch, he handed me $20 to tide me over until payday. All through that summer, in ways small and large, I experienced what I can only think was the hand of God, providing for my daily sustenance (and protecting me from my own naivete).
-------------------------
This is a good place for me to mention another of the factors that was shaping my experience that summer of '73. A couple years previously, my stepbrother, who was essentially the same age as me, had run away from home. And he hadn't returned. It was a painful episode in the life of our family, but it also formed in me a grudging admiration that my brother was actually living on his own. I was really too young and inexperienced to understand everything that it meant for his life, but I really admired that he could make his way in the world, and not die. I wasn't at all sure that I could do that, if I had to.
So, part of what was percolating in the back of my mind that summer of '73 was that I was being given a similar opportunity, even a 'test', to prove to myself, or whoever, that I could make my own way in the world, like my brother, and not die.
And so, as the summer wore on, I slowly grew in confidence, as I saw that, scuffling though the summer as I was, I wasn't dying, either. As I kept faithfully showing up every morning at six o'clock, the dispatcher started giving me more work, and I could usually count on getting three or four days of work in a given week. I wasn't quite at the point of positive cash flow yet, but I was getting close. And so, when I got to a point, about halfway through the summer, where I was coming up just short of what I needed (and lacking another 'last-minute miracle'), I decided to cash in my return bus ticket, in order to cover the shortfall. It was, in some ways, a gutsy and risky move, but by that point, I had confidence that, when I needed to have a bus ticket, I'd be able to get one. So, I cashed in my bus ticket, paid my bills, and finished out the summer in OurTown, always having enough work to meet my daily needs (and, as the summer wore on, sometimes even a small surplus besides). Then, the last week, instead of renting my room again, I just bought a bus ticket instead, and returned to my parents' house.
And when school started up that fall, I was there. Minus the depression I'd been nursing at the beginning of the summer, and with a freshly strengthened sense of myself, reinforced by the knowledge that I could live on my own, and not die. . .
Monday, May 11, 2009
Gross!
This is the 144th post for the 'Running In the Yard' blog. Over the entire three-year history of my blog(s), the actual number is somewhat higher - a few of the earlier posts didn't get 'reconstituted' when I started back up, almost a year ago, and a few posts from my 'Second Blog' were repeats from my 'First Blog', and it didn't make sense for me to re-post both copies.
Confused?
Well, this is also close to the third anniversary of my presence as a blogger in Blog-space, so maybe in honor of that, combined with my 144th post (which, for the math geeks among my readers, is also 100-base-twelve) (because yeah, that's just the incredibly nerdy way I roll sometimes), it is an opportune moment to indulge in a brief retrospective of my blogging life; you would be very kind to bear with me. . .
I discovered Blog-space sometime in the fall of 2005. I think that, at the time, I was bored with work, and took to surfing the web to alleviate my boredom. Initially, I found folks like Digger and FTN, who, would talk about their Christian commitment in the context of their marriages and daily life in general, and I found them encouraging, in helping me to at least take a 'Christian' approach to Blog-space.
For several months, I just lurked occasionally. I left my first comment on FTN's blog in March of 2006 (I don't know if that was the first comment I left anywhere, or not; but the other possibilities no longer exist, so I can't check them out). For the next couple months, I lived in Blog-space as a lurker-cum-comment-gadfly. Initially, I commented anonymously, but within a couple weeks, I adopted the 'Desmond Jones' pseudonym (taken from the Beatles song, 'Ob-la-di, ob-la-da', for those who haven't yet figured it out; I had used it a couple times for entries in the office NCAA pool, and the 'life-goes-on' vibe seemed to fit, along with the whole 'happy-family' bit) (maybe more ironically than I wished, but for blogging purposes, it worked well).
At one point, I complained to one of the bloggers I dropped in on from time to time (her blog no longer exists) that her blog wouldn't let me leave a comment, because I didn't have a blogger account. So, by way of addressing my 'problem', she opened a new blog for me, which she called 'Desmond's Place'. "So now you've got a blog," she said. "Knock yourself out."
I put up my first post on May 19, 2006. My first few posts were of the 'About Me' variety, introducing myself, Molly and our kids, and I told a few of the stories that described the 'boundary conditions' of our life - most especially, our troubles with our kids. And for a month or two, I was finding my 'sea legs' in Blog-space.
That July, I spent a goodly bit of my summer break (the company I work for observes a 'summer shutdown' week) - a little too goodly, as it turned out - tending my new bloggity toy, which irked Molly a bit, and she complained that I was spending too much time in Blog-world, and not enough in the real world, where she and our kids needed my attention (and more to the point, my 'mental energy'). So, impulsive creature that I am (and ever-obedient to my wife; sort-of), I shut down my blog. Actually, I didn't completely shut down the blog - I deleted all the posts, but left the blog itself in place. And thus ended the First Incarnation of my blog.
I didn't leave Blog-space, though - I just reverted to my earlier status as a 'comment gadfly'. For about a month. By the middle of August, 2006, I thought that, perhaps, I could take a sufficiently low-key approach to blogging, that I could remain faithful to my real-world commitments. So I re-posted a few of my favorite posts from the 'First Blog', and started back up.
In some ways, the fall of 2006 was the 'Golden Age' of my blog (such as it was). Amusing and/or thoughtful posts seemed to flow freely from my fingertips, directly into Blog-space. And in the course of it all, I made a few friends - folks like C-Marie, O272, Confused Husband, and Christian Husband (none of whom are actively blogging anymore); and I had some interesting exchanges with Emily from Australia, and Flutterby from Saskatchewan (obviously, I have some affinity for members of the British commonwealth). FTN had his first Real Blogger World House in November 2006, and I was privileged to be one of the participants; that's also where I first met FADKOG, so that was nice. Also in November '06, a couple new blogs popped up, authored by Recovering Soul and Therese in Heaven (I was one of the first to figure out that they were married to each other), and they also became good friends.
In January of 2007, my blogging life suffered a bit of a crisis. I had carried on an on-and-off correspondence with the blogger who had first opened my blog, mostly encouraging her to strengthen her marriage. That January, the correspondence had accumulated to a point where I thought that I should show it to Molly, in the interest of 'full disclosure', and keeping my hands where she could see them, so to speak. Well, Molly didn't like what she saw. Didn't like it at all - which made it a little bit hard for me to trust my ability to run my blog in a way that was appropriate to the 'real world' parameters of my life. And from that point on, the Second Incarnation of my blog was on life support. I ran a few token posts through the cold weather months, but Easter of '07 was the final end. I left the last post up for a couple weeks, and then deleted the blog.
Once again, I stayed active as a 'comment gadfly'. But, for over a year, I was quite happy not to have a blog. I even made a few more friends - hello, Phyllis and Xavier! And also my erstwhile fellow-Michigander and fellow-alum, Bunny; I think I also met Trueself around that time. But of course, as is self-evident, I was eventually moved to start back up again, and what you see before you (for better or worse) is the fruit of that. In June of 2008, I opened 'Running In the Yard', the Third Incarnation of my blog; I restored nearly all of the old posts. I've posted at a slower pace than before - about three posts every two weeks - and I'm not sure that the quality has been what it once was. But, I've made a few more friends - hello, Lime and Cocotte! - and that, to me, has always been the joy of blogging. Last fall, we had the Great Midwestern Blogger Gathering, and a few of us got to 'take it real' with each other, for a couple days. Which was very cool.
Anyway, there are now a full gross of my posts, spread unevenly over the past three years, available for your perusal and (I hope) enjoyment. Maybe even edification; I'll leave it to you all to decide. . .
Confused?
Well, this is also close to the third anniversary of my presence as a blogger in Blog-space, so maybe in honor of that, combined with my 144th post (which, for the math geeks among my readers, is also 100-base-twelve) (because yeah, that's just the incredibly nerdy way I roll sometimes), it is an opportune moment to indulge in a brief retrospective of my blogging life; you would be very kind to bear with me. . .
I discovered Blog-space sometime in the fall of 2005. I think that, at the time, I was bored with work, and took to surfing the web to alleviate my boredom. Initially, I found folks like Digger and FTN, who, would talk about their Christian commitment in the context of their marriages and daily life in general, and I found them encouraging, in helping me to at least take a 'Christian' approach to Blog-space.
For several months, I just lurked occasionally. I left my first comment on FTN's blog in March of 2006 (I don't know if that was the first comment I left anywhere, or not; but the other possibilities no longer exist, so I can't check them out). For the next couple months, I lived in Blog-space as a lurker-cum-comment-gadfly. Initially, I commented anonymously, but within a couple weeks, I adopted the 'Desmond Jones' pseudonym (taken from the Beatles song, 'Ob-la-di, ob-la-da', for those who haven't yet figured it out; I had used it a couple times for entries in the office NCAA pool, and the 'life-goes-on' vibe seemed to fit, along with the whole 'happy-family' bit) (maybe more ironically than I wished, but for blogging purposes, it worked well).
At one point, I complained to one of the bloggers I dropped in on from time to time (her blog no longer exists) that her blog wouldn't let me leave a comment, because I didn't have a blogger account. So, by way of addressing my 'problem', she opened a new blog for me, which she called 'Desmond's Place'. "So now you've got a blog," she said. "Knock yourself out."
I put up my first post on May 19, 2006. My first few posts were of the 'About Me' variety, introducing myself, Molly and our kids, and I told a few of the stories that described the 'boundary conditions' of our life - most especially, our troubles with our kids. And for a month or two, I was finding my 'sea legs' in Blog-space.
That July, I spent a goodly bit of my summer break (the company I work for observes a 'summer shutdown' week) - a little too goodly, as it turned out - tending my new bloggity toy, which irked Molly a bit, and she complained that I was spending too much time in Blog-world, and not enough in the real world, where she and our kids needed my attention (and more to the point, my 'mental energy'). So, impulsive creature that I am (and ever-obedient to my wife; sort-of), I shut down my blog. Actually, I didn't completely shut down the blog - I deleted all the posts, but left the blog itself in place. And thus ended the First Incarnation of my blog.
I didn't leave Blog-space, though - I just reverted to my earlier status as a 'comment gadfly'. For about a month. By the middle of August, 2006, I thought that, perhaps, I could take a sufficiently low-key approach to blogging, that I could remain faithful to my real-world commitments. So I re-posted a few of my favorite posts from the 'First Blog', and started back up.
In some ways, the fall of 2006 was the 'Golden Age' of my blog (such as it was). Amusing and/or thoughtful posts seemed to flow freely from my fingertips, directly into Blog-space. And in the course of it all, I made a few friends - folks like C-Marie, O272, Confused Husband, and Christian Husband (none of whom are actively blogging anymore); and I had some interesting exchanges with Emily from Australia, and Flutterby from Saskatchewan (obviously, I have some affinity for members of the British commonwealth). FTN had his first Real Blogger World House in November 2006, and I was privileged to be one of the participants; that's also where I first met FADKOG, so that was nice. Also in November '06, a couple new blogs popped up, authored by Recovering Soul and Therese in Heaven (I was one of the first to figure out that they were married to each other), and they also became good friends.
In January of 2007, my blogging life suffered a bit of a crisis. I had carried on an on-and-off correspondence with the blogger who had first opened my blog, mostly encouraging her to strengthen her marriage. That January, the correspondence had accumulated to a point where I thought that I should show it to Molly, in the interest of 'full disclosure', and keeping my hands where she could see them, so to speak. Well, Molly didn't like what she saw. Didn't like it at all - which made it a little bit hard for me to trust my ability to run my blog in a way that was appropriate to the 'real world' parameters of my life. And from that point on, the Second Incarnation of my blog was on life support. I ran a few token posts through the cold weather months, but Easter of '07 was the final end. I left the last post up for a couple weeks, and then deleted the blog.
Once again, I stayed active as a 'comment gadfly'. But, for over a year, I was quite happy not to have a blog. I even made a few more friends - hello, Phyllis and Xavier! And also my erstwhile fellow-Michigander and fellow-alum, Bunny; I think I also met Trueself around that time. But of course, as is self-evident, I was eventually moved to start back up again, and what you see before you (for better or worse) is the fruit of that. In June of 2008, I opened 'Running In the Yard', the Third Incarnation of my blog; I restored nearly all of the old posts. I've posted at a slower pace than before - about three posts every two weeks - and I'm not sure that the quality has been what it once was. But, I've made a few more friends - hello, Lime and Cocotte! - and that, to me, has always been the joy of blogging. Last fall, we had the Great Midwestern Blogger Gathering, and a few of us got to 'take it real' with each other, for a couple days. Which was very cool.
Anyway, there are now a full gross of my posts, spread unevenly over the past three years, available for your perusal and (I hope) enjoyment. Maybe even edification; I'll leave it to you all to decide. . .
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Down One
It has been an ongoing bit of light humor in my life that I have three mothers (and Molly has three mothers-in-law) - that, when someone asks me about my mother, I first have to clarify, "Which one?" There is the mother who bore me and gave me birth, the mother who adopted me, and formed the first nine years of my life, and the mother in whose family I lived and thrived from the age of ten to the present day.
But now, as of last night at 10:10 PM, that number is one smaller. At least in terms of those living in this world. My 'first mother' - my dad's first wife, who adopted me (and my brother, a year-and-a-half later), and raised me through the fourth grade - died last night. She had only recently moved back up to Michigan, having lived in Florida for the past 30+ years. Last Friday, she was hospitalized with a blood infection, with some related complications. It didn't seem like anything major at the time, but she just kept sliding downhill (there are no 'minor' illnesses when you're 88 years old), and the end came last night. I am so glad we got to visit her on Sunday.
-------------------------
Her death provokes an odd, and somewhat conflicted, set of responses in me. First, and most fundamentally, I am sadddened. She was, obviously enough, a major player in my life, in forming me into the person I am today. She pushed me into my earliest musical training, and such joy as I am able to take today from playing various instruments, and singing, can be largely credited to her early influence on my life. In fact, I first pursued searching for her when our eldest daughter showed precocious musical aptitude, and we started her on piano lessons. And I remembered the woman who had given that to me. . .
I was glad to have her back in my life, and in the life of our family. It enriched the lives of our children to know her, and hear her stories of growing up in Germany (under the Nazis from the age of 12). We went to visit her and her (second) husband in Florida twice, and they visited us on several other occasions. Her husband died in 1998, and after that, she didn't travel much.
But there was always the background 'irritant' that she had left us. She spoke with me a couple times about my dad, and how stubborn he was, and how hard he was to live with. And I, by that time having lived with him longer than she had, could acknowledge the justice of everything she said.
But she never really acknowledged that, in leaving our dad, she was leaving my brother and me in the process. Or that, however justified she might have been in leaving dad, she might still have wronged my brother and me. I didn't hold a grudge over it - please be very clear, I was unambiguously happy to have her back in my life - but a simple apology would have been very healing, probably for both of us.
But, in the ensuing years since she left, I've come to understand that adoptive motherhood comes with a whole set of baggage relating to the mothers' own infertility, and she seems to have had it gilt-edged and embroidered. Some years ago, in the course of documenting something for my family history, I got hold of the paperwork from when we enrolled in our new school when we moved Up North. She had taken us to the school, and all the signatures on the papers were hers. And on the line labeled 'Relationship to Student', she put 'stepmother'. And, even 30 years later, that just floored me. Even having had me in her family for seven years, she didn't think of herself as my 'mother'; just someone filling in, in lieu of the 'real thing'.
She was a very sensitive person, sometimes spilling over into 'insecure'. And, combined with my dad's farm-boy bluntness, I can easily understand how they were a bit of a mismatch. But, even having long since 'moved on', I can't quite bring myself to 'accept' their divorce. It still seems to me to be a tragedy that, at bottom, didn't have to happen. It happened, and it is what it is, and my life has been what it's been, and I'm OK. But, if between the two of them, they could have mustered up a bit more love and determination, it didn't have to happen. In my mind, I have tended to lay more resonsibility on her for having been the one who left, but I am well aware that my dad could've pursued reconciliation with a bit more interest than what he did. . .
When she left, she effectively walked out of our lives completely. Dad remarried within a year (basically as soon as the divorce was final), and we immediately moved on to life with our new family. I remember getting a few phone calls from her, which always felt awkward, sort of like one of those 'what doesn't belong?' panels from the kids' magazines. She sent my brother and me birthday cards for a few years afterwards - I remember the last one I got was when I was 13.
And then nothing, until we got back in touch 20-some years later.
-------------------------
When we got back together (fall of '88; we first visited them in spring '89), we had a warm - if somewhat nervous - reunion. Her new husband was a great guy, and welcomed us warmly himself. She was his second wife, his first having died after 17 years of marriage, with no children. They met each other, funnily enough, in the swirl of the celebration after the Tigers won the '68 World Series, and married within six months.
And we learned that, until I got in contact with her, she had never told her new husband that she'd had kids - when I showed up, she had some 'splainin' to do. And it occurred to me that they were married shortly after my 13th birthday, after which I didn't hear from her.
We discussed what to have our kids call her husband; we thought of having them call him 'uncle', after the fashion of those 'friend-of-the-family uncles' that many families have, who are 'uncle', even if they aren't really 'related'. But he nixed that - having had no children from either of his wives, he was very close to his brother's sons, and 'uncle' was, for him, far more than a mere 'term of endearment'. Not something he was prepared to hear from kids who'd only just showed up on his doorstep. So, we ended up at 'Mister', which seemed way too 'formal' and 'arms-length', especially in light of the warm relationship we eventually built with him. 3M, especially, seemed to have a special 'resonance' with him. He fell and broke his hip in '96, and his health steadily declined until his death in '98.
-------------------------
As I said, she and her husband were very close with their nephews, and for their part, the nephews embraced her as their own. Especially after their own mother died, they looked after her as if she was their own mother. When she started having some difficulty last fall, it was her nephews who looked after getting her the care she needed, and oversaw bringing her back to Michigan, where they could be in immediate touch with her.
It was a little nervous for us to contact them. Their uncle, after all, had been a bit slow to 'bring us in', and who were we to insinuate ourselves into their family matters? But I needn't have worried - we could not have gotten a more gracious welcome. It's funny - we aren't really 'family' to each other, but we are most definitely 'connected' through the person of my mother, their aunt. And, between the five of them, and my brother and me, we are the sum total of her family left to mourn her passing. We'll have the funeral this weekend, and at some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll sit down and get to know each other better. Something that probably should have happened long ago, but sometimes the obvious things can elude our attention. . .
-------------------------
So, my 'first mother' is dead. Not, I am given to hope, in the 'eternal' sense, but she's not here for me to speak to anymore. The phone calls that were never as frequent as they should have been, won't be happening any more. And the joys and conflicts that bubbled around inside me, relative to her, and our relationship, will be left to bubble around without any further input from her.
I was glad to know her. I am sorry that she's gone. I will miss her.
Requiescat In Pace, Mutter.
But now, as of last night at 10:10 PM, that number is one smaller. At least in terms of those living in this world. My 'first mother' - my dad's first wife, who adopted me (and my brother, a year-and-a-half later), and raised me through the fourth grade - died last night. She had only recently moved back up to Michigan, having lived in Florida for the past 30+ years. Last Friday, she was hospitalized with a blood infection, with some related complications. It didn't seem like anything major at the time, but she just kept sliding downhill (there are no 'minor' illnesses when you're 88 years old), and the end came last night. I am so glad we got to visit her on Sunday.
-------------------------
Her death provokes an odd, and somewhat conflicted, set of responses in me. First, and most fundamentally, I am sadddened. She was, obviously enough, a major player in my life, in forming me into the person I am today. She pushed me into my earliest musical training, and such joy as I am able to take today from playing various instruments, and singing, can be largely credited to her early influence on my life. In fact, I first pursued searching for her when our eldest daughter showed precocious musical aptitude, and we started her on piano lessons. And I remembered the woman who had given that to me. . .
I was glad to have her back in my life, and in the life of our family. It enriched the lives of our children to know her, and hear her stories of growing up in Germany (under the Nazis from the age of 12). We went to visit her and her (second) husband in Florida twice, and they visited us on several other occasions. Her husband died in 1998, and after that, she didn't travel much.
But there was always the background 'irritant' that she had left us. She spoke with me a couple times about my dad, and how stubborn he was, and how hard he was to live with. And I, by that time having lived with him longer than she had, could acknowledge the justice of everything she said.
But she never really acknowledged that, in leaving our dad, she was leaving my brother and me in the process. Or that, however justified she might have been in leaving dad, she might still have wronged my brother and me. I didn't hold a grudge over it - please be very clear, I was unambiguously happy to have her back in my life - but a simple apology would have been very healing, probably for both of us.
But, in the ensuing years since she left, I've come to understand that adoptive motherhood comes with a whole set of baggage relating to the mothers' own infertility, and she seems to have had it gilt-edged and embroidered. Some years ago, in the course of documenting something for my family history, I got hold of the paperwork from when we enrolled in our new school when we moved Up North. She had taken us to the school, and all the signatures on the papers were hers. And on the line labeled 'Relationship to Student', she put 'stepmother'. And, even 30 years later, that just floored me. Even having had me in her family for seven years, she didn't think of herself as my 'mother'; just someone filling in, in lieu of the 'real thing'.
She was a very sensitive person, sometimes spilling over into 'insecure'. And, combined with my dad's farm-boy bluntness, I can easily understand how they were a bit of a mismatch. But, even having long since 'moved on', I can't quite bring myself to 'accept' their divorce. It still seems to me to be a tragedy that, at bottom, didn't have to happen. It happened, and it is what it is, and my life has been what it's been, and I'm OK. But, if between the two of them, they could have mustered up a bit more love and determination, it didn't have to happen. In my mind, I have tended to lay more resonsibility on her for having been the one who left, but I am well aware that my dad could've pursued reconciliation with a bit more interest than what he did. . .
When she left, she effectively walked out of our lives completely. Dad remarried within a year (basically as soon as the divorce was final), and we immediately moved on to life with our new family. I remember getting a few phone calls from her, which always felt awkward, sort of like one of those 'what doesn't belong?' panels from the kids' magazines. She sent my brother and me birthday cards for a few years afterwards - I remember the last one I got was when I was 13.
And then nothing, until we got back in touch 20-some years later.
-------------------------
When we got back together (fall of '88; we first visited them in spring '89), we had a warm - if somewhat nervous - reunion. Her new husband was a great guy, and welcomed us warmly himself. She was his second wife, his first having died after 17 years of marriage, with no children. They met each other, funnily enough, in the swirl of the celebration after the Tigers won the '68 World Series, and married within six months.
And we learned that, until I got in contact with her, she had never told her new husband that she'd had kids - when I showed up, she had some 'splainin' to do. And it occurred to me that they were married shortly after my 13th birthday, after which I didn't hear from her.
We discussed what to have our kids call her husband; we thought of having them call him 'uncle', after the fashion of those 'friend-of-the-family uncles' that many families have, who are 'uncle', even if they aren't really 'related'. But he nixed that - having had no children from either of his wives, he was very close to his brother's sons, and 'uncle' was, for him, far more than a mere 'term of endearment'. Not something he was prepared to hear from kids who'd only just showed up on his doorstep. So, we ended up at 'Mister', which seemed way too 'formal' and 'arms-length', especially in light of the warm relationship we eventually built with him. 3M, especially, seemed to have a special 'resonance' with him. He fell and broke his hip in '96, and his health steadily declined until his death in '98.
-------------------------
As I said, she and her husband were very close with their nephews, and for their part, the nephews embraced her as their own. Especially after their own mother died, they looked after her as if she was their own mother. When she started having some difficulty last fall, it was her nephews who looked after getting her the care she needed, and oversaw bringing her back to Michigan, where they could be in immediate touch with her.
It was a little nervous for us to contact them. Their uncle, after all, had been a bit slow to 'bring us in', and who were we to insinuate ourselves into their family matters? But I needn't have worried - we could not have gotten a more gracious welcome. It's funny - we aren't really 'family' to each other, but we are most definitely 'connected' through the person of my mother, their aunt. And, between the five of them, and my brother and me, we are the sum total of her family left to mourn her passing. We'll have the funeral this weekend, and at some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll sit down and get to know each other better. Something that probably should have happened long ago, but sometimes the obvious things can elude our attention. . .
-------------------------
So, my 'first mother' is dead. Not, I am given to hope, in the 'eternal' sense, but she's not here for me to speak to anymore. The phone calls that were never as frequent as they should have been, won't be happening any more. And the joys and conflicts that bubbled around inside me, relative to her, and our relationship, will be left to bubble around without any further input from her.
I was glad to know her. I am sorry that she's gone. I will miss her.
Requiescat In Pace, Mutter.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Tough Times, If You've Ever Been Married to My Dad
I posted a couple months ago about my ‘stepmother’ (Dad’s second wife), and her struggles with Alzheimer’s. My parents had moved out of their home of the past 35 years, and into an assisted-living facility. They chose the place they did, because of its proximity to a level of care for Mom that would allow them to live together for as long as possible.
Well, it turns out that ‘as long as possible’ was about a month-and-a-half. Something about leaving her familiar surroundings and into a new-and-unfamiliar place seemed to ‘disorient’ Mom, and she fairly quickly started up with some more ‘difficult’ behaviors that just made it impossible for Dad to take care of her, so in September, she moved out of the assisted-living place, and into a full-out nursing home, about a ten-minute drive from Dad.
She seemed to do well enough at the nursing home, and the staff there complained, just a bit, that she was always ‘on the move’, and they spent more time than they’d have liked just ‘tracking her down’. Then a couple months ago, she just stopped. She wouldn’t get out of her chair, she didn’t want to get up and walk around at all. And nobody seemed to be able to tell us why. Finally, a couple weeks ago, some tests were run which determined that she’d had a pretty significant stroke, probably right around the time when she stopped walking.
And since then, her health has just continued to deteriorate. My sisters are now telling us to make sure that everybody comes down for Christmas, because it’s starting to seem like we won’t have her around for much longer.
It’s quite sad for my dad; he put a lot of thought and effort into finding a place that would keep them together for as long as possible, and it just seems cruel that it couldn’t have been just a bit longer. But, as we well know, there are no guarantees. . .
-------------------------
I’ve blogged about the fact that I have three mothers – my birth-mother, my ‘stepmother’ and my ‘first mother’ – my dad’s first wife, who adopted me, along with Dad. I’ve had a few things to say about my ‘first mother’ in the past, but I haven’t given a very full account of her story, so perhaps it’s time I did that, just a bit.
My ‘first mother’ was born in Germany in the 1920s. She was a pre-teen when the Nazis took power, and that fact pretty much set the tone for the next decade-and-a-half of her life (as it did for virtually all Germans of the time). Because her mother was ill, her father was able to keep her out of the Hitler Youth, to care for her mother. She was a young adult when the war started, and by the end of the war, she was working in a field hospital somewhere in Austria. She told us once about the last days of the war, and how everyone she worked with simply headed west as fast as they could, so as to fall into the hands of the Americans, if possible, but anyone besides the Soviets. Which she managed to accomplish.
After the war, she got a secretarial job working for the US State Department in the postwar reconstruction (which was only possible because she had never been a Nazi, including the Hitler Youth), and it was there that she met my dad. They were married in Germany just before Dad’s tour of duty ended, and she came to the US with Dad when he returned home to finish his college degree on the GI Bill.
They were married for nine years without any children, before they finally adopted me, and two years later, my brother. When I was little, we lived in the Detroit suburbs, but when I was seven years old, we moved Up North.
I’m not sure exactly what sort of marital difficulties they were having, but during the winter in which I had my ninth birthday, she left. I remember my dad sitting down with my brother and me, telling us that Mom had left, and she probably wouldn’t be coming back. And that was effectively the last we heard from her, until many years later. There were a few awkward phone calls, and she sent us birthday cards for a few years – I recall that the last one was for my 13th birthday.
My brother and I lived a kind of ‘bachelor’ existence with Dad for the next year, but he pretty quickly took up with the woman who would become our ‘new mother’ (and would instantly add three more children to our ‘new family’), and they were married before my tenth birthday (the ink was hardly dry on the divorce papers).
Fast forward now to my early 30s; Molly and I had been married for a while, and 3M had just been born. 1F had started school, and she was also exhibiting some fairly remarkable musical aptitude. And it caused me to think of my ‘first mother’, who had been quite formative of my own musical abilities – she had insisted that I start piano lessons when I was five, and she had brought music into our home (my dad, on the other hand, was pretty thoroughly tone-deaf), and that had always stayed with me.
Somewhere along the line, I thought that I wanted to thank her for having brought that into my life, so I decided to try to find her, and re-connect with her, if possible. I followed a few leads, but mostly ran into dead ends. But I did register with a ‘people-finder’ service through Social Security, where they would, blind to me, and if possible, contact the person being sought, and inform them that I was desiring contact with them. At that point, any contact would be up to them.
And, over Thanksgiving of 1988, she called me, and we re-established our relationship. I learned that she had remarried in 1969 (roughly corresponding to when the birthday cards had stopped). She and her new husband had no children; and he’d had no children with his first wife, who had died a few years previously. In the 70s, they’d moved to a warm-weather state 1000 miles from Michigan, and that’s where they’d lived ever since.
She had never told her new husband that she’d had children, so when I came onto the scene, she had some ‘splainin’ to do. (I think this was partly to do with her insecurity over her own infertility; even when she was still married to Dad, I don’t think she really, deep in her gut, thought of herself as our mother). But, in the fullness of time, we formed a warm friendship with her and her ‘new husband’ (to whom, by the time of our reunion, she’d been married nearly 20 years).
The following spring, we went Down South to visit them (and swim in the ocean for the first time), and we had roughly annual visits with them for several years afterward, until her husband’s death in the mid-90s.
Since his death, she has lived as a widow, independent and active in her church. She moved to an assisted-living facility a few years back, but she has always had a strong network of relationships.
I have been in the habit of calling each of my mothers during the major holidays. This year, when I called my ‘first mother, she didn’t answer her phone. I didn’t think much of it – I figured she was probably spending the time with friends from her church, and we’d eventually hear from her. But she didn’t call back, and after a couple days, we started to get worried. Fortunately, she’d given us the phone number of one of her neighbors, and told us to call the neighbor if we couldn’t contact her, for some reason. So Molly called the neighbor, and we learned that she’d fallen three times in the week before Thanksgiving, and was in the hospital. She didn’t have any broken bones, but she was sore and bruised, and her legs had essentially stopped working. And then, while she was in the hospital, she’d contracted pneumonia.
We had quite a bit of difficulty getting to actually talk with her, and by the time we did, this past weekend, we found out that she was being moved to a temporary nursing home, and her nephews (her late husband’s brother’s sons) were working on moving her to a home back in Michigan (God bless her nephews; they have treated her as a beloved family member since the day she married their uncle; it is a little bit daunting for us to think about contacting them to ask them to keep us in the communication loop).
It will be nice to have her closer at hand, and to be able to visit her much more easily than when she was Down South, but it is clear that now both of the women who spent any amount of time raising me are in the ‘end game’ of their lives at the same time. I’m absolutely glad that we were able to be reunited, and to be part of each other’s lives, to whatever degree, for the past 20 years.
It’s a little bit difficult to sort out just what the demands of ‘Honor your father and mother’ are, when referring to multiple mothers in various situations and relationships to us. But I do want to give each of them the honor, and gratitude, that they are due, and that God requires of me. But it’s not always clear just what that is. . .
And, just in case anybody is wondering, my birth-mother’s health is just fine; at least, as of a couple days ago. . .
Well, it turns out that ‘as long as possible’ was about a month-and-a-half. Something about leaving her familiar surroundings and into a new-and-unfamiliar place seemed to ‘disorient’ Mom, and she fairly quickly started up with some more ‘difficult’ behaviors that just made it impossible for Dad to take care of her, so in September, she moved out of the assisted-living place, and into a full-out nursing home, about a ten-minute drive from Dad.
She seemed to do well enough at the nursing home, and the staff there complained, just a bit, that she was always ‘on the move’, and they spent more time than they’d have liked just ‘tracking her down’. Then a couple months ago, she just stopped. She wouldn’t get out of her chair, she didn’t want to get up and walk around at all. And nobody seemed to be able to tell us why. Finally, a couple weeks ago, some tests were run which determined that she’d had a pretty significant stroke, probably right around the time when she stopped walking.
And since then, her health has just continued to deteriorate. My sisters are now telling us to make sure that everybody comes down for Christmas, because it’s starting to seem like we won’t have her around for much longer.
It’s quite sad for my dad; he put a lot of thought and effort into finding a place that would keep them together for as long as possible, and it just seems cruel that it couldn’t have been just a bit longer. But, as we well know, there are no guarantees. . .
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I’ve blogged about the fact that I have three mothers – my birth-mother, my ‘stepmother’ and my ‘first mother’ – my dad’s first wife, who adopted me, along with Dad. I’ve had a few things to say about my ‘first mother’ in the past, but I haven’t given a very full account of her story, so perhaps it’s time I did that, just a bit.
My ‘first mother’ was born in Germany in the 1920s. She was a pre-teen when the Nazis took power, and that fact pretty much set the tone for the next decade-and-a-half of her life (as it did for virtually all Germans of the time). Because her mother was ill, her father was able to keep her out of the Hitler Youth, to care for her mother. She was a young adult when the war started, and by the end of the war, she was working in a field hospital somewhere in Austria. She told us once about the last days of the war, and how everyone she worked with simply headed west as fast as they could, so as to fall into the hands of the Americans, if possible, but anyone besides the Soviets. Which she managed to accomplish.
After the war, she got a secretarial job working for the US State Department in the postwar reconstruction (which was only possible because she had never been a Nazi, including the Hitler Youth), and it was there that she met my dad. They were married in Germany just before Dad’s tour of duty ended, and she came to the US with Dad when he returned home to finish his college degree on the GI Bill.
They were married for nine years without any children, before they finally adopted me, and two years later, my brother. When I was little, we lived in the Detroit suburbs, but when I was seven years old, we moved Up North.
I’m not sure exactly what sort of marital difficulties they were having, but during the winter in which I had my ninth birthday, she left. I remember my dad sitting down with my brother and me, telling us that Mom had left, and she probably wouldn’t be coming back. And that was effectively the last we heard from her, until many years later. There were a few awkward phone calls, and she sent us birthday cards for a few years – I recall that the last one was for my 13th birthday.
My brother and I lived a kind of ‘bachelor’ existence with Dad for the next year, but he pretty quickly took up with the woman who would become our ‘new mother’ (and would instantly add three more children to our ‘new family’), and they were married before my tenth birthday (the ink was hardly dry on the divorce papers).
Fast forward now to my early 30s; Molly and I had been married for a while, and 3M had just been born. 1F had started school, and she was also exhibiting some fairly remarkable musical aptitude. And it caused me to think of my ‘first mother’, who had been quite formative of my own musical abilities – she had insisted that I start piano lessons when I was five, and she had brought music into our home (my dad, on the other hand, was pretty thoroughly tone-deaf), and that had always stayed with me.
Somewhere along the line, I thought that I wanted to thank her for having brought that into my life, so I decided to try to find her, and re-connect with her, if possible. I followed a few leads, but mostly ran into dead ends. But I did register with a ‘people-finder’ service through Social Security, where they would, blind to me, and if possible, contact the person being sought, and inform them that I was desiring contact with them. At that point, any contact would be up to them.
And, over Thanksgiving of 1988, she called me, and we re-established our relationship. I learned that she had remarried in 1969 (roughly corresponding to when the birthday cards had stopped). She and her new husband had no children; and he’d had no children with his first wife, who had died a few years previously. In the 70s, they’d moved to a warm-weather state 1000 miles from Michigan, and that’s where they’d lived ever since.
She had never told her new husband that she’d had children, so when I came onto the scene, she had some ‘splainin’ to do. (I think this was partly to do with her insecurity over her own infertility; even when she was still married to Dad, I don’t think she really, deep in her gut, thought of herself as our mother). But, in the fullness of time, we formed a warm friendship with her and her ‘new husband’ (to whom, by the time of our reunion, she’d been married nearly 20 years).
The following spring, we went Down South to visit them (and swim in the ocean for the first time), and we had roughly annual visits with them for several years afterward, until her husband’s death in the mid-90s.
Since his death, she has lived as a widow, independent and active in her church. She moved to an assisted-living facility a few years back, but she has always had a strong network of relationships.
I have been in the habit of calling each of my mothers during the major holidays. This year, when I called my ‘first mother, she didn’t answer her phone. I didn’t think much of it – I figured she was probably spending the time with friends from her church, and we’d eventually hear from her. But she didn’t call back, and after a couple days, we started to get worried. Fortunately, she’d given us the phone number of one of her neighbors, and told us to call the neighbor if we couldn’t contact her, for some reason. So Molly called the neighbor, and we learned that she’d fallen three times in the week before Thanksgiving, and was in the hospital. She didn’t have any broken bones, but she was sore and bruised, and her legs had essentially stopped working. And then, while she was in the hospital, she’d contracted pneumonia.
We had quite a bit of difficulty getting to actually talk with her, and by the time we did, this past weekend, we found out that she was being moved to a temporary nursing home, and her nephews (her late husband’s brother’s sons) were working on moving her to a home back in Michigan (God bless her nephews; they have treated her as a beloved family member since the day she married their uncle; it is a little bit daunting for us to think about contacting them to ask them to keep us in the communication loop).
It will be nice to have her closer at hand, and to be able to visit her much more easily than when she was Down South, but it is clear that now both of the women who spent any amount of time raising me are in the ‘end game’ of their lives at the same time. I’m absolutely glad that we were able to be reunited, and to be part of each other’s lives, to whatever degree, for the past 20 years.
It’s a little bit difficult to sort out just what the demands of ‘Honor your father and mother’ are, when referring to multiple mothers in various situations and relationships to us. But I do want to give each of them the honor, and gratitude, that they are due, and that God requires of me. But it’s not always clear just what that is. . .
And, just in case anybody is wondering, my birth-mother’s health is just fine; at least, as of a couple days ago. . .
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Rest of my DNA
When I was reunited with my birth-mother, some 19+ years ago, she told me who my birth-father was, and gave me enough information to find him, over 1000 miles away from me, within a few more months. I called him on the phone, and by my dropping my birth-mother’s name, he knew immediately who I was, and my connection to him.
Our relationship has been friendly, although I wouldn’t characterize it as ‘close’. Certainly, I don’t view him as having paid the same kind of ‘price’ for my existence as my birth-mother did. He had his fun, and the rest was up to her. And in fact, when her father sued him, to cover her medical expenses, he treated her pretty shabbily; and I’ll leave it at that. So, yeah – his role in my coming-to-be was somewhat less than ‘heroic’.
And, on a more ‘existential’ level, I wasn’t in the market for someone to fill the role of ‘father’ in my life. ‘Mother’ is a very earthy, physical relationship – I lived for nine months in my birth-mother’s womb, and drew my sustenance from her body. And, in the current day and age (although not to the same degree when I was conceived and born), her own choice brought me to the day of my birth, and into my life ‘on the outside’. But ‘father’ is a much more ‘relational’ role in a child’s life, and that role had long since been filled in my life. My history with mothers had been somewhat checkered, but my dad had been the one, solid constant in my life. So, when my birth-father started to relate to me like his ‘long-lost son’, I recoiled from that, just a bit. I wasn’t looking for ‘another father’; I was only looking for insight into where, and who, I’d come from. I was happy to know and relate to him as my birth-father, and to enjoy the obvious genetic connection that we share (he’s a Jeopardy! freak, just like me), but the role of ‘father’ was already filled. Which, I think, hurt him, but it is what it is. I regret that he was hurt, but I don’t know how I could have done it differently.
Along with my birth-father, I also found two half-sisters, my birth-father’s daughters by his first wife (my birth-mother, you may recall, had an adopted daughter, but no other ‘children of her womb’, who would have been ‘genetically’ related to me). And my relationships with my half-sisters have been one of the most pleasant surprises of the entire search/reunion phenomenon.
My birth-father gave me the names of my sisters, and told me how to get in touch with them. I called the older one (call her Martha) first; we had a real nice conversation. I think it amused her a great deal to learn about her father’s ‘wild oats’. She told me that, in her teens, her dad had gotten drunk and told her and her sister that they had a brother, but he didn’t know where the brother was. Which she’d never known what to think of, but now, it seemed, her dad’s drunken ramblings had been true.
Martha was planning to be in Michigan, visiting relatives, within a couple months, and so we planned for her to visit us while she was here. The day came, and she called us as she was leaving her relatives’ house, saying, “We’ll be there in about an hour.” Something about how she said it struck me as odd, and as I hung up the phone, I turned to Molly and said, “I think Martha is a lesbian.” It was nothing specific, just an impression from what she’d said, and something about how she’d said it.
Not in the least that we wouldn’t have wanted to meet her; she was (and is) my sister, and I am happy for our connection, regardless of anything else. Still, we had an hour to wrap our minds around the possibility. Which was probably merciful, because it’s hard to know what our response would have been if we’d been blind-sided. Because when Martha arrived, with her partner, Laura, it was clear that my impressions had been accurate. It wasn’t so much the short hair – I’ve known lots of very heterosexual women who wore their hair short – but the studded black-leather outfit she wore fairly shouted her, uh, sexual preference. And I had to smile wryly to myself, realizing that she was intent on finding out, right up front, what our attitude to her ‘leanings’ was gonna be.
We had a really nice visit. She remarked, on seeing my face, that her dad could hardly deny me if he wanted to. We took a walk around our neighborhood, and at one point, Martha, walking behind me, remarked, “You’re definitely one of us – you got no ass at all.” I’d never particularly been accustomed to women talking about my ass, but it gave me a certain warm feeling that my half-sister was pointing out the marks of our genetic related-ness. At one point, 1F, who was about eight or nine at the time, noticed that Martha and Laura were wearing matching rings, and she asked them, “Are you married?” While I tried to clap my hand over her mouth, Martha and Laura just laughed, and said no, they weren’t married.
We got together with Martha a couple more times in the years following that, but after a certain point, she moved away from the town where her father lived, to another state, several hundred miles away, and stopped responding to our letters or phone calls. I don’t know if, or how, we offended her, but she also cut off contact with her father and split up with Laura around the same time, so it was evidently a time of some turmoil in her life.
I called my other sister (call her Janet) a few weeks after I called Martha. She was a single mother of a son, who was between 2F and 3M in age. Our relationship was slower to warm up, but over time, it has become a very warm relationship. In all sorts of ways, right down to our favorite books, and that we both like to ride bicycles, we just ‘clicked’ with each other, in ways similar to what I’d experienced with my birth-mother. And her son was, in a lot of ways, more like me than my own kids were. Which I found very ironically amusing.
Janet came to visit us at our house once, which was again, a very nice visit, although it came to a rather abrupt end when 3M and 4M got into a fight, resulting in me having to take 4M to the emergency room, after he punched a window in proxy for his brother.
Janet and I still talk on the phone a couple times a year, and whenever we do, neither of us wants to put the phone down. There is just something delicious about the connection with a genetic sibling that you just ‘get’ on some intrinsic level.
So, that completes the picture of my birth-family, from my birth-father’s side. His family – hard-drinking Southerners, originally from Mississippi – could hardly be more diametrically different from my birth-mother’s family of staid, German-Lutheran farmers. A marriage between the two of them would have been difficult on multiple levels. So, on the whole, it’s probably God’s mercy that I was adopted. But it has been very rich to get a glimpse at where my DNA has been, and what kinds of people came together, which resulted in me.
Our relationship has been friendly, although I wouldn’t characterize it as ‘close’. Certainly, I don’t view him as having paid the same kind of ‘price’ for my existence as my birth-mother did. He had his fun, and the rest was up to her. And in fact, when her father sued him, to cover her medical expenses, he treated her pretty shabbily; and I’ll leave it at that. So, yeah – his role in my coming-to-be was somewhat less than ‘heroic’.
And, on a more ‘existential’ level, I wasn’t in the market for someone to fill the role of ‘father’ in my life. ‘Mother’ is a very earthy, physical relationship – I lived for nine months in my birth-mother’s womb, and drew my sustenance from her body. And, in the current day and age (although not to the same degree when I was conceived and born), her own choice brought me to the day of my birth, and into my life ‘on the outside’. But ‘father’ is a much more ‘relational’ role in a child’s life, and that role had long since been filled in my life. My history with mothers had been somewhat checkered, but my dad had been the one, solid constant in my life. So, when my birth-father started to relate to me like his ‘long-lost son’, I recoiled from that, just a bit. I wasn’t looking for ‘another father’; I was only looking for insight into where, and who, I’d come from. I was happy to know and relate to him as my birth-father, and to enjoy the obvious genetic connection that we share (he’s a Jeopardy! freak, just like me), but the role of ‘father’ was already filled. Which, I think, hurt him, but it is what it is. I regret that he was hurt, but I don’t know how I could have done it differently.
Along with my birth-father, I also found two half-sisters, my birth-father’s daughters by his first wife (my birth-mother, you may recall, had an adopted daughter, but no other ‘children of her womb’, who would have been ‘genetically’ related to me). And my relationships with my half-sisters have been one of the most pleasant surprises of the entire search/reunion phenomenon.
My birth-father gave me the names of my sisters, and told me how to get in touch with them. I called the older one (call her Martha) first; we had a real nice conversation. I think it amused her a great deal to learn about her father’s ‘wild oats’. She told me that, in her teens, her dad had gotten drunk and told her and her sister that they had a brother, but he didn’t know where the brother was. Which she’d never known what to think of, but now, it seemed, her dad’s drunken ramblings had been true.
Martha was planning to be in Michigan, visiting relatives, within a couple months, and so we planned for her to visit us while she was here. The day came, and she called us as she was leaving her relatives’ house, saying, “We’ll be there in about an hour.” Something about how she said it struck me as odd, and as I hung up the phone, I turned to Molly and said, “I think Martha is a lesbian.” It was nothing specific, just an impression from what she’d said, and something about how she’d said it.
Not in the least that we wouldn’t have wanted to meet her; she was (and is) my sister, and I am happy for our connection, regardless of anything else. Still, we had an hour to wrap our minds around the possibility. Which was probably merciful, because it’s hard to know what our response would have been if we’d been blind-sided. Because when Martha arrived, with her partner, Laura, it was clear that my impressions had been accurate. It wasn’t so much the short hair – I’ve known lots of very heterosexual women who wore their hair short – but the studded black-leather outfit she wore fairly shouted her, uh, sexual preference. And I had to smile wryly to myself, realizing that she was intent on finding out, right up front, what our attitude to her ‘leanings’ was gonna be.
We had a really nice visit. She remarked, on seeing my face, that her dad could hardly deny me if he wanted to. We took a walk around our neighborhood, and at one point, Martha, walking behind me, remarked, “You’re definitely one of us – you got no ass at all.” I’d never particularly been accustomed to women talking about my ass, but it gave me a certain warm feeling that my half-sister was pointing out the marks of our genetic related-ness. At one point, 1F, who was about eight or nine at the time, noticed that Martha and Laura were wearing matching rings, and she asked them, “Are you married?” While I tried to clap my hand over her mouth, Martha and Laura just laughed, and said no, they weren’t married.
We got together with Martha a couple more times in the years following that, but after a certain point, she moved away from the town where her father lived, to another state, several hundred miles away, and stopped responding to our letters or phone calls. I don’t know if, or how, we offended her, but she also cut off contact with her father and split up with Laura around the same time, so it was evidently a time of some turmoil in her life.
I called my other sister (call her Janet) a few weeks after I called Martha. She was a single mother of a son, who was between 2F and 3M in age. Our relationship was slower to warm up, but over time, it has become a very warm relationship. In all sorts of ways, right down to our favorite books, and that we both like to ride bicycles, we just ‘clicked’ with each other, in ways similar to what I’d experienced with my birth-mother. And her son was, in a lot of ways, more like me than my own kids were. Which I found very ironically amusing.
Janet came to visit us at our house once, which was again, a very nice visit, although it came to a rather abrupt end when 3M and 4M got into a fight, resulting in me having to take 4M to the emergency room, after he punched a window in proxy for his brother.
Janet and I still talk on the phone a couple times a year, and whenever we do, neither of us wants to put the phone down. There is just something delicious about the connection with a genetic sibling that you just ‘get’ on some intrinsic level.
So, that completes the picture of my birth-family, from my birth-father’s side. His family – hard-drinking Southerners, originally from Mississippi – could hardly be more diametrically different from my birth-mother’s family of staid, German-Lutheran farmers. A marriage between the two of them would have been difficult on multiple levels. So, on the whole, it’s probably God’s mercy that I was adopted. But it has been very rich to get a glimpse at where my DNA has been, and what kinds of people came together, which resulted in me.
Monday, September 1, 2008
On the Road Again
Labor Day weekend is pretty much the pinnacle of the bicycling season in Michigan. Every year, 1500 or so cyclists ride the DALMAC tour, 350+ miles from Lansing to Mackinaw City, over the course of 4 or 5 days.
I didn’t ride DALMAC this year; but, in honor of the Pinnacle of Michigan Bicycling, my riding buddy and I rode 77 miles on Saturday, the pinnacle of our own riding season. And this morning, 4M and I did another 35 miles, which put me over 1000 miles for the second year in a row. Woohoo!
To put that in context. . .
I bought my first touring bike after I got out of college, before Molly and I started dating. I started going for rides out on the country roads around OurTown, maybe 20 miles or so at a time. When Molly and I got married, I bought her a bike (a mixte frame, which she still has; it’s almost kind of a cool relic these days), and we would go on rides together.
By around 1982 or so, a few other guys in our community took up cycling, and we started riding together. I rode my first DALMAC in 1983, and every year from ’84-’86, I rode over 3000 miles per year (in ’85, I maxed out at 3664 – one of my riding buddies and I thought it would be really cool to say that we averaged 10 miles per day for the entire year)
2F was a year old when I rode my last DALMAC, and Molly, uh, let me know that training for DALMAC was starting to interfere with the demands that two toddlers were placing on our lives. So, I stopped riding DALMAC, and cut my miles back. Still, from ’87-‘93, I averaged over 2300 miles per year. Changes in my job meant that I rode even less after that, but still, in ’95, I rode over 1200 miles. ’96 was the year I switched jobs and started with my long commute. I didn’t even track my miles that year, but Molly and I, in honor of turning 40, ‘bootlegged’ the last day of the DALMAC tour that year. We weren’t quite in ‘DALMAC shape’, but we had a good time.
After that, I basically stopped riding for several years. My long commute and growing family just pushed cycling to the bottom of the priority list.
About 7 or 8 years ago, I started getting back on the bike. My old community riding buddies invited me on a ride with them. I rode about 5 miles, and thought I was gonna die. I had to stop, and lie on the ground, and wait for my heart to stop pounding out of my chest. It was really pretty humiliating – I used to ride 35 miles just as a routine matter, and here, I could barely do five miles without dying.
But, I knew the only way for me to get in better shape was to keep riding. If five miles was all I could do, I was at least gonna do five miles. And then eight, and then ten, and then twelve. For the next several years, I went out as often as I could on the weekends, riding miles considerably reduced from what I’d once done. There was a 17-mile ride that I used to do as my first, shake-out-the-legs ride of the season. Now, it was my goal for the summer – if I worked hard, I could do a 17-miler by the end of the summer. Or maybe (*gasp*) a 20-miler. I didn’t track my miles for those years, but I vaguely recall that something around 200-300 was a typical season for me.
And Molly, solicitous as she has always been for my health and well-being, would ride with me, when she could. Which provided another marker for how far I’d fallen. ‘Back in the day’, I’d ride with Molly when I didn’t care how good a workout I got – if I rode hard, she couldn’t remotely keep up with me. But now, she was dusting me. It became one of my goals to get strong enough to where she didn’t have to wait for me.
In 2006, I started my weight-loss program, and, as part of the program, I took a more aggressive approach to riding. Instead of starting the season with 10-12 mile rides, I started with a 15-miler, and built up to 20 miles pretty quickly. My ‘pinnacle’ goal for that year was to do the 35-mile ride that I used to do ‘back in the day’. It was actually kind of an exciting year – I was rediscovering miles and miles of really nice rides that I hadn’t done in years. I think I finished ’06 with something on the order of 600 miles.
Last year, I was even more aggressive. We built up to 30-milers pretty early in the season, did a 50-miler over Labor Day, and ended up with over 1200 miles for the year. And this year, I’m on pace for 1300-1400, depending on how the weather falls in November. . .
This is all like the next chapter of The Great Weight Loss. It’s like a whole chunk of my life that had been lost has been restored to me. I had almost forgotten the joy I got from being out on my bike. And, when I was over 300 pounds, even though I was getting on the bike in whatever ‘reduced’ capacity I could manage, I was pretty sure those days were gone forever.
So, as I said, when I started being able to ride miles that I hadn’t been able to do in years, it was like being re-introduced to an old friend. Corners of the countryside around OurTown that I hadn’t seen in years, were becoming familiar to me once again. . .
There is this huge sense of having gotten a reprieve, a ‘do-over’ on a massive scale. I am so grateful to be able to ride again. At age 52, I’m in as good a physical shape as I’ve been in many years.
And, it’s a complete, gratuitous bonus to be able to ride with my sons. At various times, if my regular riding buddy has been unavailable, I’ve been able to ride with 4M or 5M; both of them are high-school athletes, and I’m sure, if they really put the hammer down, I couldn’t stay with them. But, I can make them work harder than they used to have to. . .
So, next year, I’m thinking of doing DALMAC again. 23 years after I did my last one, and 13 years after I even rode any part of the route.
And Molly and I are saving our pennies to buy a tandem. . .
I didn’t ride DALMAC this year; but, in honor of the Pinnacle of Michigan Bicycling, my riding buddy and I rode 77 miles on Saturday, the pinnacle of our own riding season. And this morning, 4M and I did another 35 miles, which put me over 1000 miles for the second year in a row. Woohoo!
To put that in context. . .
I bought my first touring bike after I got out of college, before Molly and I started dating. I started going for rides out on the country roads around OurTown, maybe 20 miles or so at a time. When Molly and I got married, I bought her a bike (a mixte frame, which she still has; it’s almost kind of a cool relic these days), and we would go on rides together.
By around 1982 or so, a few other guys in our community took up cycling, and we started riding together. I rode my first DALMAC in 1983, and every year from ’84-’86, I rode over 3000 miles per year (in ’85, I maxed out at 3664 – one of my riding buddies and I thought it would be really cool to say that we averaged 10 miles per day for the entire year)
2F was a year old when I rode my last DALMAC, and Molly, uh, let me know that training for DALMAC was starting to interfere with the demands that two toddlers were placing on our lives. So, I stopped riding DALMAC, and cut my miles back. Still, from ’87-‘93, I averaged over 2300 miles per year. Changes in my job meant that I rode even less after that, but still, in ’95, I rode over 1200 miles. ’96 was the year I switched jobs and started with my long commute. I didn’t even track my miles that year, but Molly and I, in honor of turning 40, ‘bootlegged’ the last day of the DALMAC tour that year. We weren’t quite in ‘DALMAC shape’, but we had a good time.
After that, I basically stopped riding for several years. My long commute and growing family just pushed cycling to the bottom of the priority list.
About 7 or 8 years ago, I started getting back on the bike. My old community riding buddies invited me on a ride with them. I rode about 5 miles, and thought I was gonna die. I had to stop, and lie on the ground, and wait for my heart to stop pounding out of my chest. It was really pretty humiliating – I used to ride 35 miles just as a routine matter, and here, I could barely do five miles without dying.
But, I knew the only way for me to get in better shape was to keep riding. If five miles was all I could do, I was at least gonna do five miles. And then eight, and then ten, and then twelve. For the next several years, I went out as often as I could on the weekends, riding miles considerably reduced from what I’d once done. There was a 17-mile ride that I used to do as my first, shake-out-the-legs ride of the season. Now, it was my goal for the summer – if I worked hard, I could do a 17-miler by the end of the summer. Or maybe (*gasp*) a 20-miler. I didn’t track my miles for those years, but I vaguely recall that something around 200-300 was a typical season for me.
And Molly, solicitous as she has always been for my health and well-being, would ride with me, when she could. Which provided another marker for how far I’d fallen. ‘Back in the day’, I’d ride with Molly when I didn’t care how good a workout I got – if I rode hard, she couldn’t remotely keep up with me. But now, she was dusting me. It became one of my goals to get strong enough to where she didn’t have to wait for me.
In 2006, I started my weight-loss program, and, as part of the program, I took a more aggressive approach to riding. Instead of starting the season with 10-12 mile rides, I started with a 15-miler, and built up to 20 miles pretty quickly. My ‘pinnacle’ goal for that year was to do the 35-mile ride that I used to do ‘back in the day’. It was actually kind of an exciting year – I was rediscovering miles and miles of really nice rides that I hadn’t done in years. I think I finished ’06 with something on the order of 600 miles.
Last year, I was even more aggressive. We built up to 30-milers pretty early in the season, did a 50-miler over Labor Day, and ended up with over 1200 miles for the year. And this year, I’m on pace for 1300-1400, depending on how the weather falls in November. . .
This is all like the next chapter of The Great Weight Loss. It’s like a whole chunk of my life that had been lost has been restored to me. I had almost forgotten the joy I got from being out on my bike. And, when I was over 300 pounds, even though I was getting on the bike in whatever ‘reduced’ capacity I could manage, I was pretty sure those days were gone forever.
So, as I said, when I started being able to ride miles that I hadn’t been able to do in years, it was like being re-introduced to an old friend. Corners of the countryside around OurTown that I hadn’t seen in years, were becoming familiar to me once again. . .
There is this huge sense of having gotten a reprieve, a ‘do-over’ on a massive scale. I am so grateful to be able to ride again. At age 52, I’m in as good a physical shape as I’ve been in many years.
And, it’s a complete, gratuitous bonus to be able to ride with my sons. At various times, if my regular riding buddy has been unavailable, I’ve been able to ride with 4M or 5M; both of them are high-school athletes, and I’m sure, if they really put the hammer down, I couldn’t stay with them. But, I can make them work harder than they used to have to. . .
So, next year, I’m thinking of doing DALMAC again. 23 years after I did my last one, and 13 years after I even rode any part of the route.
And Molly and I are saving our pennies to buy a tandem. . .
Monday, August 4, 2008
Zero Tolerance
Our third son, 5M, has always been a solid kid. He’s kind and good-hearted, and has often gone out of his way to befriend the ‘social-misfit-type’ kids at school. He has tended to get a little lost in the shuffle in our family, with all the drama going on among his older siblings, but just a very solid, very good kid.
When he was in 8th grade, 5M had a MySpace page. Which was news to us, since we didn’t even have an Internet connection on our home computer (I mean, we didn’t even have the connection; I had removed the modem from the box – the only sure way I could finally find to keep porn out of our house). But, you know, other families have computers with modems, and he’s not under our roof 24-7.
One time, I brought my laptop home from work. 4M and 5M were eager to borrow it so they could go online without having to run to a friend’s house, and that was my first look at 5M’s page. It featured a large photo of his august self, shirtless and sleeping. It could possibly have been construed as mildly ‘erotic’, in a 14-year-old-boy sort of way. I told him I thought a different photo would be a good idea, and he switched it.
5M played on the school’s 8th-grade basketball team and, as I recall, they had a very good season. But, at one practice in December, one of the boys on the team messed up in such a way as to cause the whole team to run extra laps at the end of practice. Which, as has been known to happen among middle-school boys, didn’t endear the boy to his teammates on that particular day. One teammate in particular, was extremely angry over it, and left a nasty, threatening comment on 5M’s MySpace page. 5M didn’t think much of it – he knew the kid who left the comment, and figured he was just venting some steam. He might have deleted the comment, but frankly, he didn’t know he could (just speaking as the boy’s father, there are all manner of bloggity things that y’all do that I have no idea how to do, so he at least comes by his ‘ignorance’ honestly).
A month or so later, on a Friday when 5M was home sick, his class had a discussion on school violence. In the course of the conversation, one of the girls said, “You should see what’s on 5M’s MySpace page!” So that day, after school, the teacher calls up 5M’s MySpace page, sees the nasty, threatening comment sitting there, having been there for over a month, and about jumped out of her clothes. The teacher showed it to the principal, who consulted the policy manual and determined that, holy shit, they had an honest-to-goodness violent situation on their hands, right here in Tiny-Catholic School! So they huddled together and consulted the policy manual for what to do. They even called the Diocesan Education Office downtown.
The following Monday, Molly and I got a call, requesting that we meet with the principal. When we got there, 5M was already sitting in his office. We sat down, and he described the situation to us. My first thought was to wonder why he needed us to come in for a meeting over that – what, exactly, had my son done wrong? It became clear that 5M’s offense was in leaving the comment up on his page. So I asked 5M why he hadn’t deleted the comment, and he said he hadn’t known that he could. And besides, his opportunities to even get at his page were fairly limited, since we didn’t have an Internet connection at home. And, he had gone in and deleted it that afternoon, when the principal showed him how. So no problem.
Well, no. NOT ‘no problem’. Not by a long shot.
The principal went on to explain that, according to the policy manual, this constituted an instance of violence against another student, which would not be tolerated. He even invoked Columbine. 5M was to be suspended for a week, removed from the basketball team, and be ineligible to participate in any extra-curricular activities for the rest of the school year. Which, since he was in 8th grade, meant for the rest of his time at the school. Including the ‘celebratory’ class trip at the end of the year.
I was dumbfounded. Was any consideration given to the kind of person they knew 5M to be? He’d been at the school for eight-and-a-half years, and had never remotely been a trouble-maker (which could not have been said of at least one of his older brothers, and even one of his sisters). This seemed kind of a nuclear response to a first offense, that, when I looked at it, didn’t look like much of an offense at all. The only response I got was that this was what the policy manual said they should do in a case of violence against another student, and that Sister Scholastica downtown agreed.
I wrote a letter to the principal, asking him to reconsider, based on 5M’s complete lack of any disciplinary history. I wrote a letter to our pastor, and the parish Education Commission, asking if there was any way for them to intervene in the situation, but they declined. I wrote a letter to Sister Scholastica, too, but I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that; with the others, I was at least talking to people with whom I had a relationship. As far as Sister was concerned, I was just Irate Parent. The suspension was gonna stick.
I would have a hard time describing the bind we were in. Our kids have been attending this school for 20 years; it’s our parish school. So, sending our kids there is virtually a matter of supporting the parish. Plus, in all other ways, we liked and respected this principal; this ‘zero-tolerance’ thing came completely out of left field, as far as we were concerned.
Molly and I agonized over what to do. It seemed a shame (and honestly, an act of ‘violence’ in its own right) to pull 5M out of the school just a couple months before his class was due to graduate – these kids (or at least most of them) had been together since kindergarten, and they were a close-knit group. And yet, 5M was effectively being held apart from them by virtue of the discipline. If we sent 5M to the public middle school, he’d only be there for a couple months, and he knew very few of the kids he’d be there with. Besides which, with a ‘violence’ action attached to his name, we weren’t even sure they would take him, anyway.
We finally told 5M that, if he could, we wanted him to finish the year with his class. If he found that it was too hard, or too strange, to keep going back to school with his ‘Scarlet-V’ status, we would pull him out and switch him to the public school, without a second thought. But, if he could do it, we wanted him to finish the year, hold his head up, and figuratively say to his ‘adversaries’ (however he perceived them to be), ‘I won’t be beaten down’.
And that’s what he did. I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my children than I was when 5M graduated with his class from 8th grade. He held his head up and didn’t get beaten down. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut. All of his teachers (except the one who had ‘turned him in’) more-or-less rallied to his side, making clear that they regarded this as unjust, also. In fact, he even got ‘reinstated’ to go on the class trip (which he was tempted to refuse, out of principle, but he ended up going).
As I said, I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my kids. 5M’s character really showed through, and he grew a lot stronger for living through an awful situation with his dignity intact. There were no ‘good’ solutions to the problem, and I just wanted to make sure that we all, in the Jones family, handled ourselves uprightly and with dignity. We had many words of support from fellow-parishioners, including a few who offered to make some trouble on our behalf. Which we declined to have them do.
Our parish is a relatively small urban parish, and the school is its life-blood. The school itself has struggled fiscally for several years, and a major brouhaha could easily result in the school’s closing. Which, in the long run (or maybe not so long), would lead to the parish closing. Not that I thought that the fate of the parish hung on what we did, but taking care for the good of the parish was certainly part of our consideration.
And looking back, I think the whole problem was the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that the school adopted. I understand, and am supportive of, the school’s concern to protect its students from violence. But, to punish a stupid comment left on a MySpace page (out of ignorance much more than malice) as if it were the next coming of Columbine was just out of all proportion, and an affront to common sense. But then, ‘zero-tolerance’ is all about not engaging common sense. If the manual says it’s ‘violence’, then off you go; nothing to think about, you just follow the manual.
And the galling thing is that, in a Catholic school, I would expect the students to be treated as persons with human dignity, made in the image of God, but ‘zero-tolerance’ ends up treating them as line-items in the policy manual. Even the remotest consideration of the person who is my son 5M would have told them that they weren’t dealing with a putative perpetrator of violence. But thought is hard, and reading a policy manual is easy.
As I said, in every other respect, I like and respect this principal. Our working relationship is mostly intact. But trust has been damaged some, and if such a situation arises again, I don’t know with certainty that I can trust that the right things will be done, and I wish that I could. I hope such a situation never arises again, and if it doesn’t, I will be gratified. We’ve only got eight more years to run of Joneses at that school (assuming it stays afloat that long), so we’ll see, I guess. . .
When he was in 8th grade, 5M had a MySpace page. Which was news to us, since we didn’t even have an Internet connection on our home computer (I mean, we didn’t even have the connection; I had removed the modem from the box – the only sure way I could finally find to keep porn out of our house). But, you know, other families have computers with modems, and he’s not under our roof 24-7.
One time, I brought my laptop home from work. 4M and 5M were eager to borrow it so they could go online without having to run to a friend’s house, and that was my first look at 5M’s page. It featured a large photo of his august self, shirtless and sleeping. It could possibly have been construed as mildly ‘erotic’, in a 14-year-old-boy sort of way. I told him I thought a different photo would be a good idea, and he switched it.
5M played on the school’s 8th-grade basketball team and, as I recall, they had a very good season. But, at one practice in December, one of the boys on the team messed up in such a way as to cause the whole team to run extra laps at the end of practice. Which, as has been known to happen among middle-school boys, didn’t endear the boy to his teammates on that particular day. One teammate in particular, was extremely angry over it, and left a nasty, threatening comment on 5M’s MySpace page. 5M didn’t think much of it – he knew the kid who left the comment, and figured he was just venting some steam. He might have deleted the comment, but frankly, he didn’t know he could (just speaking as the boy’s father, there are all manner of bloggity things that y’all do that I have no idea how to do, so he at least comes by his ‘ignorance’ honestly).
A month or so later, on a Friday when 5M was home sick, his class had a discussion on school violence. In the course of the conversation, one of the girls said, “You should see what’s on 5M’s MySpace page!” So that day, after school, the teacher calls up 5M’s MySpace page, sees the nasty, threatening comment sitting there, having been there for over a month, and about jumped out of her clothes. The teacher showed it to the principal, who consulted the policy manual and determined that, holy shit, they had an honest-to-goodness violent situation on their hands, right here in Tiny-Catholic School! So they huddled together and consulted the policy manual for what to do. They even called the Diocesan Education Office downtown.
The following Monday, Molly and I got a call, requesting that we meet with the principal. When we got there, 5M was already sitting in his office. We sat down, and he described the situation to us. My first thought was to wonder why he needed us to come in for a meeting over that – what, exactly, had my son done wrong? It became clear that 5M’s offense was in leaving the comment up on his page. So I asked 5M why he hadn’t deleted the comment, and he said he hadn’t known that he could. And besides, his opportunities to even get at his page were fairly limited, since we didn’t have an Internet connection at home. And, he had gone in and deleted it that afternoon, when the principal showed him how. So no problem.
Well, no. NOT ‘no problem’. Not by a long shot.
The principal went on to explain that, according to the policy manual, this constituted an instance of violence against another student, which would not be tolerated. He even invoked Columbine. 5M was to be suspended for a week, removed from the basketball team, and be ineligible to participate in any extra-curricular activities for the rest of the school year. Which, since he was in 8th grade, meant for the rest of his time at the school. Including the ‘celebratory’ class trip at the end of the year.
I was dumbfounded. Was any consideration given to the kind of person they knew 5M to be? He’d been at the school for eight-and-a-half years, and had never remotely been a trouble-maker (which could not have been said of at least one of his older brothers, and even one of his sisters). This seemed kind of a nuclear response to a first offense, that, when I looked at it, didn’t look like much of an offense at all. The only response I got was that this was what the policy manual said they should do in a case of violence against another student, and that Sister Scholastica downtown agreed.
I wrote a letter to the principal, asking him to reconsider, based on 5M’s complete lack of any disciplinary history. I wrote a letter to our pastor, and the parish Education Commission, asking if there was any way for them to intervene in the situation, but they declined. I wrote a letter to Sister Scholastica, too, but I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that; with the others, I was at least talking to people with whom I had a relationship. As far as Sister was concerned, I was just Irate Parent. The suspension was gonna stick.
I would have a hard time describing the bind we were in. Our kids have been attending this school for 20 years; it’s our parish school. So, sending our kids there is virtually a matter of supporting the parish. Plus, in all other ways, we liked and respected this principal; this ‘zero-tolerance’ thing came completely out of left field, as far as we were concerned.
Molly and I agonized over what to do. It seemed a shame (and honestly, an act of ‘violence’ in its own right) to pull 5M out of the school just a couple months before his class was due to graduate – these kids (or at least most of them) had been together since kindergarten, and they were a close-knit group. And yet, 5M was effectively being held apart from them by virtue of the discipline. If we sent 5M to the public middle school, he’d only be there for a couple months, and he knew very few of the kids he’d be there with. Besides which, with a ‘violence’ action attached to his name, we weren’t even sure they would take him, anyway.
We finally told 5M that, if he could, we wanted him to finish the year with his class. If he found that it was too hard, or too strange, to keep going back to school with his ‘Scarlet-V’ status, we would pull him out and switch him to the public school, without a second thought. But, if he could do it, we wanted him to finish the year, hold his head up, and figuratively say to his ‘adversaries’ (however he perceived them to be), ‘I won’t be beaten down’.
And that’s what he did. I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my children than I was when 5M graduated with his class from 8th grade. He held his head up and didn’t get beaten down. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut. All of his teachers (except the one who had ‘turned him in’) more-or-less rallied to his side, making clear that they regarded this as unjust, also. In fact, he even got ‘reinstated’ to go on the class trip (which he was tempted to refuse, out of principle, but he ended up going).
As I said, I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my kids. 5M’s character really showed through, and he grew a lot stronger for living through an awful situation with his dignity intact. There were no ‘good’ solutions to the problem, and I just wanted to make sure that we all, in the Jones family, handled ourselves uprightly and with dignity. We had many words of support from fellow-parishioners, including a few who offered to make some trouble on our behalf. Which we declined to have them do.
Our parish is a relatively small urban parish, and the school is its life-blood. The school itself has struggled fiscally for several years, and a major brouhaha could easily result in the school’s closing. Which, in the long run (or maybe not so long), would lead to the parish closing. Not that I thought that the fate of the parish hung on what we did, but taking care for the good of the parish was certainly part of our consideration.
And looking back, I think the whole problem was the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that the school adopted. I understand, and am supportive of, the school’s concern to protect its students from violence. But, to punish a stupid comment left on a MySpace page (out of ignorance much more than malice) as if it were the next coming of Columbine was just out of all proportion, and an affront to common sense. But then, ‘zero-tolerance’ is all about not engaging common sense. If the manual says it’s ‘violence’, then off you go; nothing to think about, you just follow the manual.
And the galling thing is that, in a Catholic school, I would expect the students to be treated as persons with human dignity, made in the image of God, but ‘zero-tolerance’ ends up treating them as line-items in the policy manual. Even the remotest consideration of the person who is my son 5M would have told them that they weren’t dealing with a putative perpetrator of violence. But thought is hard, and reading a policy manual is easy.
As I said, in every other respect, I like and respect this principal. Our working relationship is mostly intact. But trust has been damaged some, and if such a situation arises again, I don’t know with certainty that I can trust that the right things will be done, and I wish that I could. I hope such a situation never arises again, and if it doesn’t, I will be gratified. We’ve only got eight more years to run of Joneses at that school (assuming it stays afloat that long), so we’ll see, I guess. . .
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Back In the Blog Life Again. . . Sort Of
Well, maybe not quite. Mainly, I just regretted deleting my old blog, and I thought it would be better to have almost a year’s worth of my old blog posts back up, in case anyone would ever want to have a look at them (does that seem incredibly vain?) Plus, a couple times in the past year, I’ve wished I still had my blog, so I could post some thoughts that were burning a hole in my brain at the time (that’s not nearly as painful as it sounds). So, here I am.
I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up. My intention is not to post very often. If at all. I simply can’t ever go back to ‘full-time’ blogging; I have too many other things going on in my life. I expect I’ll be one of those frustrating bloggers who posts just seldom enough that you want to say ‘the heck with it’, but then a new post appears. But such is life in blog-space. Actually, to be perfectly candid, even as I sit here saying I don’t intend to post much, I have half-a-dozen ideas for new posts floating around in my brain. So, maybe some stuff will trickle out here and there, until the flow of ideas dries up, and then I’ll go dormant for a while again, until something else gets stirred up in my brain.
-------------------------
Since I’ve been gone for awhile, I should probably take just a moment to bring you all up to speed on what all us Joneses are up to these days, and where we’ve been.
Molly and I, and virtually all of our kids (except 8M) have spent time in counseling over the past year-and-a-half (I talked about it some here). I think it’s been helpful. At least, we’ve got a few more tools for how we relate to each other that, if we remember to use them, help us to defuse a lot of the conflicts that arise in the course of our family life. Molly and I are learning just to be more empathetic with our kids, to just throw an arm around their shoulders, and ‘be there’ for them. Which, over the years, has been our major failing as parents. It isn’t always easy to do, with so many of them. But it’s necessary; and worth the time and effort. And we’re getting better at it. I think.
Molly and I continue to be madly, passionately in love with each other, even after nearly 28 years of marriage. I can’t help it; she’s the most amazing woman in the world, and the hottest 50+ year old any of you will ever meet. . .
1F is steadily getting her life back on track, although not without some struggle. She’s been back in school, taking single classes for the past year, to get herself re-acclimated to the whole ‘school’ thing. Her daughter is now two-and-a-half years old, and cute as a bug. The ‘open’ adoption is still working really well for all parties concerned.
2F has spent the last year doing mission work in Detroit. She has tended to get short shrift here, and in real life, just because her siblings on either side of her have drawn so much attention. And that has left a few scars on her psyche. Under the age of ten, she was probably our most difficult child, but these days, she’s quite a shining star. Once her mission year ends this summer, she’ll come back to finish her schooling and see what life has next for her.
3M is doing much better. Since he graduated from high school, he’s spent a fair bit of time getting educated by The Universe. The first year after high school was especially painful for us to watch. But the past year has been better. He’s held a job, and has mended fences on several of the relationships he’d trashed. And our relationship as father/son is as good as it’s been in a long, long time. There’s still lots of room for him to make some better decisions for his life, but for now, he seems to slowly be absorbing the lessons The Universe is giving him.
4M has had a bit more adversity over the last year than what he’d been used to. He’s still an A-student, star athlete, All-American Boy. But, whereas a year ago, he had colleges knocking on his door to come play football for them, his junior season pretty much ended those prospects. When you play quarterback, you can be a great athlete, but if you make bad decisions under pressure, it doesn’t go so well for you. We’ll see how his senior year goes, but now he knows that he’s much more likely to earn his living at something he learns in the classroom than he is on the football field.
5M has also had more adversity than he’d bargained for, starting in 8th grade, when he was peripherally involved in some trouble at school, for which he was very severely punished (way more severely than the ‘offense’ warranted, in my opinion, but that’s another story for another day). He has also tended to get lost in the swirl surrounding his older siblings, but we’re learning not to do that.
6F has had a difficult transition into teenager-hood. Aside from being the only girl living at home in a sea of testosterone, middle-school social drama and barbarian middle-school boys have made her life more stressful than I wish it was.
7M, our ‘miracle boy’, is still brilliant, still volatile. We started him on piano lessons six months ago, and he’s already run miles down the road with it. Just like 1F used to do when she was younger, he tends to play the piano for stress-relief. And he’s gotten pretty good at it. The bad news is, he feels stressed a lot. We’re getting better at helping him get on top of his emotions, but it isn’t always easy.
8M isn’t a baby anymore, even though he’s every bit the ‘baby of the family’. He was in kindergarten this past year, meaning that, for the first time since before 1F was born, Molly was home alone during the school day. He’s showing signs of being genius-prone like 7M and 3M. We’ll see about that.
And that’s the short version of where we’re at these days. Life is both harder and richer than we’d anticipated. And God is merciful.
I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up. My intention is not to post very often. If at all. I simply can’t ever go back to ‘full-time’ blogging; I have too many other things going on in my life. I expect I’ll be one of those frustrating bloggers who posts just seldom enough that you want to say ‘the heck with it’, but then a new post appears. But such is life in blog-space. Actually, to be perfectly candid, even as I sit here saying I don’t intend to post much, I have half-a-dozen ideas for new posts floating around in my brain. So, maybe some stuff will trickle out here and there, until the flow of ideas dries up, and then I’ll go dormant for a while again, until something else gets stirred up in my brain.
-------------------------
Since I’ve been gone for awhile, I should probably take just a moment to bring you all up to speed on what all us Joneses are up to these days, and where we’ve been.
Molly and I, and virtually all of our kids (except 8M) have spent time in counseling over the past year-and-a-half (I talked about it some here). I think it’s been helpful. At least, we’ve got a few more tools for how we relate to each other that, if we remember to use them, help us to defuse a lot of the conflicts that arise in the course of our family life. Molly and I are learning just to be more empathetic with our kids, to just throw an arm around their shoulders, and ‘be there’ for them. Which, over the years, has been our major failing as parents. It isn’t always easy to do, with so many of them. But it’s necessary; and worth the time and effort. And we’re getting better at it. I think.
Molly and I continue to be madly, passionately in love with each other, even after nearly 28 years of marriage. I can’t help it; she’s the most amazing woman in the world, and the hottest 50+ year old any of you will ever meet. . .
1F is steadily getting her life back on track, although not without some struggle. She’s been back in school, taking single classes for the past year, to get herself re-acclimated to the whole ‘school’ thing. Her daughter is now two-and-a-half years old, and cute as a bug. The ‘open’ adoption is still working really well for all parties concerned.
2F has spent the last year doing mission work in Detroit. She has tended to get short shrift here, and in real life, just because her siblings on either side of her have drawn so much attention. And that has left a few scars on her psyche. Under the age of ten, she was probably our most difficult child, but these days, she’s quite a shining star. Once her mission year ends this summer, she’ll come back to finish her schooling and see what life has next for her.
3M is doing much better. Since he graduated from high school, he’s spent a fair bit of time getting educated by The Universe. The first year after high school was especially painful for us to watch. But the past year has been better. He’s held a job, and has mended fences on several of the relationships he’d trashed. And our relationship as father/son is as good as it’s been in a long, long time. There’s still lots of room for him to make some better decisions for his life, but for now, he seems to slowly be absorbing the lessons The Universe is giving him.
4M has had a bit more adversity over the last year than what he’d been used to. He’s still an A-student, star athlete, All-American Boy. But, whereas a year ago, he had colleges knocking on his door to come play football for them, his junior season pretty much ended those prospects. When you play quarterback, you can be a great athlete, but if you make bad decisions under pressure, it doesn’t go so well for you. We’ll see how his senior year goes, but now he knows that he’s much more likely to earn his living at something he learns in the classroom than he is on the football field.
5M has also had more adversity than he’d bargained for, starting in 8th grade, when he was peripherally involved in some trouble at school, for which he was very severely punished (way more severely than the ‘offense’ warranted, in my opinion, but that’s another story for another day). He has also tended to get lost in the swirl surrounding his older siblings, but we’re learning not to do that.
6F has had a difficult transition into teenager-hood. Aside from being the only girl living at home in a sea of testosterone, middle-school social drama and barbarian middle-school boys have made her life more stressful than I wish it was.
7M, our ‘miracle boy’, is still brilliant, still volatile. We started him on piano lessons six months ago, and he’s already run miles down the road with it. Just like 1F used to do when she was younger, he tends to play the piano for stress-relief. And he’s gotten pretty good at it. The bad news is, he feels stressed a lot. We’re getting better at helping him get on top of his emotions, but it isn’t always easy.
8M isn’t a baby anymore, even though he’s every bit the ‘baby of the family’. He was in kindergarten this past year, meaning that, for the first time since before 1F was born, Molly was home alone during the school day. He’s showing signs of being genius-prone like 7M and 3M. We’ll see about that.
And that’s the short version of where we’re at these days. Life is both harder and richer than we’d anticipated. And God is merciful.
Monday, April 2, 2007
A Few Questions From a Friend
One of my blog-friends asked me a few questions, which I believe will help you all understand me better (and I'm just vain enough to think that you would want to). So, forthwith. . .
- What moved you to embrace Catholicism?
This demands a bit of a complex answer; you would be very kind to bear with me. I’ve posted about it, way back when, but perhaps I can expand a bit here.
I suppose it started the first time I went to a Catholic Mass, when I was in high school. My Jesus-freak buddy and I took on a project of visiting as many different kinds of churches as we could find. When we visited the Catholic church in town, I was very surprised by how much scripture was woven into the liturgy (I’d been told that Catholics just didn’t ‘do’ scripture), and how prayerful it was. So, my first impression was, “hey, this is a lot cooler than I expected it to be.”
When I went away to college, I was sort of ‘rootless’ in a church sense. I went to the college-town church of my ‘home denomination’ once, and was quite underwhelmed. I started going to a charismatic prayer meeting, and felt immediately at home. I took up with a young lady, who happened to be Catholic, and she began regularly inviting me to go to mass with her. Which I did, quite a lot, and it mainly reinforced my first impression.
At the same time, I took up an independent study of Church history – I was interested in what had happened to Christianity in the generations immediately following Jesus and the Apostles – how the second generation of Christians received the gospel from the Apostles, and how they, in turn, passed it on to the third – and I wondered how it had gotten from Bible days to my own. I don’t say that such a project would affect everyone the same way it affected me, but I came to see Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) as being in historical continuity with the first Christians, and if I wanted to be in that kind of ‘spiritual continuity’, I had to at least deal with that question.
I undertook to be received into the Catholic Church when I thought that the young lady (GF2, if you recall her) and I would get married, but for various reasons, we broke off our romantic relationship while I was in instruction (we are good friends today, tho). By then, though, I was already thinking of the Catholic Church as my spiritual ‘home’, and I completed my instruction on my own initiative, and was received into the Catholic Church.
Once I was safely Catholic, a few things sort of ‘cemented’ my conversion. Catholic sacramental life turned out to be a good deal richer than I’d anticipated. I recall hearing a Pentecostal preacher talking about a trip he’d taken to Poland, and he drew a fascinating parallel between communion and an altar call – “people standing in line to receive Jesus”. That thought has never left me, and to this day, I will often quietly hum ‘Just As I Am’ in the communion line.
I also discovered what I’ll call the ‘Catholic Intellectual Tradition’ – Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, GK Chesterton, the whole Natural Law tradition – and I was instantly smitten. This was only reinforced when John Paul II became pope. I had never encountered anything quite like it (aside from CS Lewis, I suppose, and to a lesser extent, Francis Schaeffer).
- If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?
I wish I weren’t so selfish. It is altogether too easy for me to go through life thinking about myself and my interests and what I want/need, when Molly and the kids need more of my ‘brain space’. I can do OK where Molly is concerned, especially when I’m feeling horny. But I really need to give more of my thoughts and attention to the kids. It’s altogether too easy for me to retreat into my ‘private world’ and tune them out. And that is not unrelated to the troubles that a couple of them have had. . .
- What is the best and worst thing about having a large family?
I want to say that they’re the same thing – you’re rarely alone. There’s never a dull moment, for sure. It’s very gratifying to see the relationships they have with each other – much as they bicker with each other, as they grow up their relationships really do develop some depth and affection. With eight kids, that’s 28 separate relationships of the kids with each other (45, if you throw Molly and me into the mix). And, as the kids get older, it’s very gratifying to see them cultivating a ‘family identity’ – all that shared experience has started being a ‘bonding’ thing. And, I’ve definitely improved my odds of having grandchildren. . . ;)
But, the bickering can reach truly epic proportions, and sometimes I just want to lock them all in the basement and let them have at each other, and then we’ll just go on with the survivors. I’m also a guy who seems to have a more-than-average felt need for some low-key solitude, and that just doesn’t happen very often. And I won’t even get into the grocery bills. . .
There has been a certain good-news/bad-news aspect when it comes to the troubles we’ve had with 1F and 3M – in the course of dealing with those situations, there are six other kids who get sort of short-changed in the process. But, they can also soften the grief for us, if we’re paying attention. . .
So, there you have it. I'll gladly entertain any follow-up questions any of you might have.
I enjoyed this; I hope you all enjoyed it, too. . .
(23 comments)
- What moved you to embrace Catholicism?
This demands a bit of a complex answer; you would be very kind to bear with me. I’ve posted about it, way back when, but perhaps I can expand a bit here.
I suppose it started the first time I went to a Catholic Mass, when I was in high school. My Jesus-freak buddy and I took on a project of visiting as many different kinds of churches as we could find. When we visited the Catholic church in town, I was very surprised by how much scripture was woven into the liturgy (I’d been told that Catholics just didn’t ‘do’ scripture), and how prayerful it was. So, my first impression was, “hey, this is a lot cooler than I expected it to be.”
When I went away to college, I was sort of ‘rootless’ in a church sense. I went to the college-town church of my ‘home denomination’ once, and was quite underwhelmed. I started going to a charismatic prayer meeting, and felt immediately at home. I took up with a young lady, who happened to be Catholic, and she began regularly inviting me to go to mass with her. Which I did, quite a lot, and it mainly reinforced my first impression.
At the same time, I took up an independent study of Church history – I was interested in what had happened to Christianity in the generations immediately following Jesus and the Apostles – how the second generation of Christians received the gospel from the Apostles, and how they, in turn, passed it on to the third – and I wondered how it had gotten from Bible days to my own. I don’t say that such a project would affect everyone the same way it affected me, but I came to see Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) as being in historical continuity with the first Christians, and if I wanted to be in that kind of ‘spiritual continuity’, I had to at least deal with that question.
I undertook to be received into the Catholic Church when I thought that the young lady (GF2, if you recall her) and I would get married, but for various reasons, we broke off our romantic relationship while I was in instruction (we are good friends today, tho). By then, though, I was already thinking of the Catholic Church as my spiritual ‘home’, and I completed my instruction on my own initiative, and was received into the Catholic Church.
Once I was safely Catholic, a few things sort of ‘cemented’ my conversion. Catholic sacramental life turned out to be a good deal richer than I’d anticipated. I recall hearing a Pentecostal preacher talking about a trip he’d taken to Poland, and he drew a fascinating parallel between communion and an altar call – “people standing in line to receive Jesus”. That thought has never left me, and to this day, I will often quietly hum ‘Just As I Am’ in the communion line.
I also discovered what I’ll call the ‘Catholic Intellectual Tradition’ – Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, GK Chesterton, the whole Natural Law tradition – and I was instantly smitten. This was only reinforced when John Paul II became pope. I had never encountered anything quite like it (aside from CS Lewis, I suppose, and to a lesser extent, Francis Schaeffer).
- If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?
I wish I weren’t so selfish. It is altogether too easy for me to go through life thinking about myself and my interests and what I want/need, when Molly and the kids need more of my ‘brain space’. I can do OK where Molly is concerned, especially when I’m feeling horny. But I really need to give more of my thoughts and attention to the kids. It’s altogether too easy for me to retreat into my ‘private world’ and tune them out. And that is not unrelated to the troubles that a couple of them have had. . .
- What is the best and worst thing about having a large family?
I want to say that they’re the same thing – you’re rarely alone. There’s never a dull moment, for sure. It’s very gratifying to see the relationships they have with each other – much as they bicker with each other, as they grow up their relationships really do develop some depth and affection. With eight kids, that’s 28 separate relationships of the kids with each other (45, if you throw Molly and me into the mix). And, as the kids get older, it’s very gratifying to see them cultivating a ‘family identity’ – all that shared experience has started being a ‘bonding’ thing. And, I’ve definitely improved my odds of having grandchildren. . . ;)
But, the bickering can reach truly epic proportions, and sometimes I just want to lock them all in the basement and let them have at each other, and then we’ll just go on with the survivors. I’m also a guy who seems to have a more-than-average felt need for some low-key solitude, and that just doesn’t happen very often. And I won’t even get into the grocery bills. . .
There has been a certain good-news/bad-news aspect when it comes to the troubles we’ve had with 1F and 3M – in the course of dealing with those situations, there are six other kids who get sort of short-changed in the process. But, they can also soften the grief for us, if we’re paying attention. . .
So, there you have it. I'll gladly entertain any follow-up questions any of you might have.
I enjoyed this; I hope you all enjoyed it, too. . .
(23 comments)
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
You Got to Have Friends
OK, it seems that the corporate info-trolls have repented of their decision to put Blogger ‘under the ban’. Which many of you have known for a while, since I’ve been leaving comments on your blogs for the past couple weeks. Which means that I can post again, from time to time. I won’t be posting terribly regularly – once or twice a month, at most, and probably not as extensively as before – but, from time to time, as thoughts occur to me, I’ll throw ‘em out here. Hope you all don’t mind. . .
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So, here’s a bit more ‘backstory’ for you all; perhaps it will shed just a bit more light on who I am, and where I’m coming from; it might be a little convoluted, so I'll ask for your patience in advance. . .
In recent months, I have blogged quite a bit (here and here) about our recent struggles with a couple of our kids, and about the life of our community. I think I've mentioned, maybe in passing, that, until a few years ago, I had a 'low-level' pastoral position in the community - I led a small men's group (maybe 6-8 guys, at various times). I was also involved in leadership of music for our worship meetings, and I had my fingers in a few other 'pies', as well, including leading music for the community's kids' summer camp. When things with my kids got so intense, I stepped down from leading the men's group. The music leadership also got a fair bit more demanding of my time/energy around that time, and so I stepped down from that, too. All with the agreement and approval of those who had been my 'peers' and 'leaders' in those things. Then, at the same time, the directors of the summer camp asked another guy to lead music for the camp (there was a complex set of reasons for their decision, and they talked about it with me beforehand; they didn't 'spring it on me'; at least not completely). So, in the space of a few months, I left pretty much every significant role I had in the life of the community, except that of 'member'.
The trouble is, those 'positions' provided me with most of the context for my friendships in the community. So, when I left those positions, I lost most of my close friendships. Not in the sense that they weren't my friends anymore, but, the context I'd had in which we encountered each other was gone. They weren't any less busy than they'd ever been, and so the net effect on my life was, that I lost most of my closest friends; or at least, I lost virtually all of the day-to-day contact that I'd had with them. Now, I'm a person who forms a few really deep friendships, rather than lots of shallow ones, so that was a very painful set of events in my life. I've tried hard not to be bitter about it; I don't think I've succeeded as well as I wish I had. I keep plugging away, but the pain hasn't just gone away like I wished it would.
Since the first of the year, Molly and I have gone to counseling (separately, for our own issues; the woman we’re both seeing has been counseling 1F for the last six months or so). I think it’s been good. We’ve covered a fair bit of ground already. It will probably take a while for it all to ‘take shape’ for me, but I will say that both Molly and I have been addressing things from our pasts that we’ve always known about, but never particularly felt the effects of (my parents’ divorce, for my part). But, of course, just because we didn’t feel the effects, didn’t mean that there weren’t any effects; only that we didn’t feel them.
When Molly and I were ‘courting’, I laid out my life story for her, with the adoption, the divorce, etc, etc. She said to me, tongue only partly in cheek, “How can you be normal?” (saying what’s on her mind is one of Molly’s very endearing qualities). Well, it turns out I’m not! Sorry about that, Sweetheart. ;)
So now, we’re starting to understand what some of those effects are (and how they’ve worked to the detriment of our kids), and how we can begin to undo them. And we’re seeing positive trends already.
As far as my friends go, I’m finally figuring out that a large part of my ‘friendship need’ is up to me to address. Rather than just wallow in my own hurt feelings and self-pity (it is so easy to just say “to hell with it,” and wallow; as unpleasant as it is, it’s incredibly tempting), I really can just go initiate some contact. Which takes a bit more work on my part than it used to, when I could just go to meetings, and my friends would be there, without me having to do anything. But – it is what it is. And we’ve revisited a few ‘older’ friendships that had sort of ‘lain dormant’ for a while – people who, ironically, I’d fallen out of touch with as I got too busy to spend much time with them. And it’s all good.
The whole counseling thing is really just getting started, and there’s still a lot of territory left to be explored in my psyche. But, based on the early returns, I’m hopeful. And, when I can, I’ll keep you all posted. . .
-------------------------
Edit, Feb. 15 - I should add, by way of tying things together a bit, that one of the 'issues' that this all brings up is a 'weak sense of myself', to use my counselor's psycho-jargon. Which is to say, that I think of myself in 'social' context - I understand 'where I fit in', and who I am relative to others, but, when I'm 'left to myself', so to speak, my inner resources aren't so strong, and I start to feel 'lost'. Which actually makes sense of several things in my life. So, as I said above, I'm hopeful. And hope is a good thing. . .
(20 comments)
-------------------------
So, here’s a bit more ‘backstory’ for you all; perhaps it will shed just a bit more light on who I am, and where I’m coming from; it might be a little convoluted, so I'll ask for your patience in advance. . .
In recent months, I have blogged quite a bit (here and here) about our recent struggles with a couple of our kids, and about the life of our community. I think I've mentioned, maybe in passing, that, until a few years ago, I had a 'low-level' pastoral position in the community - I led a small men's group (maybe 6-8 guys, at various times). I was also involved in leadership of music for our worship meetings, and I had my fingers in a few other 'pies', as well, including leading music for the community's kids' summer camp. When things with my kids got so intense, I stepped down from leading the men's group. The music leadership also got a fair bit more demanding of my time/energy around that time, and so I stepped down from that, too. All with the agreement and approval of those who had been my 'peers' and 'leaders' in those things. Then, at the same time, the directors of the summer camp asked another guy to lead music for the camp (there was a complex set of reasons for their decision, and they talked about it with me beforehand; they didn't 'spring it on me'; at least not completely). So, in the space of a few months, I left pretty much every significant role I had in the life of the community, except that of 'member'.
The trouble is, those 'positions' provided me with most of the context for my friendships in the community. So, when I left those positions, I lost most of my close friendships. Not in the sense that they weren't my friends anymore, but, the context I'd had in which we encountered each other was gone. They weren't any less busy than they'd ever been, and so the net effect on my life was, that I lost most of my closest friends; or at least, I lost virtually all of the day-to-day contact that I'd had with them. Now, I'm a person who forms a few really deep friendships, rather than lots of shallow ones, so that was a very painful set of events in my life. I've tried hard not to be bitter about it; I don't think I've succeeded as well as I wish I had. I keep plugging away, but the pain hasn't just gone away like I wished it would.
Since the first of the year, Molly and I have gone to counseling (separately, for our own issues; the woman we’re both seeing has been counseling 1F for the last six months or so). I think it’s been good. We’ve covered a fair bit of ground already. It will probably take a while for it all to ‘take shape’ for me, but I will say that both Molly and I have been addressing things from our pasts that we’ve always known about, but never particularly felt the effects of (my parents’ divorce, for my part). But, of course, just because we didn’t feel the effects, didn’t mean that there weren’t any effects; only that we didn’t feel them.
When Molly and I were ‘courting’, I laid out my life story for her, with the adoption, the divorce, etc, etc. She said to me, tongue only partly in cheek, “How can you be normal?” (saying what’s on her mind is one of Molly’s very endearing qualities). Well, it turns out I’m not! Sorry about that, Sweetheart. ;)
So now, we’re starting to understand what some of those effects are (and how they’ve worked to the detriment of our kids), and how we can begin to undo them. And we’re seeing positive trends already.
As far as my friends go, I’m finally figuring out that a large part of my ‘friendship need’ is up to me to address. Rather than just wallow in my own hurt feelings and self-pity (it is so easy to just say “to hell with it,” and wallow; as unpleasant as it is, it’s incredibly tempting), I really can just go initiate some contact. Which takes a bit more work on my part than it used to, when I could just go to meetings, and my friends would be there, without me having to do anything. But – it is what it is. And we’ve revisited a few ‘older’ friendships that had sort of ‘lain dormant’ for a while – people who, ironically, I’d fallen out of touch with as I got too busy to spend much time with them. And it’s all good.
The whole counseling thing is really just getting started, and there’s still a lot of territory left to be explored in my psyche. But, based on the early returns, I’m hopeful. And, when I can, I’ll keep you all posted. . .
-------------------------
Edit, Feb. 15 - I should add, by way of tying things together a bit, that one of the 'issues' that this all brings up is a 'weak sense of myself', to use my counselor's psycho-jargon. Which is to say, that I think of myself in 'social' context - I understand 'where I fit in', and who I am relative to others, but, when I'm 'left to myself', so to speak, my inner resources aren't so strong, and I start to feel 'lost'. Which actually makes sense of several things in my life. So, as I said above, I'm hopeful. And hope is a good thing. . .
(20 comments)
Friday, January 5, 2007
My Other Old Flame
A while ago, when I posted about my 'old flame', I referred to her, very cryptically (if not terribly creatively) as 'GF1'. And I'm sure that the more perceptive among you were asking yourselves, "Why did he call her 'GF1' and not just 'GF', or 'OGF' (for 'Old GirlFriend, I suppose), or something like that? Does 'GF1' imply the existence of a 'GF2'?" To which I reply - you are very clever bloggers; you figured me right out, you did.
When I was a freshman in college, I met a young woman, with whom I shared a couple classes, and who also, as luck would have it, lived in the women's wing of my dorm. She was witty and clever, and very bright - interesting, and lots of fun. She was also a strong Christian - she went to the same charismatic prayer meeting that I did, and, when the community began, she was part of it, as well.
As I got to know her better, I found that we had quite a bit of other common ground, besides. Both our families had moved during our senior year of high school, uprooting us from schools and friendships we'd had for years. And, coincidentally, our families had both moved to the suburbs of the same midwestern megalopolis; in fact, they lived about twenty minutes from each other. We began to spend a lot of time together, and by the time spring break rolled around, we were a definite 'item'.
Our parents' proximity to each other meant that, even when we returned home for the summer, we could easily get together pretty much whenever we wanted to, which turned out to be quite a lot. It also meant that we got to know each other's families very well. Which is a very helpful thing, if you mean to build a solid, long-term relationship. Which I certainly did.
GF2 effectively introduced me to the Catholic Church (which I actually mentioned in this post, without referring to her by name; or pseudonym; whatever). I began the process of being received into the Catholic Church when I thought that I would marry her someday (I mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, that I wasn't far into the process before I made the decision to become Catholic on my own behalf, and not just for her).
But ultimately, I think we were mismatched in a few significant ways. For one, the whole time we were together, she was never completely certain that marriage was what she wanted for her life. From time to time, she would get a strong urge to be a nun. Which was certainly her prerogative, but definitely not what I wanted to hear.
I also think that we were somewhat mismatched temperamentally. Both Molly and GF1 are very outgoing, sanguine personalities, and very complementary to my more brooding, melancholy tendencies. But GF2 is temperamentally very similar to me, at least in terms of brooding melancholy. The problem with that being, that whenever one of us got 'down-in-the-dumps', the other one tended to follow them down into the dumps, rather than help them get out of their depression.
Anyway, between those factors (and a few others, like the fact that that we were both still teenagers at the time we were together), our relationship, at least in romantic terms, ended after a bit more than a year. I think we both agreed that our relationship was distracting us from things that we needed to be paying more attention to, like finishing our education(s), growing stronger and more mature in our Christian lives, and just growing up in general. (She probably agreed more than I did, but I could admit the truth of it.) And so, we broke off our romantic relationship.
That was incredibly painful for me, and made all the moreso by the fact that I was still in regular contact with her in the life of the community. For a few years afterwards, we practically ignored each other in public, just because neither of us could figure out how to treat each other 'normally'.
An interesting epilog to this story is that, after we broke up, Molly joined the community, and she and GF2 became very close friends. To the point that Molly asked her to be a bridesmaid in our wedding. Which GF2 accepted. And which my mom thought was very weird, but whatcha gonna do? By the time Molly and I were engaged, GF2 was also in a serious relationship with a guy who, in the fullness of time, would become her husband. In fact, they more-or-less announced their engagement at our wedding reception. So, our lives have been intertwined in some interesting ways over the years, even though we never revisited our 'old flame'.
Today, GF2 is happily married to the same guy (they just had their 26th anniversary), and the mother of seven kids, all of whom she has home-schooled (five of them, so far, through high school). In recent years, she and her husband have become one of our closest friend-couples (the 'big-family' thing, no doubt), and one of her sons, a theology student, has become a good friend of mine in his own right. Somewhere along the line, all of our kids have found out that "Our mom and your dad used to date each other," which is the object of great mirth among them. We would both be tickled pink to have two of our kids marry each other - if we can't have kids together, maybe we can have grandkids together.
But that's another story, yet to be written, if at all. . .
(11 comments)
When I was a freshman in college, I met a young woman, with whom I shared a couple classes, and who also, as luck would have it, lived in the women's wing of my dorm. She was witty and clever, and very bright - interesting, and lots of fun. She was also a strong Christian - she went to the same charismatic prayer meeting that I did, and, when the community began, she was part of it, as well.
As I got to know her better, I found that we had quite a bit of other common ground, besides. Both our families had moved during our senior year of high school, uprooting us from schools and friendships we'd had for years. And, coincidentally, our families had both moved to the suburbs of the same midwestern megalopolis; in fact, they lived about twenty minutes from each other. We began to spend a lot of time together, and by the time spring break rolled around, we were a definite 'item'.
Our parents' proximity to each other meant that, even when we returned home for the summer, we could easily get together pretty much whenever we wanted to, which turned out to be quite a lot. It also meant that we got to know each other's families very well. Which is a very helpful thing, if you mean to build a solid, long-term relationship. Which I certainly did.
GF2 effectively introduced me to the Catholic Church (which I actually mentioned in this post, without referring to her by name; or pseudonym; whatever). I began the process of being received into the Catholic Church when I thought that I would marry her someday (I mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, that I wasn't far into the process before I made the decision to become Catholic on my own behalf, and not just for her).
But ultimately, I think we were mismatched in a few significant ways. For one, the whole time we were together, she was never completely certain that marriage was what she wanted for her life. From time to time, she would get a strong urge to be a nun. Which was certainly her prerogative, but definitely not what I wanted to hear.
I also think that we were somewhat mismatched temperamentally. Both Molly and GF1 are very outgoing, sanguine personalities, and very complementary to my more brooding, melancholy tendencies. But GF2 is temperamentally very similar to me, at least in terms of brooding melancholy. The problem with that being, that whenever one of us got 'down-in-the-dumps', the other one tended to follow them down into the dumps, rather than help them get out of their depression.
Anyway, between those factors (and a few others, like the fact that that we were both still teenagers at the time we were together), our relationship, at least in romantic terms, ended after a bit more than a year. I think we both agreed that our relationship was distracting us from things that we needed to be paying more attention to, like finishing our education(s), growing stronger and more mature in our Christian lives, and just growing up in general. (She probably agreed more than I did, but I could admit the truth of it.) And so, we broke off our romantic relationship.
That was incredibly painful for me, and made all the moreso by the fact that I was still in regular contact with her in the life of the community. For a few years afterwards, we practically ignored each other in public, just because neither of us could figure out how to treat each other 'normally'.
An interesting epilog to this story is that, after we broke up, Molly joined the community, and she and GF2 became very close friends. To the point that Molly asked her to be a bridesmaid in our wedding. Which GF2 accepted. And which my mom thought was very weird, but whatcha gonna do? By the time Molly and I were engaged, GF2 was also in a serious relationship with a guy who, in the fullness of time, would become her husband. In fact, they more-or-less announced their engagement at our wedding reception. So, our lives have been intertwined in some interesting ways over the years, even though we never revisited our 'old flame'.
Today, GF2 is happily married to the same guy (they just had their 26th anniversary), and the mother of seven kids, all of whom she has home-schooled (five of them, so far, through high school). In recent years, she and her husband have become one of our closest friend-couples (the 'big-family' thing, no doubt), and one of her sons, a theology student, has become a good friend of mine in his own right. Somewhere along the line, all of our kids have found out that "Our mom and your dad used to date each other," which is the object of great mirth among them. We would both be tickled pink to have two of our kids marry each other - if we can't have kids together, maybe we can have grandkids together.
But that's another story, yet to be written, if at all. . .
(11 comments)
Friday, December 15, 2006
Behold, How Good and Pleasant It Is
When I started this blog, I never expected or intended to say much about the Christian community that Molly and I are part of. I didn't really mean for this to be a 'Christian' blog, although I certainly didn't intend to hide who I am or what my life is about. When I started, I mainly intended to talk about my family, and my marriage to Molly, and a little bit of married sex, just to keep you all interested. I didn't think that our community would be all that interesting to you all, and besides, it's a little hard to explain. But, in recent weeks, it has become clear to me (and probably to many of you) that I can't really tell you about myself without being pretty up-front and explicit about our community (and a few of you have asked me to tell more about it). So, here goes. . .
Back in September, I made this post, describing my spiritual journey, and it might be helpful if you read that before plowing ahead here. As I said, when I went to college, I was introduced to what, to my eyes, was a really cool prayer meeting.
In the late '60s and early '70s, Christian stuff was popping up all over the place - Jesus freaks and all that good stuff. This was a 'charismatic' prayer meeting (for a brief description of the charismatic movement, this isn't too bad). By the time I got there, in the fall of '73, it was a weekly prayer meeting with around 200 people in attendance. Of course, enthusiastic young Christian that I was, I was fairly blown away by it, and immediately made it part of my regular routine.
At the time that I arrived, there was quite a bit of ferment going on in the life of the prayer group. There was a growing conviction among many of the folks that, in order to 'go deeper' in the Christian life, we needed to have some kind of a 'life together'. In order to really grow in Christian life and character, we needed to have some more definite, structured way to support and encourage each other, and 'call each other on'. So, most of my freshman year, there was a series of meetings and presentations aimed at exploring what such a 'life together' would look like, and how it would work. At the end of the school year, about 80 people, my 18-year-old self among them, made a commitment to live in community together with each other, whatever that would mean. I went home to my parents for the summer.
When I returned the following fall, the life of the new community was underway. Most of the members had moved into households with each other, and those of us living on campus in the dorms arranged to live on the same floors in the same dorms with each other, so we could have enough direct contact with each other to actively support each other. We would pray together, a lot, and meet to discuss issues in our lives, and how we could more effectively live as Christians in the circumstances of our daily lives.
The community had a 'pastoral' structure, with each member having a 'pastoral head' with whom they met regularly (usually weekly, in those early days) to discuss their lives. In those early, 'formative' days, pastoral input was often direct, challenging, and, um, intense. Sometimes, the leadership crossed lines into some overly rigid and controlling stuff, and I suppose that I experienced some of that myself. I was usually able, though, to see the component of it that had my best interest in mind. Some folks quit the community because they felt overly manipulated and controlled; I can acknowledge what they experienced, while still saying that I experienced far more benefit than pain.
Words like 'cult' were occasionally thrown our way, but I can't say with any justice. No one ever tried to keep me from my family, or get me to sign away my paycheck. I've already told you the story of how Molly and I met and married; you can rest easy that no one 'arranged' it for us. I discussed 'major life decisions' with my leaders, but the decisions were mine alone.
I should be clear here that the community is voluntary, and intentional. We are also not a church - virtually all of our members belong to their own churches, and our community life is independent of our churches or parishes. We're also 'ecumenical' - our members belong to a whole range of churches - Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, and probably a few others that I can't think of right now. Catholics might best understand us as a kind of lay religious order, akin to the Third Order Franciscans or Opus Dei.
I graduated from college, and took a job that would allow me to maintain my involvement in the community. Once I was more or less 'established' in my job, I started looking for a wife; Molly and I began our 'courtship' that fall, and we were married the following summer.
In the early '80s, the community went through a period of major upheaval, prompted in part by some pretty extreme abuse of authority on the part of one of the 'senior' leaders. We went from a membership of around 500 to less than half that in the course of about a year.
But I also think that a large component of it was that community members were becoming 'grown-ups'. When we began in '74 with 80 or so members, there were five or six married couples, and one child; maybe two of our 'founding members' were over 30. In the late '70s and early '80s, dozens of community members (Molly and I among them) married each other, and by '82 or so, the character of the community had pretty completely changed over from a group of mainly young singles to a group of young married folks. And as we started having children and families, we started drawing more lines in terms of what we were available to do (looking back, I don't know how the families that joined us in the 'early days' managed to do it; the 'single-ness' of the community in those days was pretty clueless when it came to how families needed to work).
And, for the last 20 years, the life of our community has been more or less like that - couples and families, and young singles (we have maintained a campus 'outreach' all along), pursuing a Christian way of life together, mutually supporting and encouraging each other in that life.
I don't know if I've been able to do justice to the task of describing our community, but perhaps this will help you all understand what I've been talking about. If I've left something unclear to you, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification.
(14 comments)
Back in September, I made this post, describing my spiritual journey, and it might be helpful if you read that before plowing ahead here. As I said, when I went to college, I was introduced to what, to my eyes, was a really cool prayer meeting.
In the late '60s and early '70s, Christian stuff was popping up all over the place - Jesus freaks and all that good stuff. This was a 'charismatic' prayer meeting (for a brief description of the charismatic movement, this isn't too bad). By the time I got there, in the fall of '73, it was a weekly prayer meeting with around 200 people in attendance. Of course, enthusiastic young Christian that I was, I was fairly blown away by it, and immediately made it part of my regular routine.
At the time that I arrived, there was quite a bit of ferment going on in the life of the prayer group. There was a growing conviction among many of the folks that, in order to 'go deeper' in the Christian life, we needed to have some kind of a 'life together'. In order to really grow in Christian life and character, we needed to have some more definite, structured way to support and encourage each other, and 'call each other on'. So, most of my freshman year, there was a series of meetings and presentations aimed at exploring what such a 'life together' would look like, and how it would work. At the end of the school year, about 80 people, my 18-year-old self among them, made a commitment to live in community together with each other, whatever that would mean. I went home to my parents for the summer.
When I returned the following fall, the life of the new community was underway. Most of the members had moved into households with each other, and those of us living on campus in the dorms arranged to live on the same floors in the same dorms with each other, so we could have enough direct contact with each other to actively support each other. We would pray together, a lot, and meet to discuss issues in our lives, and how we could more effectively live as Christians in the circumstances of our daily lives.
The community had a 'pastoral' structure, with each member having a 'pastoral head' with whom they met regularly (usually weekly, in those early days) to discuss their lives. In those early, 'formative' days, pastoral input was often direct, challenging, and, um, intense. Sometimes, the leadership crossed lines into some overly rigid and controlling stuff, and I suppose that I experienced some of that myself. I was usually able, though, to see the component of it that had my best interest in mind. Some folks quit the community because they felt overly manipulated and controlled; I can acknowledge what they experienced, while still saying that I experienced far more benefit than pain.
Words like 'cult' were occasionally thrown our way, but I can't say with any justice. No one ever tried to keep me from my family, or get me to sign away my paycheck. I've already told you the story of how Molly and I met and married; you can rest easy that no one 'arranged' it for us. I discussed 'major life decisions' with my leaders, but the decisions were mine alone.
I should be clear here that the community is voluntary, and intentional. We are also not a church - virtually all of our members belong to their own churches, and our community life is independent of our churches or parishes. We're also 'ecumenical' - our members belong to a whole range of churches - Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, and probably a few others that I can't think of right now. Catholics might best understand us as a kind of lay religious order, akin to the Third Order Franciscans or Opus Dei.
I graduated from college, and took a job that would allow me to maintain my involvement in the community. Once I was more or less 'established' in my job, I started looking for a wife; Molly and I began our 'courtship' that fall, and we were married the following summer.
In the early '80s, the community went through a period of major upheaval, prompted in part by some pretty extreme abuse of authority on the part of one of the 'senior' leaders. We went from a membership of around 500 to less than half that in the course of about a year.
But I also think that a large component of it was that community members were becoming 'grown-ups'. When we began in '74 with 80 or so members, there were five or six married couples, and one child; maybe two of our 'founding members' were over 30. In the late '70s and early '80s, dozens of community members (Molly and I among them) married each other, and by '82 or so, the character of the community had pretty completely changed over from a group of mainly young singles to a group of young married folks. And as we started having children and families, we started drawing more lines in terms of what we were available to do (looking back, I don't know how the families that joined us in the 'early days' managed to do it; the 'single-ness' of the community in those days was pretty clueless when it came to how families needed to work).
And, for the last 20 years, the life of our community has been more or less like that - couples and families, and young singles (we have maintained a campus 'outreach' all along), pursuing a Christian way of life together, mutually supporting and encouraging each other in that life.
I don't know if I've been able to do justice to the task of describing our community, but perhaps this will help you all understand what I've been talking about. If I've left something unclear to you, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification.
(14 comments)
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Workin' For a Living
Back when I finally graduated from college (I got to the end of my senior year, and wasn't ready to be done with school yet, so I stayed on for a Master's degree), I entertained a few good job offers, and I chose one in the same town where I'd gone to college, mainly so I could continue my involvement with the Christian community I'd become part of when I was in college. (I'm working on a post to 'flesh out' the life of our community more for you; as you can see, it has provided a major context for my life).
I enjoyed working for XYZ Corp., an automotive supplier company. My job was interesting and challenging, and I worked with good folks who became many of my friends. (Among my bosses were Alex and Ross, about whom I have blogged previously). I was an engineer, but of a particularly computer-geek variety (which is quite funny, because I'm no more than mildly 'tech-savvy').
I worked for XYZ for 17 years. While I worked there, I got married and begot (begat?) the first six of my children.
In the mid-90s, life for automotive suppliers became crushingly difficult, and in the fulness of time, XYZ ceased to exist. I was laid off (just before my 40th birthday) about a year before the final collapse, which actually worked in my favor, in terms of getting into the job market that much sooner.
With six kids, you can imagine that that was a pretty anxious time in Jones-world. But, within a couple weeks, I was already generating some good leads, and within six weeks, I had landed a new job with HugeMassive Company. I hoped to stay in the same town I was living in, and the guy that hired me at HMC promised me that, if I took a position at an office 45 minutes' drive from my home, that a position was about to open up back in OurTown. So I took the job, and started driving the 45 minutes.
And it was a darn good job. A company like HMC could offer me a much more interesting and challenging set of problems to work on than XYZ could. I had to learn some new methods, and use some different software than I'd had, but it didn't take long for me to come up to speed.
The 45 minute commute was kinda painful, after having been used to no more than a 10-minute drive to work, but I got used to it. I even managed to coach my sons' Little League team for two years, in spite of the commute. Besides, I was going to be moving back to OurTown in fairly short order, so I didn't mind.
Two years later, I finally got the call that the position in OurTown was opening up. On the same day, HMC announced that it was closing the OurTown engineering office in one year. So, I discussed the situation with my bosses, and arranged that I could work in OurTown for the one year, and then return to my current position. While I was in OurTown, HMC announced that the engineering office I was hoping to return to would also be closing, and my job would be moving to another office, over an hour's drive away. So, I had one peaceful year working in OurTown, and then I hit the road. Since 1999, I've been driving roughly 65 minutes one-way to work.
Molly and I seriously pondered the idea of moving closer to my job, but in the end I decided that, dug in as we were to relationships in our Christian community, parish, school, etc, that it was preferable for me to drive the miles rather than uproot our family from a stable and life-giving set of relationships.
-------------------------
And that's what our life has been like since 1999. I'd be lying if I told you I was real happy about it. It's workable, at best. But, I sorely feel the effect of having another 2+ hours taken out of my day just driving back and forth. I can 'make use' of the 'car time' - thank God for books on tape - but I'd much rather be home, and on hand for Molly and the kids.
I've tried many different avenues for getting my job at least closer to OurTown, but nothing has panned out. It seems that the Universe has created a black hole for jobs of my sort within an hour's radius of OurTown. (sigh)
And, the friendships that I had with my co-workers at XYZ - well, let's just say that HMC mainly doesn't swing that way. The culture is much more 'upwardly-mobile', more competitive, more fast-paced. Most people don't sit still in one place long enough to form friendships, and besides, co-workers tend to be viewed more as competitors for the next promotion than as potential friends. I don't mean to whine about it; it's just the way it is, and it's very different from what I had for 17 years.
I wonder sometimes what God is up to with me - right when my family needs me to be on hand the most - right when my sons are teenagers - my ability to be on hand for them gets seriously curtailed. You can believe that, when the stuff of the two previous posts was playing out, that I wondered many times why I couldn't manage to come up with a better situation.
And that's about all I have to say about that.
(11 comments)
I enjoyed working for XYZ Corp., an automotive supplier company. My job was interesting and challenging, and I worked with good folks who became many of my friends. (Among my bosses were Alex and Ross, about whom I have blogged previously). I was an engineer, but of a particularly computer-geek variety (which is quite funny, because I'm no more than mildly 'tech-savvy').
I worked for XYZ for 17 years. While I worked there, I got married and begot (begat?) the first six of my children.
In the mid-90s, life for automotive suppliers became crushingly difficult, and in the fulness of time, XYZ ceased to exist. I was laid off (just before my 40th birthday) about a year before the final collapse, which actually worked in my favor, in terms of getting into the job market that much sooner.
With six kids, you can imagine that that was a pretty anxious time in Jones-world. But, within a couple weeks, I was already generating some good leads, and within six weeks, I had landed a new job with HugeMassive Company. I hoped to stay in the same town I was living in, and the guy that hired me at HMC promised me that, if I took a position at an office 45 minutes' drive from my home, that a position was about to open up back in OurTown. So I took the job, and started driving the 45 minutes.
And it was a darn good job. A company like HMC could offer me a much more interesting and challenging set of problems to work on than XYZ could. I had to learn some new methods, and use some different software than I'd had, but it didn't take long for me to come up to speed.
The 45 minute commute was kinda painful, after having been used to no more than a 10-minute drive to work, but I got used to it. I even managed to coach my sons' Little League team for two years, in spite of the commute. Besides, I was going to be moving back to OurTown in fairly short order, so I didn't mind.
Two years later, I finally got the call that the position in OurTown was opening up. On the same day, HMC announced that it was closing the OurTown engineering office in one year. So, I discussed the situation with my bosses, and arranged that I could work in OurTown for the one year, and then return to my current position. While I was in OurTown, HMC announced that the engineering office I was hoping to return to would also be closing, and my job would be moving to another office, over an hour's drive away. So, I had one peaceful year working in OurTown, and then I hit the road. Since 1999, I've been driving roughly 65 minutes one-way to work.
Molly and I seriously pondered the idea of moving closer to my job, but in the end I decided that, dug in as we were to relationships in our Christian community, parish, school, etc, that it was preferable for me to drive the miles rather than uproot our family from a stable and life-giving set of relationships.
-------------------------
And that's what our life has been like since 1999. I'd be lying if I told you I was real happy about it. It's workable, at best. But, I sorely feel the effect of having another 2+ hours taken out of my day just driving back and forth. I can 'make use' of the 'car time' - thank God for books on tape - but I'd much rather be home, and on hand for Molly and the kids.
I've tried many different avenues for getting my job at least closer to OurTown, but nothing has panned out. It seems that the Universe has created a black hole for jobs of my sort within an hour's radius of OurTown. (sigh)
And, the friendships that I had with my co-workers at XYZ - well, let's just say that HMC mainly doesn't swing that way. The culture is much more 'upwardly-mobile', more competitive, more fast-paced. Most people don't sit still in one place long enough to form friendships, and besides, co-workers tend to be viewed more as competitors for the next promotion than as potential friends. I don't mean to whine about it; it's just the way it is, and it's very different from what I had for 17 years.
I wonder sometimes what God is up to with me - right when my family needs me to be on hand the most - right when my sons are teenagers - my ability to be on hand for them gets seriously curtailed. You can believe that, when the stuff of the two previous posts was playing out, that I wondered many times why I couldn't manage to come up with a better situation.
And that's about all I have to say about that.
(11 comments)
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