family

Travel Observations


In spite of its less than stellar beginning, the trip back to Iowa has exceeded expectations. We have seen, were seen, and by this time tomorrow – the goddess willing – we will be getting ready to land in Minneapolis for the final leg of our journey home. Home, where apparently winter is getting ready to take up his nine month residence. No joke. Snow by week’s end. I plan to console myself with a new pair of winter boots.

The wedding went off with only the slightest of hitches. The groomsmen were hungover and the bride’s wedding band had been sized too small. Aside from that every detail announced my niece – her personality, taste and style. Only she could use every shade of pink known to man in a way that was elegant rather than Disney princess.

The hotel where we stayed was on the plaza recreation of a canal street that had only just been finished the last time I visited Pella with Will. It is – interestingly – just across the street from his grandmother’s house, a house she bought with the proceeds of the life insurance policy of Will’s late father. I noted that the building belongs to a historical preservation society now. I haven’t any idea where Lucy is. She could be dead. She is old enough to be dead.

Rob and I walked the town square on Sunday morning. The day was crisply fall. As Rob snapped a photo here and there, it occurred to me that this was what Will and I had done on that last visit. It was Easter of 2001. We’d been coerced/guilted into including his relatives on a stop on our way back from my folks. After a quick bite, we’d escaped the dagger looks of disappointment from his mother for a stroll in rather bitter spring air. She was angry because Will’s cousin announced her pregnancy that day and there she was without a grandbaby or one on the way.

“I should be the one wearing the grandma shirts,” she complained to him.

We strolled the canal that day. Took photos. Never dreaming that someday he would be dead and I would be there again, remarried and ruminating a bit on the twistyness of life.

Staying in a hotel on our own has become this wonderful treat. It’s like Idaho Falls again except we do get outside the room for more than just food. I am not sure how much longer we will be able to leave Dee with my mom overnight. It struck me forcibly this trip that she is nearing eighty. The nephews One and Two stay the weekends with her frequently, but they are used to the autonomy. And so are their parents. We are not as keen on the running wild aspect for Dee. Fostering independence is one thing and leaving children with the impression that they are the masters of their known universe is quite another.

We spent Sunday afternoon at the wedding brunch. Sis and Bride each made promises to sit and chat with me that really never came to fruition. I was not disappointed because I have been a bride and know that personal time is premium. Everyone wants to bask in your glow.

I did have time to talk a bit with Sis about things more personal. She was asking about the memoir and I mentioned that I was afraid I might offend or hurt feelings with my take on life back then.

“I feel badly that I didn’t help more,” she said. “I should have been there more for you at the end.”

We’ve never discussed this. I was distant for many months because of the events of those last days, but I never told her how hurt I was or that I was upset by it. Mostly because there was no point. Sis is my family, and there is no question of our connection.

“I was upset,” I admitted. “But I have come to realize that there is no handbook for events like these and people will do what they are able. You can’t ask more from anyone than they have to give and you accept people as they are or not. I am okay now. And I made my mistakes too.”

The time with immediate family has been pleasant to actual fun. Rob and BIL get along much better than BIL and Will ever did. It makes hanging out possible. Although we don’t have a lot in common. I am a “dance mom” and DNOS is a hockey mom. They are Republicans and we are Canadians, so many topical conversations are off limits. We are middle-aged though and have historical mile-markers in common. Sadly, we are also old enough now to veer off into discussions of the physical betrayals of age. BIL regaled us with his bladder habits.

While here I have shopped. And will shop again today. It’s hard not to consume when in the land of consumption. Leafing through the Sunday flyers in the paper, I happened upon the Target ads. I actually hugged them. We don’t have Target. I couldn’t live here again and not become a devotee of the place. Best that I am a foreigner.

At the wedding brunch, I spent quite a while chatting with Sis’s Norwegian cousin, Helge*, and his wife. I am not surprised to find that I have more in common from a common sense stance with Europeans than with people from my homeland. I haven’t ever met Helge before though they come to visit at least once a year. He invited Rob and I to call upon them when we are overseas if we should ever make it to Norway.

Today is our last day of non-travel. There is a laundry list of things to do with Mom, and actual laundry, to do. Wish us luck for tomorrow. We will be victims of the system.

*Quick aside, we noted that Chicago had lost its Olympic bid and after listening to Helge recount with considerable disgust the practice the U.S. has adopted of photographing and fingerprinting foreign visitors, I am not surprised. Rob didn’t have his vitals captured and secured at customs though there were large signs everywhere reminding people that they could be and what the process was. Canadians are still exempt for the moment. I am a bit disconcerted by my country’s need to collect and store data. It sounds more Nazi than healthcare to me.

This Kinda Pissed Me Off


I am not reading blogs as I used to (sorry, but I scan/read through my blog reader because I am crunched right now) which means I don’t comment much either (though I am really trying to pop over and leave a note for those of you who are friends – ‘cuz I do care to know about you and yours and stuff). Sometimes I read things still that work me up enough to actually write a comment that says more than just “hi, I was here and thinking of you”.

Mommy blogs bore me. I don’t read them. I have my own mom moments and mom stories, and I prefer to get my advice from known sources. But I read Jessica because she is smart, irreverent and herself, which isn’t always a given. Bloggers have personas that don’t often match their real life self. You would have to know me for a while to hear the same kind of honesty from me that you read on my blog. Discretion is actually one of my real time virtues.

The subject has come up before on this blog and it irked me then too. It’s the idea that DNA trumps with a sub-theme of “I could never love another as I love my spouse”.

Okay.

So I am adopted and until I had Dee, there was literally no one else in the world with whom I had a blood relationship. And I have to be honest, I didn’t love her at first sight. I was perplexed and a bit unsure because I was told I would love her with the intensity of a million suns from moment one and frankly, I didn’t feel that. She was a stranger who I thought I knew because of all the time she’d spent growing inside me. She was a little person from the start who I had to learn – just like I have had to learn everyone else in my life. As a result, I am not an advocate of the Disney Princess School of Motherhood.

I should have known this going in. I had witnessed plenty of instances of mothers and fathers whose regard for their biological children ranged from disinterest to pure duty with all sorts of cringe-worthy twists and turns in between. Biology ensures almost nothing in terms of attachment. Case in point would be Nephew1 who regularly threatens his mother (my youngest sis) with:

“If you do not come and visit me the next time I am at Grandma’s, I will divorce you when I am 18 and you will never see or hear from me again.”

This is the only thing that will rouse my sister from the reality show disaster of her life to spend an hour or so with her son. The third of four children to whom she has given birth. The other three she gave up for adoption without a second thought. The one she kept so she could go back on state aid because she was tired of couch surfing and living out of paper grocery sacks with her toothless boyfriend -who isn’t the father by the way. He wouldn’t oblige. She seduced the teenage friend of another guy – who also declined to impregnate her. Award winning mother material my sister is not and that’s my point. There are more people in the world like her that disprove the “I would lay down my life for my (bio) child” than not.

I would have taken umbrage even before I remarried (yeah, I’ll get to that) and became a step-parent. If there is any disparity in my feelings for my older girls and Dee, it’s because we are still getting to know each other. It’s harder when they are older and living on their own. We just don’t get opportunities to interact like Rob and Dee do, but I wouldn’t be able to choose among them in one of those hypothetical “you have to toss one from the boat scenarios” which are stupid anyway.

Blending fails when adults in the scenario make decisions that will ensure it does. Adults set the tone, make the rules and provide the examples, and if you go into a second marriage with children with whom your past track record as a real adult is in question, you are going to have your work cut out for you.

My Uncle Donnie married a widow who was 8 years older than he was and who had seven children – some of them already grown and married when they wed back in 1968. They all call him “Pops”. He is their children’s grandfather. They aren’t as blended into my mother’s family as they could have been because at the time, my mom’s siblings weren’t as close as they could have been – are now. This was the result of adult decisions. My grandmother didn’t like Auntie Bern very much. Different personalities. But as far as Auntie Bern’s family went Uncle Donnie was welcomed and became “husband” and “dad”. Auntie Bern passed away quite a while ago and nothing has changed.

Perhaps it’s what you are taught growing up? Dad’s family is the direct result of a second marriage after widowhood. His father’s older step-brothers had issues with their father, but they never let it keep them from integrating with their new siblings (who were the same ages as their own children really). Sometimes a certain amount of “suck it up, buttercup” is necessary to make blending work and this, I think, is what separates the true adults from the wanna-be’s and posers.

So, the nonsense about not being able to love another as much as your spouse? Crap. People fall in love after having long, short and in-between marriages to people they truly loved all the time. Often what I hear from them is that they are even happier in the second relationship. Because they didn’t love the first spouse or it wasn’t a “soul mates” thing? No, it’s because they know how to create a loving relationship. They make the extra effort because they have lost someone and know the searing pain of regrets and what-if’s and opportunities lost.

Love is something you choose to do whether there are biological ties or not. It is not magic or genetically hardwired. Believing in love as some kind of compulsion based on forces beyond our control is what allows us to not care about people who are homeless or without health care or are being imprisoned by fanatical religious extremists in parts of the world that don’t interest us because we don’t have family or first spouses there. It’s the kind of thinking that allows us to dehumanize others and dismiss them and their welfare and that kind of reasoning has never led humanity to any happy place that I know of.

I choose to believe that I am capable of  more than that.

Family Matters


Mom called me Thursday afternoon. Because it was the tenth anniversary of my marriage to my late husband, I thought for a brief second she may have remembered. But the phone call was about her. Another streak unbroken.

“DNOS sold your father’s car,” she informed me. “And I am pissed.”

The car, if you remember, was a huge bone of contention in the days following Dad’s death last October. My brother, CB, was desperate for Mom to sign it over to him because he didn’t have a reliable vehicle back in Nevada and the truth was that without dependable wheels, he was never going to find work. But DNOS would not hear of it. CB behaved poorly during Dad’s last days and even worse in the aftermath. They don’t get along anyway, but DNOS was Dad’s favorite. She was the one who shouldered the load during his illness. She thought that CB should have manned up and acted his age instead of mining his childhood grievances. He was miffed that no one would at least allow him the right to have issues with the way he was parented. They are both a little right and a little wrong.

In the end, I sided with DNOS. I am the swing vote. I swung incorrectly in this instance. DNOS sold the car in the spring – without a word to Mom – because she wanted the money to pay for repairs to her jeep. Mom had signed the title over to her but on the condition that the car would be available for Nephew1 when he turned sixteen next year. DNOS did not mention the sale of the car until Mom showed up at her house yesterday and asked where it was.

It isn’t a huge deal really. Nephew1 will undoubtedly nag Mom into buying him a beater anyway and my cousin’s husband runs an autobody shop where such vehicles show up regularly. The issue is the money. DNOS, apparently, helped herself to grocery gift cards that Mom had in the house while Mom was visiting us in July. About $400 dollars worth of script which DNOS claims was just $200 and that she “borrowed” to give to BabySis who was broke and begging while Mom was gone.

DNOS has repaid the $200 she claims she borrowed for BabySis, but the kicker is that BabySis had no idea what Mom was talking about when Mom brought it up to her over the past weekend. BabySis was begging again for cash to buy cigarrettes (how does one find the balls to ask for ciggie money from a woman whose husband died from lung cancer?) and Mom reminded her of the $200.

“DNOS never gave me any gift cards.”

Here’s the bottom line. DNOS was Dad’s favorite and she used him like a private credit union, borrowing and repaying in amounts and on terms that only the two of them knew. Dad is dead. DNOS’s spending habits live on.

Mom had a conversation with DNOS about everything. What did she say?

“Don’t tell Annie.”

As if. I am most likely to hear from our mother when things are awry.

I told her what I thought she should do. Whether she will do it or not is debatable. I didn’t even entertain the thought of calling my sister. I like my sister. I like her husband and her son. And I know, more than anyone I think, just how taxing the caregiving she did for Dad was and how much heavier the burden was because I upped and remarried and left the country. I don’t feel like causing a rift between us because Mom has been unclear about her new position on handouts to her children and grandchildren. I handed Mom my two cents, Canadian, and she will do what she will do. I did tell her this,

“I could go all drama about the unfairness where money has always been concerned in our family and remind you of the differing standards you and Dad had for each of us kids, and how DNOS, and me especially, where always left to fend for ourselves even in times of crisis, but I won’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what do you want to do with your money and what is your criteria for lending money and giving away possessions now.”