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Friday


I am too tired to properly update on the holiday. In fact, I hadn’t any real plans to post live again until June, but a lot is going on and this usually drives me to write.

First, I have a pen name. It came to me after much thought and back/forth right before we left for the mountains. It combines a distinctly family name, which is also my dad’s middle name, with my maiden name. I will unveil it when I have my author’s website completed and up, but I am pleased with it.

The idea for a pen name for my fiction writing self has been stirring around for a while in my mind, but a speaker at the writing conference I attended finally provided me with a tangible reason to write under more than one name. Branding. When I am Ann or anniegirl, people who read are sure of what they are getting, but my fiction is dark, twisted and not particularly mainstream in a chick lit or even a straight high-brow lit kind of way. Therefore, my alias will brand my fiction. Readers will know what they are getting.

Second, we arrived home to yet another job offer for Rob. The same job he has been offered twice before – the long term project that would have taken us to Houston is now beckoning from England.

“How many times does opportunity have to knock?” Rob asked.

And I agreed. I read Paulo Coelho’s Brida and The Alchemist over holiday (along with three other books – I was tearing up the pages) and the second book deals almost entirely with following the signs the universe will show those who make their wants, needs or desires known to it. Coelho wrote an interesting fable about listening, trusting and having faith in one’s personal legend.

I don’t know that this job is Rob’s personal legend, but I have felt for a while that it is a sign and a step towards it. But more on it as it develops.

Finally, illness stalks the family once again. Rob’s younger brother was in the ICU as of Sunday night. He is chronically ill and had taken a turn. He will not live to be an old man and probably not a middle-aged one either (he is sixteen years younger than Rob) and though it isn’t a surprise, and Rob and he are estranged, it is unsettling. And it is a reminder.

On my side of the family, Nephew1 is quite ill. Deteriorating lung disease (or syndrome – it’s hard to know because my youngest sister was conveying the information and she is not bright). The doctors had been treating his breathing difficulties as asthma for a while but it turns out incorrectly.

“They told me I could die, Grandma,” is what he told my mother.

We may be making a trip to Iowa this summer after all.

Columbine: 10 years Later


I was teaching in middle school in Des Moines, Iowa on the day the tragedy at Columbine High School occurred ten years ago. I was 35, engaged to be married that summer and had been teaching for a dozen years, working mainly with working class and at-risk kids.

By the spring of 1999, Des Moines had seen some of the worst gang violence in its history. At the middle school where I had worked previously, many of my students were involved in gangs. They were drug dealers who hid their weapons in the lockers at the beginning of the school day, wore bling – before it was called that – and flashed wads of cash that no fourteen or fifteen year old should have access to.

“Any time you need some extra cash, Miss Cox, just ask,” one of my newspaper students, Chris, informed me one afternoon, and he pulled a roll of paper bills bound by a rubber band out of the pocket of his baggy jeans. He smiled and nodded as I politely declined but thanked him for his generous offer.

Chris was a sweet kid, but a gangster who ran with a dangerous crowd. Despite that I was never afraid of him. His teachers in the Behavioral Disorder program marveled at how well we got on with each other. I was one of the few regular ed teachers whose class Chris attended regularly and without incident. His helpfulness and work ethic never surprised me. You could see the good kid underneath the bad circumstances that life had thrown him into.

But I taught my fair share of kids who were not simply products of their dicey environments. Children who suffered from mental illness who truly didn’t belong in a class with ordinary kids or in a school ill equipped to monitor them or protect others from them. And I went to work a few years afraid of a few of them and glad to see the backs of their heads come summertime, knowing that they would be someone else’s daily nightmare in the fall.

I think we locked the school doors for a few weeks after the Columbine killings. The district stepped up its half-hearted attempts at emergency procedures and lock-down drills. Every spring thereafter, we would get a little nervous and wait for the newspaper reports of another school shooting or thwarted attempt somewhere.

We joked that there wasn’t a student in the building we’d throw ourselves in front of a bullet for, war zone humor to hide the fear that one day we might very well be put in the position of choosing. Despite my promise to my husband-to-be that I would not sacrifice myself for someone else’s child, I would have. I would have protected any one of them. In fact, from then on I assessed my classrooms for possible defensive tactics and multiple escape routes. Every classroom I ever had thereafter in every school I worked, I knew what I could block the door with and how I would get my kids out if the occasion ever arose.

I taught for another seven years, and might still be teaching today if I hadn’t come to live in Canada, though I knew it was a vulnerable profession in terms of students and violence. I never let on to anyone but my husband if there was a kid I thought had the potential for a Columbine episode, and I made sure to point these kids out to counselors and administrators if they hadn’t already caught their attention – which was not often.

People scoff at teachers. We are considered people who opted out of real jobs for weekends off and summer vacations, but we are people who daily deal with a microcosm of society which includes kids like the two young men who murdered so many at Columbine ten years ago.

This is an original 50 Something Moms post by Ann Bibby of anniegirl1138 on April 20th.

What’s in a Surname?


My not quite seven year old daughter refers to my husband by his first name for the most part. To her friends and teachers he is “daddy”, however, and though I went through a phase of referring to him as “daddy” for her benefit – as well as my own – I don’t anymore at the request of my husband. He felt that the relationship he has with Kat should progress as it progresses without undue influence from me.

The other day as I lay on my flu/death bed, Kat came into the bedroom to inform me I had spelled her last name incorrectly. She had just collected her “mail” and was holding up the little note I had written to welcome her home from school. Kat loves mail. She has attached a small box to her bedroom door and instructed Rob and I to leave all mail for her there. All mail that we are expected to write her on a regular basis that is. I have to admit, Rob is far more diligent a correspondent than I am.
“I spelled it the way I always have,” I said as she held the paper out for me to see.
“But that’s not right,” she told me.
It took me a moment, but then the light went off. She expected to see Rob’s last name.

Early on in our relationship Rob and I discussed him adopting Kat though we have yet to begin the paperwork. Kat was consulted then too and assented without any fuss except for one thing – she wanted her last name to stay the same. That was fine with Rob. He believes she shouldn’t have to change her name and that she is too young to make the choice even if she expressed an interest in taking his name. 

Until the other day, Kat hasn’t had any interest in Rob’s last name.

The experts say that it takes three to five years to successfully “blend” families in second marriages. My husband thinks that families don’t blend as much as they simply get used to and grow accustomed to each other. Or not. I think that the idea of blending applies to all families regardless of their formation.

As far as family goes, our three girls – his two adult daughters and my wee one – have folded into our new unit with far less trauma than I have observed in other situations. Rob attributes it to our presenting ourselves as a united front that comes first but more so to the fact that our girls have been raised properly. I think we deserve a little credit too. We have tried to listen and accommodate and give the kids the space they needed to adjust and acknowledge that there is still adjusting to do. In any event, they have grown used to our situation much more gracefully than than some of their elders in the extended family have.

It has not always been as easy as it might appear to anyone simply peering in. All five of us came to this new family as a result of the death of a loved one and that grieving is ongoing and, with the kids especially, it will manifest over and over as they encounter the normal milestones in their lives. But we are no different from any other family in that we are five individuals with needs and wants that will not always match up perfectly.

Kat’s declaration caught me a bit off guard. I never really expected her to want to try out Rob’s last name at such a young age. As a middle school teacher, I encountered many children who used their step-father’s last name even though all their official paperwork had the name they were born with on it. Teens, and pre-teens even, are prone to identifying closely – or completely shunning – a step-parent in my experience. I didn’t think the name issue would come up before Kat was in junior high.

I know there is a sizable majority who would counsel against allowing Kat to change her last name. They would cite her age, but most would insist that her late father’s last name is something she owes him. Fortunately, this is not a decision for today. It’s not one we have to have for a long time to come. And ultimately it isn’t a “we” decision. It’s Kat’s decision. And I will honor that decision, no matter what it is.

She and I talked about it a bit and then I let the matter drop. She hasn’t brought it up again. Rob raised an eyebrow when I told him but hasn’t said anything one way or another. I don’t have to wonder what Kat’s late father would have thought. He would have hated the idea. And I wonder just how much I have to take this into account because, frankly, he’s dead. This isn’t his life; it’s his daughter’s. At this point, Rob has been her father in the active sense longer than my late husband was. Rob is the one she consciously imitates and seeks to impress. It’s his world view she will absorb before utterly rejecting it as a teenager and then re-embracing the parts of it that mesh with her own as a young adult. Being a parent is more than DNA and being someone’s daughter is more than sharing a last name, or not.

 

 

This is an original 50 Something Moms post.