Cat’s in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon
In my last blog I was talking about my children. I ran out of time (or space) after discussing just
two of them, so this time I’ll be talking about my other two.
I should have just kept writing while I was on a roll, but after stopping I found it hard to get
started again. Part of the reason may be because the child I am going to start with today is my
son, Jack, who is the one who has encouraged me to write a blog, and helps me get it posted.
Jack
Jack is my third oldest. His brother, Justin, was 26 and in the National Guard when my husband
Ken died, and his sister, Megan, was a senior in High School. Jack had just turned 14 and was
getting ready to graduate from the 8 th grade. He was a leap-year baby and on the years when
there was no February 29 th , we tended to arrange his birthday celebration to fit our busy
schedules. The year my husband died, we put Jack’s birthday off until the weekend. Ken died
the following Thursday.
As I mentioned in my last blog, in the days after Ken’s death, Jack performed amazing feats. He
played the pipe-organ at Ken’s funeral (The Phantom of the Opera), and he played his
saxophone for a style show that weekend. I didn’t understand how he could be so stoic.
I never considered getting counseling for the kids, or us as a family. I tried to reassure them that
their Dad and I had had a plan and I was going to stick to it. All they had to do was to keep
themselves on track and I would take care of the rest. I thought we were doing fine. It broke my
heart when Jack came home from school one day, looked at the garage door and said, “He’s
never going to come through that door again, is he?”
In addition to his musical talent, Jack was also quite an athlete. He ran track, (going to the
Junior Olympics in Sacramento, California the summer before Ken died), wrestled, played
football, and was one of the best baseball catchers (and hitters) in the County. When he was 10
years old we had a coach in Florida call and ask us if we would consider letting Jack come play
ball for him during the summer. We wouldn’t. He was also a Boy Scout, having attained Life
Rank and being named Scout of the Year the previous year.
Trouble
The first sign of trouble came in sports. I loved football and wanted him to play in high school.
Sure enough, he got hurt. Someone ran into his knee and his football days were over.
Unfortunately, so were his baseball catching days. When spring try-outs came for the baseball
team, he didn’t go to the camps for pitcher’s and catchers because he could no longer get into
(and out of) the catcher’s stance. He went to the regular conditioning camps though. On the
day of the try-outs, I went to pick him up afterwards. He acted dejected when he got in the car, and I thought he was pulling my leg when he said, “I didn’t make it.” I soon realized he wasn’t
kidding and I said, “Not even the Freshman Team?” and he answered, “No, I was the first one
cut.” Later he told me that his heart just hadn’t been in it, because part of the joy he got from
sports was having his dad there watching.
The next year he got in some trouble with vandalism in a nearby neighborhood. He and some
friends went to the house of a kid they knew and what started out as a prank got out of hand.
He told me later that something in him “snapped” and he couldn’t stop himself from going too
far.
It wasn’t all bad. He traveled to Europe with a Youth Band, and he excelled in Speech. After
graduation he started college with an English major. He soon decided that wasn’t what he was
really interested in though and started going to a school for broadcasting. After graduation he
was hired by the radio station where he did his internship.
Wedding Bells
At college, he met his future wife, and they were married the same year as both of his older
siblings. Three weddings in one year made for quite an eventful period. (May thru October) I
thought everyone was well on their way to successful launches.
His wife had bought a house in her hometown, a different city than ours. They lived together a
couple of years before they got married, with Jack commuting back here for work, as he
continued to do after the wedding.
Last year, though, I received a phone call from Jack, He stated that he had finally found out for
sure something that he had previously suspected: his wife was having an affair. On top of that
she had been being mentally abusive for some time. That weekend, he moved back home.
Our house is pretty full. Megan and her family have most of the upstairs (except for me in the
master bedroom), Mandy and her boyfriend live in the basement, and Jack is living in the living
room.
I had noticed when talking with him, before he moved back, that it didn’t seem like he and his
wife were doing many things together. She would take vacations without him and spent a lot of
time with people from work or the theatre where she was involved. I had just told his brother,
Justin, on the 4th of July that I didn’t think Jack was very happy.
After he came back home, I said to him one day, “You know, it’s OK to cry.” His reply really
shocked me, it was something I never had an inkling of. He said, ”How could I, all your friends
kept telling me how I had to ‘be a man, ’and ‘take care of your Mother’?” All the times we
would see Ken’s and my old friends, I thought they were being so sweet to include him and
treat him like a grownup, they were really burdening him with my well-being.
Mandy
As I mentioned, Mandy and her boyfriend are living in my basement. This is just one in a long
line of boyfriends that have lived with her, either here or somewhere else.
She was thirteen, and in the sixth grade, when Ken died. The day he died, her school was having
an after school roller skating party and I wanted her to be happy as long as possible, so I let her
go to the party and had Megan pick her up afterwards. I was meeting with the coroner and a
priest and it also fell to Megan to explain what had happened.
All of my children are adopted. We got Megan right from the hospital from a girl who gave her
up so that she could finish school. She put Megan in my arms with high hopes that they would
both have better lives. Sometimes I wonder. We got Justin when Megan was two and kept
asking “What is that boy doing here?”. He was eleven, and had been passed around many
different foster and potentially adoptive homes before coming to us.
Jack and Mandy are siblings. We got Jack when he was seven months old because the people
who were fostering him already had 4 kids and were expecting another. At the same time, the
agency learned that Jack’s mother was also pregnant and unable to care for a baby, and they
hoped to place them together. Their birth parents both had mental/emotional problems and
issues with substance abuse. Jack has been lucky to avoid most of the fall-out from his
background, but Mandy wasn’t so lucky.
School
She was held back in first grade and ultimately changed schools to one with a more
comprehensive special education curriculum. She was doing really well at the new school, and
we were hopeful that she would succeed.
After Ken died, she felt like she had been “left out” of everything, partly because of the way I
handled the skating party thing. She always had a hard time expressing herself and she became
more withdrawn. She did pretty well in school and managed to graduate with a job placement
from the resource department.
She got her driver’s license, started working, and started dating. Since then she has gone
through numerous cars. Some she wrecked herself, and one was taken without permission, by
her boyfriend while she slept in the basement, wrecked and abandoned. That particular
boyfriend is now in jail on an unrelated charge.
She has also gone through numerous jobs. She starts out doing really well, but soon begins to
miss work. She blames a lot of it on her medication and is also somewhat of a hypochondriac.
She also has a problem with alcohol, and has lost her driver’s license. This means that it is up to
me to take her on job interviews and ultimately to work when she gets it.
Abuse
A lot of her current problems stem from her first boyfriend. They lived together in his mother’s
basement and he was abusive. She never told us about it. They would fight, and he would call
the police and claim that she was out of control. They would take her to the hospital where she
would spend time in the mental ward. She was there so many times that they stopped
accepting her and made her go to another hospital and finally the Crisis Center. She finally
admitted that she was being abused after she was able to break away from him.
The boyfriend after that was the one who took her car and wrecked it. I spent New Year’s Eve
that year at the hospital while she was having a miscarriage. The next week the police came to
the door and arrested him on an old cold case that they had matched his DNA to when they got
it from taking him in for the car wreck.
The guy she is with now seems like a nice guy. When she met him he had a good job, a car, and
was living with a friend. Shortly after they started dating, he moved into the basement. One
Friday night a few months ago, they decided to go riding around. They got stopped 3 counties
away for “a taillight violation”. He failed a sobriety test and she had a pipe in her purse. His car
got impounded and he can’t afford to get it out, so he lost his job. They both got new jobs close
by but it’s far from an ideal situation.
Solutions?
I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know what may have happened if my husband hadn’t
died. All my children seem to suffer from low self- esteem, otherwise, why would they allow
themselves to be victimized? I try to support them, but do I enable them instead? I have
exhausted my funds trying to support them financially and I’ve exhausted my patience trying to
support them emotionally. I keep waiting for the tide to turn.
Have your children had the same or similar kinds of problems? I’d love to hear from you.
‘til then…….I’m Kitty