Over The Fence: The Things We Learn

 

One day I shall find a nice set of vintage ads or pictures to share with this post.  Right now it's a painful thing to look for anything with fences in it.  I'm sure I'll come across something if I stop trying to search for it.  So far I've had the option of a man leaping a fence his neighbor is painting to get to the beer sitting on the picnic table nearby,  a scantily clad young woman with the oddly named 'fence' net hose (instead of the more common fishnet) and a lot of photos of fences taken in someone's gardens.  I'm a little leery of using a photo that is someone's real home.  I'd rather it was a photo set or illustrated...

I've a confession to make.  There will be no Homemaker Diary this week because I haven't written one just yet.  I know, it looks very remiss of me but  you'll understand  and forgive me I'm sure.  I promise I'll have one for you next week.  In the meantime, let's have a neighborly chat over the fence shall we?

I unwittingly touched a nerve in my own life and that of others when I mentioned the anxiety of being a latch key child.  

We lived in the country for all but one year of my latch key years and we had no near neighbors.  I didn't know how to call Mama, Daddy, or anyone save Granny (Tilden 4282 was her phone number).  She and Granddaddy had only one car and they lived here in Reynolds, and we lived some 30 minutes away. I daresay in a real emergency though she'd have been able to contact Mama or the sheriff or someone had I called but I admit at 7 I wasn't adept at using a phone nor was I encouraged to use it.  It was, as with so many other things, a gap in my education that some adult ought to have thought to help with but didn't.  

These were the days well before cell phones or 911.    For six years I was responsible for my brothers and myself.  I was expected to also clear up the dishes from breakfast and to start supper heating on the stove.  Not onerous tasks I know but it added to my sense of feeling unsure of myself because I was out of my depth.   There were so many uncertainties.    We weren't alone that long but it felt like a long time.  And then there were the rare days when we were suddenly sent home early for weather warnings and such that meant longer times at home alone.

Oddly, in later years when we might have gone home alone after school, daddy put his foot down and demanded that Mama pick us up at school each day.  We sat in the car in the parking lot at her workplace each school day until she got off.  

Summers were another story.   We were home alone for about 8 hours.  Mama called to check on us but also to discuss what I might make for supper each day and to instruct us in what she expected us to do but mostly we were unsupervised and unchecked.  There were neighbor houses within a little walking distance but like our own parents they worked and weren't home. By this time, my brothers were less inclined to bow to the authority of the oldest child regardless of who made her boss and there were difficult days that often ended with me being upbraided for their misdeeds after spending a day quarreling with them.  

I think part of the anxiety too was that our being home alone made Daddy anxious.  He didn't want us to open the doors to knocks, or be out in the yard in case  a stranger came along and realized we were home alone especially way out in the country.   He saw dangers everywhere and we children felt his anxieties.   Some days when he came home from work he'd be upset and angry when he came in.  I could put it down to sheer bad temper in Mama, but not Daddy.  He'd worked himself into a state worrying on his way home.   Not to say that Daddy was the better parent and Mama the careless one.  But I do honestly believe he felt the strain of our being home alone as much as we did.    

I am not by any means feeling sorry for myself nor faulting my mom.  All she ever wanted to be was a nurse and what's the point if you're stuck at home with a bunch of children?   Being a mom was secondary to her.  Again, I'm not faulting her.  This was the reality of our lives and while I longed with all my heart not to be the responsible one, I understood even in my younger years that what she did was important to her.  Coming home to be with us wasn't on her options list.  

I was quite earnest in my desire to avoid that with my own children, though there was a time when they were latchkey kids out of necessity.  I was especially blessed in that situation  because we lived on a quiet dead end street in town  that was just packed with modest little houses and very pleasant neighbors who kept an eye on the three older kids (aged 16, 13, and 9) and several were available most days if any issue should arise.   My children well knew how to use a phone to call for help.  I worked only a bit over a mile away from the house.  I had Katie in a good  day care for those years.

And yet, I hated every single minute of it.  That situation kept up for about 2 years then John was home most days (he began EMS as a tech and worked nights).  

Later, after we'd moved here,  John worked nights and I worked days.  He went to paramedic school in the evenings.   Sometimes he had to make up time at work because of school and eventually he had to work rotations on weekends at other facilities in order to earn all the credits he needed to take the test.  My job kept me from home from  7am until 8pm some days.  The kids were in school then and got home about 4pm.  But Amie  was 17 and I felt she was old enough to watch the two younger children for a few hours each day.  I made it a paid babysitting job for her.  Granny was just a few hundred yards  away and they all knew how to call me at work.  My brother's wife came in from work at the time the bus arrived and picked them up to bring them home and she was only as far away as Granny on our other side.  Still, I was a 30 minute drive away and that bothered me.

When Amie was graduating and wanted to get a 'real' job,  I knew things had to change.  We looked for  day care  in this county (none) for the summer months ahead and for day care in my work county. Then there was the next school year to consider .  Out of county school tuition and day care in the area where I worked and the cost of someone to come stay with Sam and Katie each afternoon, etc.  The job just wouldn't support any of those options, though it was a  good job.   It was more than clear that I should be home with the kids and so we made it happen.     

There was one particularly tight financial period about 2 years in when we began to discuss my going to work once more.   I shall never forget Samuel coming to John saying "I know how bad things are right now but please don't send Mama back to work.  Katie needs her to be here.  I've got my summer job and I can find another and I'll give you all I make."   John looked at me and said "Apparently you need to be here..." and he told Sam "Thank you for making the offer but we'll get through this.  You've helped us make the decision we needed to make."   

Again, I'm not saying my choice was better than that others made.  In the end, we made the right choice for us, for our family and that's about the best thing anyone can do.  

I didn't plan to always be at home, though I confess I had no particular career desires.  I liked being a homemaker.  When Katie left home, I asked John if he wanted me to look for a job.  I wasn't keen, mind you, but I felt it only fair after all our years of living on a budget to at least offer.   By that time we'd paid off our home.  He  said "How can I afford for you to work?!  All the stuff you do to save us money wouldn't get done and we'd be bound by your job schedule and mine...No, I think you belong at home."  I didn't argue with the man.  I was just grateful he'd seen the value of having me here.

And to be fair to us both, I did work hard at making home my job.  

John's been talking a lot lately about Purpose and Calling.  He's read books by a pastor he enjoys and  watched sermons by another who are explaining it all.  He's convinced he has had no calling on his life and is debating whether he has purpose.    

Listening to him, I've questioned my own calling and purpose but I can say assuredly that all of my life long I wanted just five things: I wanted to learn to read.  I can remember just aching with the need to read words on pages.   I tackled that in first grade and never looked back.  

I wanted a  a good  husband and family who loved me dearly.  I wanted my own home.   I wanted to write.  

I spent many years in my 20's through my 50's feeling I'd missed out on something, hadn't achieved much, pitied myself for the ways in which I'd had to make do with what came my way or with which I'd gone without.  I shake my head right now in wonder at that foolish woman.  And please don't think she's too far off because she tends to pop in now and then even yet! Right now, in this moment, I can say most sincerely that I'm glad it all happened as it did.    

Would I have given up reading?  No!  It's carried me to lands I'll never travel to in this lifetime.  It taught me history and fed me spiritually and transported me in some of the more heartbreaking days to a better place.  It shaped me in ways I couldn't even see, giving me life lessons I might have missed otherwise.

Home, I've discovered, is more than just the house you live in or the place you came from.   Home is something that is in the very heart of you and you carry it with you.  Some people, some women, only ever live in a house but there are others like myself who have a knack of making a home wherever they are.  I've made a home in a hospital room and home in rundown houses and home with next to no furniture.  I take no credit for this trait in myself.  It was born in me.  I can only assume that reading helped to cultivate it because I loved reading of how others made home.

Could I have given up my family?  Now there's a question I'll have to answer truthfully.  When my first marriage was ending, I considered it.  It's not something I say with pride.  I was in a sad and sorry place and I couldn't see light at the end of the tunnel.    I earned little, their father earned a good deal more.  I wondered how I'd care for my two children on my own and whether I could do so emotionally as well as physically.  

As well,   I'd listened too hard to people who assured me I wasn't the mother I ought to be, both family and friend, who seemed to always see a need for improvement in me.  There were no brownie points being handed out for doing your best.  It was a constant criticism that wore down my confidence.  

And too, there was a part of me that wanted to claim that freedom I'd never known as a teen and young adult. I felt I'd always been taking care of someone my whole life long.  I was mentally and emotionally exhausted from fighting depression for years upon years, too.  Did I have enough left in me to spare to love my children sufficiently, too? I'm being very real here with you all. 

I used to daydream of just fading away.  I don't mean running away so that I could ever be found but of fading into nothingness.  Not ever having been.   But life had a grip on me and I would not end it myself, though I often thought of it.  I'll tell why one day, but not today.  This is about something else entirely and that is the sense of exhaustion and utter overwhelm a parent can feel when they're doing it all and getting blasted from all sides despite trying so very hard.

 I went through these things in the same season when my marriage was failing hard.   Then my husband was called up for duty in the Gulf War and I was left alone with the kids.   I discovered that without the mental and emotional strain of beating on the chest of a very dead marriage, I was enough as a parent.  I didn't go hang out with my friends.  I worked.   I came home to my children.  We were enough together.   I learned I could manage financially and provide for my family, too.   

And then, then...when I'd learned so much about myself that I'd never known, I was hit by the drunk driver on my way to work one morning.  I was in the hospital for 2 weeks and in a rehab hospital for 6 or so, and my children God only knows where while I did all I could to be improved enough to go home to them, I had the agonizing experience of living without those kids. I didn't see them or hear their voices on the phone.    I wept at night with the deepest, most sincere yearning.  I called every friend I could asking if they knew where my children were. If I called my husband, he said they were with this person or that.   I've never known such a deep absence in my life.  I knew then that if I had to go through hell, I'd never let them go again if I could possibly find them.

And so I was right back to what I believe I'd ever wanted to be: a mother.  I knew it without a doubt.

It's true you know.  What we call catastrophe, what we call horrible, tragedy...They are all just words that really mean opportunity.   It was as if God was giving me  insight into myself.

In all those weeks that my husband was gone for active duty, I never missed him.  I found life, even though it consisted only of work and home, was full and satisfying.    But when my children were nowhere to be found... I learned what yearning truly is.  What I wouldn't have given to hear my children's voice on the phone, to have listened to them share their  day at school, to hug and kiss them  a dozen times, to fuss over them and to fuss at them, to have the opportunity to be Mama!

The hard things were not over and done.  No they were not. I was on the road to who I was going to become.  Mistakes were still ahead to be made.  And I made them, oh I made them!   I make them still.

But now and then I'd get something incredibly right.  I had Katie.   She was solely mine... I was done with men, I knew that for sure

God apparently had other plans.... I met John, after years of living near one another but not knowing each other. We talked and talked and talked our way through more hours of time than I ever imagined possible.  In just two weeks,  I knew without any doubt that whatever mistakes I'd made in my personal life in the past, this man would never be one of them.  Six weeks later we'd progressed to the point of talking of marriage and he moved in with me eight weeks after we'd talked in my office.  30 years later I can say that I regret nothing.  

I won't tell you he was perfect.  No, nor was I.  Together we've done a whole lot of growing.  We've been through things as a couple and we've been through spells where we went through some hard  things all alone and the other could only stand patiently by...We've had fun and we've worked hard.  We've lived our way through a real marriage. 

Only John ever knew of my dream to write.  I never told anyone else, but the internet came into my life and here I am.  You see where the desire to write has gotten me.  I'll spare you another long story for which I'm sure you'll thank me.

I've taken time this month to share what I've learned financially over the years.  Some of you have shared similar stories, or harder ones, and I know that those journeys taught you much as they mine taught me.  

I've learned from my childhood experiences and from my teen and adult years.  I've learned from every relationship in my life, be it a relationship with a person or with less tangible things like money and fear.   Not all lessons are big ones.  Some are small ones but the small lessons add to our experiences, too.  Some lessons are just hard.  They're hard to go through and hard to review but they teach us just like the less hard ones do.

Well time I stopped chatting and got busy.  Shabat will be here soon.  And then we'll rest...