Filling in the Gaps: Divorce and Moving

In January 2015, I wrote a post I titled "Coming Clean".  Here is the bulk of that post (edited down just a bit), which kind of summarizes the changes I had faced to that point:

Although I'd never shied away from writing about the stressful things in my life, there seemed to be a shift.  I felt like if I were to continue writing about the daily goings on under my roof, it would be less how-to from a Mom who'd been-there-done-that, and more Jerry Springer.

Writing about PTSD and trauma and RAD of my young children, in the vein of venting and commiserating and also educating?  What's wrong with that?

Writing about misdemeanors of now adult children?  Not so easy to go there.

Writing about the fall-out of parenting children with mental illness, trauma-based or otherwise? It's all in the name of keeping it real.

Writing about 911 calls, paramedics, police, questioning neighbors, in-patient admissions?  We've moved on to a different realm. 

And aside from the parental side of my life, there's the marital.  How does one write about a separation after 26 years of marriage and not feel just wrong on so many levels?  There's privacy to think about, my kids to think about, my feelings, his feelings, trying to figure out how I feel/he feels/where we stand from one day to the next.  How do you write about that sh**?

Although I know first-hand all that is wrong with "wearing a mask", it is something I have been guilty of.

Nothing to see here!  We're just one big happy family that managed to go from three kids to four through international adoption of a special-needs child, then from four kids to six with the addition of two older internationally adopted kids with mental health issues including RAD, PTSD and more!  Woo hoo! Plus my husband and I were high school sweethearts!  We can weather ANY storm, right?  

Holding that image up for all to see is a disservice to me, to my family, to my readers. 

If I can't write on my blog that it's ok that we are where we are, how am I going to convince my kids?  How am I going to sell it to myself? 

The truth is, it IS ok. 

It's ok that two of my three adopted kids have had their lives dominated by the fallout of the trauma-born mental illness that is often part of the fabric of the lives of adopted children.  I have dealt with those issues with dignity, compassion, and love.  I have been able to tell my children that no matter what they do, I will always love them, even when their actions have caused me to take drastic measures such as eviction, filing charges, hospital admissions, outpatient programs, residential treatment facilities.  It means I love them enough to do whatever it takes to help them become the best persons they can be, even when they may feel that my actions prove just the opposite.

It's ok that life is difficult for the entire family when one of my children (one that's wearing my genes) is dealing with the ramifications of his own mental illness demons.  He didn't ask for it.  My husband and I, given our unique genetic histories, should never have spawned children.  It was the perfect storm. What the family has gone through in dealing with his (and the others) sequellae have stretched us to the limit.  I love my kids for their resilience, their flexibility, their adaptability, their compassion.

It's ok that my husband and I may not have a happily-ever-after marriage.  It just means that we're honest enough with each other that we can attempt to deal with it, that we can own up to having problems, and we can have the courage to try to fix them.  I can't tell you how things will end with us.  All I know is that we're trying to figure out if we have what we need to make our marriage succeed.  The answer may be yes, and it may be no.  Right now the answer is elusive, but I pray that God will show us the answer in His own time.

I am proud of myself for having weathered so much, and to still have the strength I need to deal with problems as they continue to surface.  Let's face it, my life is one big Whac-a-Mole game, and I have to keep sharp and quick in noticing the issues and dealing with them as they arise.  Have you ever watched someone playing Whac-a-Mole?  Their face is always a mixture of both fun and determination. I've got to keep that smile on my face and have fun. 

It's life. 
It's MY life. 

And it is what it is.

It's hard to believe I wrote that more than five and a half YEARS ago!  So, just to bring you up to speed, here is a brief summary of what's happened between that post and now:

• I dabbled in my own business, Birdsong Bits and Pieces, creating art, decor, and refinishing furniture.
• James moved out, first to live with my sister in NJ, but when he burned that bridge, on to NY.
• Started the process of divorce.
• Fixed up the house with a good bit of help from my friends, to put it on the market.
• My Mom was given a few months to live, went into hospice care, and died at home with her children around her.
• Rosie went off to college.
• Bought a new smaller house, a few miles from the old one.
• Plans for selling the farmhouse changed: Fred moved back in to the big house with Daniel. 
• I fixed up and moved into my new house with Patrick, Julie, Bella, (plus a friend of theirs that moved in with us), and Rosie when she was home from school.
• My daughters' friend moved out.  Julie started going through another round of new problems, culminating in let's just say drama of many varieties.  New ground rules were set that she had to meet or move out.  She moved out.
• James was brought back home when things got really bad for him in NY.  He seemed to be getting things straightened out here, but sadly has fallen off the rails again.  He is currently (and it breaks my heart to say this) in jail.
• The divorce was finalized.
• I have a new job (still in the field of Occupational Therapy, doing home health care) with a great company that pays well and provides benefits even though I'm only part time.
• And as you may know, I've gone through a bunch of health issues this year (which resulted in four hospital admissions and countless tests and procedures), including surgery to remove a weirdly positioned stone up in my liver, pancreatitis, and open heart surgery. 

And that catches us up on the big picture items.  I'm in my new house with Patrick (commuting to college and working part time), Rosie (who with any luck will be doing a semester as a student teacher this fall to finish up her college education), and Bella (who is working at Goodwill).  Julie is, for the time being, living with Fred, as is Daniel.

Thank you for letting me catch you up!

On my next update I will take you through a tour of my house, that I am very much in love with. Can't wait to show you!

   

Filling in the Gaps: Saying Goodbye to My Mother

So I used to write in this blog pretty prolifically.  But when things went from chaotic/messy/stressful/fun to just plain old stressful, the blogging dropped by the wayside as I processed all my life changes.

Looking back, I see the drop-off started in 2016, where I published five posts, then in 2017 there was only one.  In 2018 I wrote no posts at all, and a grand total of two in 2019.  I'd like to think I'm getting back into the groove this year.  I only started up again last month, but already have five posts to my credit!

In a post I wrote in November 2019, I said I would like to go back to fill in the gaps.  I am not going to pretend to attack this in any kid of systematic fashion.  Instead, I'll just put things up as they come to me and as I have time. 

Like I said, the drop-off began in 2016, and one of the biggest things that happened in my life that year was the death of my mother.  I had written up a post after her passing, but never published it.  I will do that now, and let that serve as my jumping-off point for filling in the gaps between then and now.

Kid, Hon, Bird, 

Mrs. Birdsong, Mother Bridsnog

Sugar Britches.

Kathy, Katharine, Kath,

Miss Kimball,

Ma, Mom, Mommy, Grammy, 

and (long story) “Susan.”

Katharine Evans Kimball Birdsong went by many names, but the one name that best captures her spirit is…

POET.

She was a gentle soul with a poet’s heart, and on June 2nd, 2016, Katharine Birdsong took her last breath at the age of 72. When my mom learned of her terminal condition, she felt like she was just going on a long trip- quite literally at first.  Shortly after her prognosis of having three to five months to live, she had the impulse to start packing and began looking for her favorite well-worn Agatha Christie novel , and her even more worn pair of slippers, only to realize with a disappointed laugh that it was true what they say—“You can’t take it with you.” 

She was more of a giver than a taker anyway.  One of the greatest things she gave us was a colorful childhood.

 Words like “colorful,” “unconventional,” “eccentric”… these are polite substitutions for words less kind -- words that sometimes come with unwarranted shame. They are a gentlemen’s code used to describe people whose brilliance, creativity and compassion come with some heavy crosses to bear.  And though our mother’s “peace of mind” was often tested by personal demons, great tragedies and deep loss, she always strove to find some kernel of beauty and light amidst the struggle.  

It’s hard to explain our unconventional household, but if you’ve ever come home from school and found a wounded (but very much alive) goose staring back at you from the only bathtub in the house, or a large (but very much dead) deer in the back seat of your mom’s broken down Oldsmobile, you'll have an idea of the colorful childhood our mom painted on a Jersey Shore canvas. 

Her unorthodox life was matched by her eclectic resume, with jobs including, but not limited to:

• waitress
• journalist
• clammer
• convent cook
• monastery maid

These jobs may been humble, but they were not without their perks.  While working as a live-in cook and housekeeper for a Catholic bishop (in a beautiful oceanfront home) she'd occasionally “borrow” his house when he was off doing bishop-y things.  Her daughter Mary’s eighth birthday party was held in his living room.  It beat the one bedroom efficiency apartment over his garage where she and her four children actually lived.

Whether in a professional capacity or for her family, the woman could cook.  She nurtured the food she was cooking just as she nurtured the folks fed by it, working a pot of soup like a sculpture.  Many sat at her table: friends, neighbors, folks down on their luck or without family.  Even from time to time the creepy neighbor who claimed to be an orthodox Ukrainian priest (“He wasn’t no priest!”). She was also an expert at stretching a few meager ingredients. The mouths she could feed with a can of tuna and a loaf of generic white bread would put Jesus’ loaves and fishes to shame.

Born in northern NJ in 1944, Katharine wouldn’t remain a Yankee for long.  Her parents relocated to the Deep South (where they’d both grown up) to raise their children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  

Married at seventeen, our mother had her first child at eighteen after having to relocate quite unexpectedly with her new husband to Germany, where they lived an almost medieval lifestyle complete with chamber pots and cauldrons of boiled water for bathing.

After returning to the states and her Louisiana life, she made several moves through a handful of states and eventually wound up in a South Jersey Shangri-La called Long Beach Island.  Choosing a remote island for her home, where she knew not a blessed soul had its own unique challenges, but she was nothing if not resourceful.  

Case in point: Her first day on the island she’d tucked her three small children into bed with kisses on their cheeks and thumb-swiped crosses on their foreheads, then returned to unpacking.  Much time and many boxes later, she still could not find the alarm clock. Desperate to make sure they’d all wake up in time for school, she called the police, and in her soft whisper of a southern voice, she asked the amused cop on the other end of the line for a wake-up call.  He was putty in her hands, and her children all got to school on time the next morning.

How a woman as beautiful as she could be so self-conscious of her looks is hard to fathom, yet she never saw the beauty that was so apparent to others. Despite her poor opinion of her looks, she stopped many a heart and turned many a head.  In fact, one Halloween while taking her children trick-or-treating, she was hit on by a bold 13 year old who mistook the dark-haired beauty for a gypsy. “Son,” she said, “I’m somebody’s Mama.” 

Her Mama’s depression-era mentality certainly rubbed off on her, and she was simply unable to throw things out.  Cupboards and counter tops overflowed with cookie tins, plastic bottles, boxes and bags of all shapes and sizes.  Her refrigerator was crammed tight with little baggies containing half pieces of toast or a few crumbles of bacon, each labelled meticulously with a black marker on a piece of masking tape. Although she would use paper plates, she refused to throw them out until they were threadbare, wiping them off over and over because they were still “perfectly good.” Some say "Hoarder," others say "Green.” Tomato, tuhmahto.

Regardless, though she had to feed four children from a poverty-level pantry, she knew all there was to know about British Royal Family lineage, Shakespearean sonnets, biblical archaeology, and the latest installment of Masterpiece Theatre.  She was quite the anglophile.  Yorkshire Pudding was a regular item on the menu, but her children would eat it off of rickety TV trays while sitting on a three-legged curb-rescue sofa watching Laverne and Shirley.

Cooking and kindness will likely be what folks remember most about Katharine. A friend recently said of her, “She was always so kind to me. Every time she saw me she would compliment me, tell me I was a good father, and that God had a special place for me.”  That was just what she did.

She lost her only son Donald (her first-born child) to brain cancer when he was just 33 years old. And when his illness went from bad to worse she cared for him when he could no longer care for himself.  She was with him through all of it.

With her intelligence and her compassion, she could have excelled in any field, but due to so many struggles (both internal and external) she never found “success” in the traditional sense of the word.  She was, however, wildly successful in making those around her feel loved and cherished, and as unique as their fingerprints. There were many times she could not access her heart of gold, her generous and kind nature.  But when she could, you felt flooded by the light of the angels, and buoyed by the voice of a poet:

FINGERPRINTS

by Katharine Birdsong

To all who’ve touched my life, my soul,

Who’ve broken me or made me whole,

Or who’ve revealed a glimpse of you,

Stripped by all except what’s True—

You’ve left your mark no other’ll see,

Indelible, a part of me;

An imprint only you could make,

And from me none’ll ever take.

Light and dark, these works of Art—

Fingerprints upon my heart----

For good or not, I cannot tell,

But I’ve left my own as well. 

Coming Clean

I miss writing.

I miss writing for what it gives me.
I miss it for allowing me to bond with others and make them laugh, and to provide help sometimes.
I miss it for "talking" to the folks who stop in to read.

Looking back, I've only posted very sporadically on this blog in the last couple of years, and I've submitted next to nothing to other publications.

I did go back to work part time around the time my writing slowed down, but I'd be lying if I said that was the reason.

Truth is, life just got friggin' HARD.

And although I'd never shied away from writing about the stressful things in my life, there seemed to be a shift.  I felt like if I were to continue writing about the daily goings on under my roof, it would be less how-to from a Mom who'd been-there-done-that, and more Jerry Springer.

Writing about PTSD and trauma and RAD of my young children, in the vein of venting and commiserating and also educating?  What's wrong with that?

Writing about misdemeanors of now adult children?  Not so easy to go there.

Writing about the fall-out of parenting children with mental illness, trauma-based or otherwise? It's all in the name of keeping it real.

Writing about 911 calls, paramedics, police, questioning neighbors, in-patient admissions?  We've moved on to a different realm.

And aside from the parental side of my life, there's the marital.  How does one write about a separation after 26 years of marriage and not feel just wrong on so many levels?  There's privacy to think about, my kids to think about, my feelings, his feelings, trying to figure out how I feel/he feels/where we stand from one day to the next.  How do you write about that sh**?

Hence, the absence.

And hence, after giving it some thought, the "coming clean".

Although I know first-hand all that is wrong with "wearing a mask", it is something I have been guilty of.

Nothing to see here!  We're just one big happy family that managed to go from three kids to four through international adoption of a special-needs child, then from four kids to six with the addition of two older internationally adopted kids with mental health issues including RAD, PTSD and more!  Woo hoo!  Plus my husband and I were high school sweethearts that got married when Reagan was in office!  We can weather ANY storm, right?

Holding that image up for all to see is a disservice to me, to my family, to my readers.

If I can't write on my blog that it's ok that we are where we are, how am I going to convince my kids?  How am I going to sell it to myself?

The truth is, it IS ok.

It's ok that two of my three adopted kids have had their lives dominated by the fallout of the trauma-born mental illness that is often part of the fabric of the lives of adopted children.  I have dealt with those issues with dignity, compassion, and love.  I have been able to tell my children that no matter what they do, I will always love them, even when their actions have caused me to take drastic measures such as eviction, filing charges, hospital admissions, outpatient programs, residential treatment facilities.  It means I love them enough to do whatever it takes to help them become the best persons they can be, even when they may feel that my actions prove just the opposite.

It's ok that life is difficult for the entire family when one of my children (one that's wearing my genes) is dealing with the ramifications of his own mental illness demons.  He didn't ask for it.  My husband and I, given our unique genetic histories, should never have spawned children.  It was the perfect storm. What the family has gone through in dealing with his (and the others) sequellae have stretched us to the limit.  I love my kids for their resilience, their flexibility, their adaptability, their compassion.

It's ok that my husband and I may not have a happily-ever-after marriage.  It just means that we're honest enough with each other that we can attempt to deal with it, that we can own up to having problems, and we can have the courage to try to fix them.  I can't tell you how things will end with us.  All I know is that we're trying to figure out if we have what we need to make our marriage succeed.  The answer may be yes, and it may be no.  Right now the answer is elusive, but I pray that God will show us the answer in His own time.

So that brings me here.

An owning up.
A coming clean.

I'm done with hiding.  I will use discretion to a degree to protect and respect, but I will no longer hide.

I am proud of myself for having weathered so much, and to still have the strength I need to deal with problems as they continue to surface.  Let's face it, my life is one big Whac-a-Mole game, and I have to keep sharp and quick in noticing the issues and dealing with them as they arise.  Have you ever watched someone playing Whac-a-Mole?  Their face is always a mixture of both fun and determination. I've got to keep that smile on my face and have fun.

It's life.
It's MY life.

And it is what it is.