Mortgage Crisis - Part One

My sister lost her house a few months ago.  The fire started in her bedroom.  The source of the fire was an electrical cord that ran under her bed to a lamp. Due to lack of closet space, my sister and husband store many belongings under the bed. This combination overheated the cord and started the fire.  Luckily my parents live next door and were able to raise the alarm.  Little Sister rushed home from work and we rushed to her aid to help with the clean up.  We wore old clothes, brought boxes, garbage bags and facemasks to protect us from the fumes. 

When we pulled up three men were in front of the house, one had a badge around his neck.  At first we couldn’t figure out what was going on.  They were taking things out of the house and so was my sister.  She was working furiously and with such a concentration that I don’t think she even knew that we were there. Were the men helping her save her belongings, getting them out of the smoke filled house?  Our confusion turned to disbelief when we finally realized that they were not helping my sister, but these men were here to evict her.

We asked her what was going on and she just kept on working to keep her belongings from ending up in the dumpster.  Soon we were helping her, dragging out soot-covered possessions before the men could get a hold of them.  We started filling my mother’s garage and backyard with the salvaged belongings, a stove from the garage, televisions, stereos, and other valuables from inside the house.  Luckily or not depending on how you look at it, the crew that came to evict her was a three-man crew when the number should have been six.  With a six-man crew they would have emptied that house quickly and more efficiently. They kept mumbling under their breath about the fire. They mumbled how they wished they had facemasks.  But when the fire marshal came in and gave his verdict that the fire was definitely an accident, the men became more sympathetic.

The three men seeing the scope of possessions that my sister’s family had accumulated in 25 years quickly became tired and became more concerned with their own health, inhaling all that soot. and so their resolved weakened. And when they saw my sister’s tenacity and single-minded determination of retrieving her belongings their resolve weakened further.  They started asking her if she wanted this item or that item and helped move a piece or two.

Apparently they were commissioned to take out only very large pieces and were not interested in the smaller items.  Besides with most of the surfaces covered in the house by papers, bills, books and the like they just tossed them to the floor.  Not only was there soot everywhere they added to the debris pile creating soot clouds, which made it harder for them to breathe and harder for us overall. We scoured every room making split second decisions on what was expendable and what should be left behind.

Her husband hurried home from work expecting to deal with the fire situation. To say he was taken aback by the eviction is such an understatement because it in no way describes the range of emotions that came over his face all at the same time. He kept asking the same question over and over to his wife. But she kept on working. He wanted to have a show down, but she kept on working.

The fire was contained in hallway and rear bedroom.  I had never been in a house after a fire and was shocked to see how every wall in the house was black as though charred but in reality covered in soot.  We worked until nightfall to begin again the next day.

My sister was still very quiet, exhausted, but still concentrating on all the work yet to be done. She wasn't ready to talk about it. It was too soon. I took a few moments to cry my eyes out.  I know how hard she has struggled the last few years trying to keep it all together and I felt her anguish.  As nightfall came, the work stopped for us, but it kept going for her.  She began the laundry, trying to remove the smell of smoke from the clothes we saved. Finally, I had to ask her the inevitable question, “Is it all right if I give you a hug before I leave?”  When she answered yes, I put my arms around her and as soon as I touched her, she began to sob uncontrollably.

The mortgage crisis has finally hit too close to home.

Queen Maker Have You Met Mami?

This is how Queen Maker first met my mother.  

I was fifteen years old when I first met my boyfriend and future husband (but after this encounter, I don't know why he stayed around.)  I invited him to my house to meet my mother and father. When we walked in,  Mami was preparing dinner. She was using the large butcher knife cutting a whole fryer chicken into pieces.  

Queen Maker went over to introduce himself and to talk to her for a few minutes.  Mami asked him, “So you like my daughter?”  He said he did and she said, “Just so you remember I’m really good with a knife and..” she suddenly thrust the butcher knife into his belly.  Queen Maker’s knees almost buckled.  He was shocked and when he looked down, expecting a big hole in his belly, he realizes that she was holding the tip of the blade.  She was so good with a knife that when she pretended to thrust the knife at his belly, she just let go of knife handle and with the dexterity of a magician, moved her hand to the tip of the knife in one swift, perfect move. She laughed and laughed and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks.

I walk up and ask, "So Queen Maker have you met Mami, yet?"

PECAN SANDIES

One of my most cherished memories of my father is when he was getting ready for work.  Because the family didn’t own a car, he had to take the bus everyday.  He got up before 4am every morning.  He would make his coffee, eat a chuck of bread and a few thick slices of cheese and this would be his breakfast, which is pretty much what it is today at the age of 79. One morning I heard him moving around. I carefully made my way down the stairs trying not to make the steps creak. I pretended I had to go to the bathroom and when I came out, surprisingly he didn’t shoo me back to bed.  He always wanted us away from him, didn’t he?  I sat and watched him prepare his lunch and breakfast.

I don’t remember if there was much conversation, very little. He offered me a little bit of coffee or milk and two Pecan Sandies. I picked coffee so I could be just like him, I’d tell him.  This was a most special time.  We would sit and eat our cookies and then he would send me back to bed. Sometimes I would try to wake up the next morning to be with him and of course to get those cookies. This was our secret and I felt special that he let me be with him from time to time. 

Thirty years later the sisters were talking about our favorite cookies.  I said, “Pecan Sandies of course. If you put a bag of Pecan Sandies down in front of me they’ll be gone within the hour. I can’t help myself. I had to stop buying them.”  Sister After Me surprised said, “I didn’t know you liked them so much.  Those are my all time favorite cookie too. Papi used to let me come downstairs when he was going to work?”  Middle Sister and Little Sister confirmed the same thing. My sisters are all afflicted with the same condition when presented with a bag of Pecan Sandies, uncontrollable bingeing.

Little Sister said,   “Remember the time I cut my foot so badly and Papi had to carry me upstairs every night? I loved it when he carried me.  Papi went upstairs one morning and picked me up and brought me downstairs to have cookies with him. I loved him so much at that moment.”  A few years later, I spied a bag of Pecan Sandies on my brother’s kitchen table.  I asked him if he ever sat with Papi before he went to work and ate Pecan Sandies. Only Brother said, “Of course. I sat with him lots of times before work.”

Although I initially thought that I was the only fortunate one to have shared those quiet mornings with my father, I feel comforted in knowing that each one of us had our turn downstairs with Papi. I cherish those moments and now I know that my siblings share those same strong feelings, similar to mine, but each a beautiful memory belonging uniquely to each one of us. It puts daddy in a whole new light.  He seems less alone. He must have realized how much his little girls and boy loved him and wanted to be with him.

I realized that Pecan Sandies was a sacred icon on the desktop of my life. Press the icon and a big picture of my Papi pops into my head. 

Hearing Mom Again

If you read my previous post Selfish Mom Needs, you will understand what hearing the word Mom means to me.

The light of my life came to the school yesterday.  Since graduating from college he now has the time and the inclination to come back to his martial arts school to train. This means, dare I say it, that I will see Beloved once or twice a week. Joy, joy, joy!

I’ve been missing my kid for four years, especially the last few months. He’s been studying for finals and had six papers to write, meaning little to no sleep, lots of stress and little time for visiting. I was worried about him.  Now that he’s out of school, I’m hoping those dark circles under his eyes will soon be gone.

Knowing he is done with college, I can’t let my hopes (of spending lots of time with him) and my expectations to become unrealistic. I have to keep myself in check. He still has to find a job and when he starts working, again I won’t see him as much as I like. I know that I will go to the school anytime he will be training. I know I will be deeply disappointed if he doesn’t show.

Luckily for me his goal is to finally get his black sash this summer, meaning that I will see him more often.  I can be Mom again. I can hug my kid, give him a kiss, and tell him I love him to his face. Sometimes he can tell that I need to be Mom a few minutes longer, so yesterday after class, he asked me, “Mom, do you want to go with me and get something to eat.” Like, yeah!  Joy, he said the word, Mom.

Afterwards he decided he would drive me home, even though it was out of the way and Dad was still down the street at the school giving a lesson and would be done soon. He said he wasn’t done talking with me.  Joy!

So I will relish the time I do have with my Beloved.  It brings such joy to my life.  And once you’ve tasted joy, you want it everyday. I’ll settle for once or twice a week.

My Mother in Law has COPD

For the Love of a Child

My mother-in-law has COPD.  At first she didn’t understand what the doctors were telling her, as to what this condition actually means, maintaining but never getting better.  Her strength continues to diminish and her struggle for breath is ever increasing. She now understands that her condition can only worsen over time. All the stages of grief are present: terror, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And as the disease progresses, these stages will be repeated over and over.

Smoking was her addiction.  For decades she tried valiantly to quit.  She did it all, medicines, patches, acupuncture, and hypnosis.  Her addiction was strongly entrenched and there was no way to change it. When she smoked, a large grey cloud would literally hang in the air above her.  But one day something happened.  She quit cold turkey and went through a year and a half of hell, and to his credit, her husband, poor man, went though the same year and a half of his own hell living with her while she beat her addiction.  

A love greater than she had ever experienced was her reason to quit.  Because of this love she was able to find the will and strength to put the cigarettes away and I believe she extended her life by many years because of it. Her only grandson, Beloved, asked grandma to quit. 

One day Beloved noticed that I would wash all his clothes after a weekend visit with grandma and grandpa whether they were clean or not.  I would complain about the smoke smell and how foul I found it to be and he picked up on it.  He asked why grandma couldn’t smoke at our house, so I told him the story about his premature birth and the heart monitor he wore for six months after coming home from the hospital.  As a new mother, the heart monitor freaked me out.  Whenever the alarm sounded, and it went off frequently, I would be gripped in fear. I didn't want anything to compromise Beloved’s health at that time, so I told grandma for the first time in her life, that she could not smoke in my house. When I witnessed that grey cloud over her head while she was holding my child, I knew it had to stop.

At first she didn’t believe me, and then was indignant, and then insulted.  I remained firm and soon she was ostracized to the porch whenever she wanted to light up. This story prompted him to ask questions and more questions and more questions.  Ay yes, four year olds and their undying quest for knowledge.  I answered his questions about smoking and the health risk his grandmother was taking.

Two months later, I was wrapping Christmas gifts when I noticed Beloved playing with the leftover scraps of wrapping paper.  He was amusing himself by rolling them between his hands making cylinders and rolling them on the floor. When I was done wrapping the last gift, he came to me with the colorful cylinders in his hands and asked me to wrap them up.  What are they? He answered that they were a present for grandma.  They were cigarettes and that these would be much better for her than what she was smoking now.  I was touched and did what he asked. At the same time, I knew I was setting grandma up.

Queen Maker said, “You aren’t really going to give them to her are you?  It’ll make her feel bad.” I told him it was Beloved’s present to her and maybe she should feel bad. Beloved thought this one up all on his own. Who am I to tell him he is wrong that he can’t give a present that he so lovingly fashioned especially for his grandmother.

This is a lesson that only a four-year-old can teach and she was about to learn it. Beloved took the wrapped cigarettes and put them in his “present” bag.  Beloved was proud when he presented grandma with his gift.  I mentioned that he had made the gift all by himself and brought them to me to wrap.  She made a big deal of it, confused as to what they actually were. He told her they were new cigarettes that she could smoke instead of the bad ones.  She was a little side swiped by the explanation. This small loving act from her four-year-old grandson spoke volumes to her.

Later I told Beloved that he was probably the only person in the world that could help grandma quit because she loved him so much. That if she couldn’t do it for him, she probably couldn’t ever do it.  It might work. That by telling her that he loved her and wanted her to be there for his graduation from college and at his wedding that she might find the strength enough to quit.

She told me years later, that the next time she lit up in front of him, he asked her specifically to stop smoking. He told her that he wanted her to be alive and well.  He asked her, don’t you want to see me graduate from college or when I get married or when I have my own boy? And from that day forward she stopped smoking.  She did put a pack of cigarettes in her desk drawer, but only as a safety net. Knowing they were there made her feel better, but she never had to take them out.  Years later when Beloved was seven years old, he saw them when she opened the drawer and instantly became angry with her. He asked her if it wasn’t about time to throw them out.  And she did.

She hasn’t smoked in 17 years, but the emphysema came anyways.  Now her body is denying her the freedom of movement she once enjoyed. But with the help of oxygen she is hanging on and working on maintaining quality of life. I am sure that Beloved’s intervention gave her many more years. A week ago, she witnessed his college graduation.  

Selfish Mom Needs

I wrote the following a year or so ago, when I felt a little low.  Tomorrow, I become Mom again. 

I miss something and I miss it a lot.  Ever since my Beloved left home for college, I miss being “Mom.” I didn’t realize it until a few months had passed.  Of course, in the beginning, Beloved called for us to bring him more stuff, more food, moral support.  But soon those calls for help slowed down and eventually came only once or twice a month.

I looked around and no one needed me. Beloved was my traveling companion just as I was his chauffeur. My driving companion was gone, the questions were gone, the conversations were gone and the asking was gone. By golly, even his laundry was gone. My activities were no longer dictated by his activities. My schedule no longer was impacted by whether or not he needed something that day. Our dinner plans became simplified, no longer needing to take into consideration his taste or quantity requirements. After 18 years, I no longer had to get up to make sure he had a warm breakfast before sending him off to school. 

A big part of me, the caring and nurturing aspects of my persona was no longer required, just wrapped up and put away until the call came again sometime in the future for “Mom.” I finally realized that the sense of loss that I was feeling was my need to hear it, the word  “Mom.”  That single word “Mom” was my conditioned response, my Pavlovian equivalent to “I need you.”

You just can’t turn that off can you? Queen Maker offered to make the supreme sacrifice and take all the caring and nurturing I can give him, but that usually leads to him making me feel like a Queen, if you know what I mean. So it isn’t really the same thing, is it? Don’t get me wrong; nothing is more delicious in this world that being Queen Maker’s wife, if the name bestowed upon him in not evident enough. But this is about being called “Mom” and I most definitely am not his mother.

I wasn’t done hearing the word “Mom.”  I literally looked around. Where are my other children, isn’t there a spare somewhere around here? Why didn’t I have another one lying around? I wasn’t finished. I need someone to call me Mom and I need to hear it EVERY DAY. Beloved is well on his way in becoming self-sufficient and self-reliant.  Although he knows we have his back, our relationship is becoming more like great friends, which is exactly how Queen Maker and I had planned it. Excellent, but this does nothing to satisfy my selfish mom needs.

I started to envy my three sisters.  They have more than one child and each one of them have a gift that I will never have, a daughter. Ah, those daughters.  The relationships I watched develop between mother and daughter are beautiful and the bonds between them are well crafted in our family.

Youngest Sister has two boys and the divine Ms. M. who is in her first year of college and away from home. It is obvious that they are each other’s BFF. She calls Mom at least two to three times a day sharing triumphs and despair.

Middle Sister has the fairy like and talented Ms. A. who is eleven years old. Her older brother is now in his first year of college at State. See, Middle Sister still has one lying around – and she’s a girl! Middle Sister is letting me share, bless her soul.

The Sister After Me has a more unique situation. Not only does she have a son who is 28, she has a 30-year-old daughter, gifted Ms. T, with a little girl and boys of her own making Sister After Me a grandmother at 37. She is twice blessed because she is also a new mom again in mid-life with the sweet Ms. E., now four years old.

Years and years of the beautiful call, “Hey, Mom!” ahead for these lucky women. I’ve heard that a daughter is a daughter forever. Sigh, but enough with the daughter envy.

I felt as though my identity had suddenly changed.  I wasn’t ready to be non-Mom. When Beloved was born, a new identity was bestowed upon me. I joined the Mom Club and suddenly felt legitimized as an Adult Woman entrusted with the care of a precious life. Then, if by chance your Beloved turns out to be a wonderful person, my status not only as Mom but also as Successful Parent increased significantly in the eyes of others.  Hey, we are really good at raising a child. Who knew? Everyone loved Beloved and I was proud to be his Mom. He increased my standing greatly.  My identity thus evolved to be, Beloved’s Mom.

But now, no one would realize that.  From now on when someone new comes into my life, Beloved is not there standing next to me. They will not understand who I really am because no one is calling me “Mom.” The labels I wore so proudly are no longer evident. The name “Mom” ringing out made me feel younger because all the Moms in the room would turn to the sound. Whether you were in your 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Yes, I too have a child in the room, and our membership in this club makes us all seem younger.

The next thought made me cringe.  If I was no longer to be known as Beloved’s Mom or just Mom, how would people perceive me? What was my next identity in life? I will soon turn fifty facing menopause and becoming an old lady.  No. No. NO. NO!   Quick someone let me borrow a kid. 

My own dear Mom always puts things in perspective.  “Honey, don’t worry, you still have a chance. Your aunt thought she was going through menopause and found out she was pregnant at the age of 50. Remember? Of course, she had to be hospitalized for exhaustion several times in the first three years, but you still can get pregnant. You’ll be 50 soon; there is still hope yet. You may still be blessed just like your aunt. That would be wonderful. Don’t look so horrified. It could still happen. It would be a good thing.”

Oh my god! What I am really asking for here? I was just feeling sorry for myself. I just wanted someone to call me Mom again.  Wait. I mean I just missed being called Mom, Wait. I don’t want another child NOW, not really. I’m going to be 50. I work with 4 and 5 year olds everyday at school. That should be good enough. Really I don’t know why I was complaining so much. Just because none of them can call me Mom… Wait, I don’t mean that. Knock on some wood. No that’s laminate, that doesn’t count. Find wood now! No, I’m not calling you Queen Maker.

Will my selfish rant be heard above and will someone smile and say, “Careful what you ask for sister.”

Oh, dear Saint Emily Litella*, hear my words,  “Never mind.” 

*the lovely Gilda Radner's character on SNL  

Calling for a Cat Chat

I really enjoy thinking random thoughts.  It's such a great distraction and can keep me busy all day long.  

Tony the Tiger should have a talk with that Chester the Cheetah.

I wonder if you find it disturbing that Chester is such a spiteful and revengeful instigator, that he understands how to manipulate those that are already as spiteful and vengeful as he.  He waits, sitting in outside cafes and at playgrounds, awaiting to play the little voice on the your shoulder, and he’s not sitting on the angel side of your conscience. He seems to influence those that already have the same mind set because the commercial makes sure to show you the full agreement in his accomplice’s eyes. 

But then he disappears and you realize that the person is as petty as you thought or maybe we should excuse their behavior because “Chester” was whispering in their ear. Besides the other person deserved it, right? They were annoying. Who really is the culprit here? I’m confused. Does Chester want me to like the product or not?  But again, it’s just a fantasy after all, just something we wished we could do, but never really would. Isn't it?

I don’t know why this commercial disturbs me. I am apparently not their target market. It might thrill the cockles of some pubescent teens, but the characters are all adults and so I must ask, what is the message? Maybe I don’t get it.   I just thought that if Tony the Tiger heard about these shenanigans, he certainly would want to have a big brotherly talk with Chester, big cat to big cat.  If not, I wish he’d punch him in the face