I once told my counselor (oh yeah, years of it,) that I have experienced the trifecta of loss and rejection in life, and that is why I am such a mess today. He laughed, I was serious. Well, semi-serious, anyway. [If you don't know what a trifecta is, you need to get a dictionary and increase your vocabulary, instead of reading silly blogs online.]
When I was born, my biological mother took one look at me and decided she didn't need the entanglement. In other words, she gave me up for adoption.
I am not complaining. It was, perhaps, the only intelligent decision of her adolescence, although since I don't know her, I don't have a lot of information to work with. However, the evidence from the two decisions I do know about demonstrates a rather dismal 50% smart rate, which makes me think she was not the brightest bulb in the four pack.
I was lucky enough to be adopted by what can only be described as the most deperate pair of wannabe parents on the planet, which made me very lucky indeed. While they did not shower me with money or worldly goods :( they did give me love, attention, and an amount of discipline directly correlated with my penchant for making my own bad decisions, something which I apparently displayed from my earliest hours.
My mother likes to tell the story about how I never cried after they got me until I fell off a cupboard. This may have involved tooth loss, but the details remain sketchy to me. Clearly, I had found a good thing, and I knew it.
The good fortune was interspersed, even at that early age, with some sadness, especially the loss of my beloved uncle, Phillip, who lived with us. Phillip slipped me treats as long as I promised not to tell my mother on him, and in the eyes of a very little girl who had a mother who was not afraid to say no, that made him very nearly God-like. Losing Phillip at the age of four was a hard life lesson, but it certainly let me know early that my life was not going to be a picnic. Well, on second thought, maybe it was a picnic - one complete with ants, chiggers and a rainout!
Anyway....
The next installment in my personal trifecta of rejection and loss was the untimely death, when I was 12, of my beloved daddy at age 50 from a ridiculous birth defect no one knew about until he died. Of all the random events in a life filled with absurdities, this was certainly one of the most senseless. I was daddy's little girl, and I followed him around whenever I could, just to be with him. A piece of me died with him, I am sure, just as it does with everyone who loses a parent. But however hard it is when you are an adult, it is a quantum worse when you are a child whose whole universe revolves around your parents. And so it was for me.
My dad was a pretty interesting combination of quirks and goofy traits, although as a kid I thought he was pretty much perfect, of course. He was a big tease, and no event went unnoticed, to say nothing of unmentioned. Every time I cried, he would tell me he loved to hear me sing, and that I should sing louder. He was a perfectionist of a sort, who drove himself, and us, especially my brother, relentlessly at times, especially when we weren't measuring up to his expectations. Even when he relaxed, on vacation or on Sunday, he was always doing it with intensity. And yet, he would stop in the middle of his day to help a person with a flat tire or listen to their problem, or to tease a niece or have a piece of pie.
Dad was a storyteller, too, and he did the very best loon calls you have ever heard in your life. [The loon is the Minnesota state bird, and if you grow up in Minnesota, you know the ability to make loon calls is a big deal.] He was a Boy Scout leader, he was the church janitor, he was an elevator employee by day and a farmer by night. He could fix anything, he knew almost everything worth knowing, and losing him was like having the foundation pulled out from under your house. It is still standing, but it's pretty shaky and hollow, which was how I felt for a lot of years after he died.
A very funny story about my dad and his sense of humor. My uncle Bud has always been a pie lover, and my mother used to make a lot of pies when I was growing up. [I am not really sure when that stopped, but if I am resentful of anything in my life, it is that my mother never seems to make me pie any more!] Anyway, my dad had been saving a piece of pie for himself when my aunt and uncle arrived. Bud saw the pie and really wanted that piece of pie for himself, and my dad wanted it too. Instead of cutting it in half and sharing it, my dad told Bud that he could have it for 50 cents, which was a lot more money back then. You could buy a couple gallons of gas with it, for goodness sakes. Anyway, Bud was really wanting that pie, and eventually coughed up the 50 cents. So my dad took the money and gave Bud the pie. And he laughed about it for the rest of his life.
I took his death personally, for some reason. Kids always think they are responsible for everything that happens in their life, I guess. I don't really know why, because you are reminded a thousand times a day just how little you matter, and yet, you think you control the universe, and apparently even life and death. So when my dad died, I sort of thought he just up and left me on purpose. I know you are thinking, oh for dumb, but it is what it is.
By the way, for those who are uninitiated to Minnesota-isms, we like to make "oh-for" statements. No, not as in, 0 for 4, like some kind of lifetime batting average. We add Oh-for statements to words for added emphasis. For example, oh for dumb is not just dumb, it's really dumb. But oh for dumb is so much more satisfactory. Try it. You'll see. We are smart up there in the cold north. We have to keep our brains warm doing something, so we think a lot. We also have hot dish, and think casserole is just hoity toity, but that's another post....
Anyway, the final leg to get pulled off my three legged stool [apparently another thing Minnesotans like to do is not get to the point, and use a lot of metaphors while not doing it] was when my husband, Mr. Midlife Crisis, left me for another woman. Oh, it was cliche, of course, in a way. She was younger, naturally, while I was a rather unexciting 44. She was blond, short and new, while I was an at home mom, same old, same old. She was a nursing student, who would minister to the populace like the angel she was (I am paraphrasing him here, but not much,) while I did nothing all day but take care of the house, raise the kids, make ends meet, pay the bills, volunteer like crazy at school and church. You know. The b-o-r-i-n-g stuff.
But he did not just leave me and our kids, (when my daughter was exactly the same age, 12 years old, that I was when my dad died, I might add,) for another one of his affairee's. He made sure it was a little more interesting, because he got her pregnant first, THEN left us because she was, and this is an exact quote, "Carrying my child." Okay.
Well, that was a pretty interesting time. Excruciating. Painful. Exasperating. You get the drift.
Not only did he leave and move in with the new girl, but he insisted he still loved me, and was just "taking a vacation from his life." For months. Even though he was living with his brand new family. A few days before the divorce was final, he even e-mailed me [no, I am not kidding] to ask if I thought there was any chance of reconciliation. Ha! Ha! Ha! Always the romantic.
True funny story. [If you haven't figured it out yet, my ex-husband will figure rather prominently in some of these stories I have to tell. I will leave it to your discretion whether you chuckle silently to yourself, or just laugh out loud, as I usually do when recalling these things.] One day, he informed me that he had made such a mess of things that he was just going to start his life over. Seriously. Like you get a mulligan on life or something. Apparently in his world if you screw up, you don't have to own up to it and go from there, like the rest of us. Instead, you get to wipe the slate clean, sort of like a moral bankruptcy or something, and start over again. Do you think his sky is purple?
So, to cut to the chase, you take a nice, quiet, introverted Minnesota girl, and you marry her off to a sociopath with no moral compass whatsoever, and what you get is Help! I'm a Walton in a Jerry Springer World!
