I Married a Car Guy

For Car People Who Care: Rob's Datsun B-210 on our wedding day, decorated by his 11 yr. old sister. The stinker put pebbles in the hubcaps that made an insane racket whenever we slowed below 60 mph. We drove around with those rocks and noise for our whole honeymoon. Let's just say EVERYONE knew we just got married. Thanks, Sarah.  

Rob is all about cars. He’s not interested in the typical guy kinds of cars, like sports cars, fancy cars, or antique cars. He doesn't care about those cars very much. What he cares about is our cars, the ones we depend on for transportation to all the fabulous, exotic and romantic places we constantly go, like the grocery store and hardware store.

My first clue he was an unusual car guy was when he constantly rescued me and my crappy, always-breaking down car while we were dating. You want to test someone's character? Stick them in the middle of a 6-lane intersection at rush hour in over 100 degree weather in Phoenix, AZ and have the car die. Their coping skills will become quickly apparent.  More than one boy I dated failed the car test, but Rob didn’t. The second clue I had he was different, happened weeks before our wedding. He told me he bought new tires for his car.

 “They were on sale at a great price, so I snapped those baby’s up before someone else got them,” he chortled. I was confused.
“Does your car need new tires?”I asked.
“Well, not right now but it will. And when it does, we probably won’t have the money for tires. Now we don’t have to worry about it.”
Not knowing anything about tires, I shrugged and said, “Oh. Ok. Whatever you think, it is your car.”
I didn’t think about his tires again until days before our wedding, when we moved the individual boxes of our lives into the married student studio apartment on campus at the university we both attended.

As I opened boxes of Rob’s boyhood, I formed the picture of a sweet kid who liked toy match box cars, fuzzy black color-in-the-animal posters and canteens from long-abandoned Boy Scout troops. Not much of his stuff was useful for our married future, but I realized I was marrying a guy who was much more sentimental than I was. Our apartment was in an old motel the school bought and converted into housing for married but childless students. What was once the coat closet was converted into a tiny kitchen with a junior-sized stove and refrigerator.  The motel room was our bedroom, living room and study.  

When Rob triumphantly rolled in his tires, I saw we had a problem. Where were we going to put a stack of 4 car tires? Our room was barely big enough for us, a desk, a bed, and dressers. There was no room for them and besides – they were tires. Ugly, petroleum- stinky tires that turned my palms black as I tried out different corners of the room.  We finally stuck them under our full-sized bed and went off to get married. When we opened the door to our apartment  a week later, the smell of the tires was overwhelming. Oh my heavens, do tires stink! We didn’t have a fan, so I opened both windows in the apartment and propped open our front door to get fresh air moving through. All that did was dump the tire smell into the hallway, annoying every other couple who lived in the building. As we lay down to sleep that night, the gasoline/oil smell wafting from under our bed was so strong it killed any thoughts of romance. It was horrible.

What were we going to do with the tires? There were no storage lockers in the apartment building and no place to put them other than in our room. Within a couple of days of eye-watering stench, headaches and feeling overwhelmed by the chemical stink, Rob did the only thing he could. He took his proudly acquired, on sale tires and put them on the car. The perfectly good, nothing-wrong-with-them tires on the car were sold for pennies to a local tire shop. It took a couple of days, but the nasty tire smell finally left our apartment. We kept Rob’s car for two more years before selling it to another poor starving student on campus for $300. The very first thing he commented on while checking out the car was how nice the tires were.

Rob still pays attention to our cars. He obsesses about the oil levels, tire pressure and whatever else car guys care about. Just yesterday it was record-breaking cold in Iowa and he went to the gas station to put more air in the tires. There was no way in heck I would have put air in the tires in -9 degree weather, but it sure was nice knowing he would. 

On Hospitals, The End and Things That Will Never Change

Ralph and Claudia on their 50th wedding anniversary, Claudia holding her trusty clipboard to record her life in 15 minute increments. She would be an amazing witness to a crime, no one takes better notes than she does.

Years ago, Claudia had a therapist who suggested she control her anxiety by writing down her thoughts. That morphed into writing down all her thoughts, all her activities, and all the things that happened around her. Someday it will make for fascinating reading, when I am done reading every other printed word on the planet. 

The latest news is Claudia is in the hospital with blood clots in her lungs. She is fine, she isn't in pain and she will be released in a few days to resume her life back at the nursing home room she shares with my father. While waiting for hours in the ER for her to be officially admitted into the hospital, Claudia and I had plenty of time to talk.

For us, that means Claudia revisits our dark past, recounting as if it just happened yesterday, how her children were taken from her bosom and how she never, ever would have given us up willingly. It also means I reflexively reassure her that my brother and I know that we are loved, that she and Ralph were good parents and that all is well now. I would say that it is a drag to regularly have the same conversation with her regarding our childhoods, but how can I blame her? Hell, the same demons ate at my table to the point I wrote a whole damned book about it, so I figure she is allowed to tell me, tell me, tell me what she so desperately wanted me to know all those years ago and couldn't. 

Then our hospital conversation turned to the inevitable because a young kid (Seriously. The same age as my kids. Eeekk!) doctor came in and asked Claudia her official thoughts on death and dying. Claudia solemnly asserted her right to die whenever God intended, without heroic measures to save her. When the doctor looked to me for agreement, I shrugged and said, "Give the lady what she wants. She isn't afraid of meeting God." After the door closed on his leaving, Claudia launched into her Jehovah's Witness lecture on the Afterlife, which I have also been lucky enough to hear a bazillion times from her own mouth, followed up by enough church tracts on the subject to wallpaper my kitchen and bathroom. I know she is a believer and it gives me great comfort to know I don't have to feel anxiety about her fear of the eternal future. She has none, other than a tad bit of concern for my soul but she assured me that God has a plan for people like me, she just isn't clear on all the details yet. 

We finished up our time together with the one topic that does manage to stomp the life out of my heart, leaving it in bruised tatters on the floor every single time we revisit it. 

"Why doesn't Lennis call me by my name, Claudia? Why does she get so mad and insist on calling me Janet?" Claudia asked.

"Probably because she named you Janet as a baby and you are her Janet, not Claudia," I reply, already feeling the weariness start to invade my muscles.
"But I'm NOT Janet. I'm Claudia. Janet and I switched places. Janet lives overseas..." Claudia started in and I cut her off, too exhausted to hear the story again.
"I know you are Claudia. I know Janet doesn't live here anymore. But Lennis misses Janet. You have to know that. You are a mother, too. " I argue, knowing full well how this conversation goes, the pattern set like wheel ruts run through cement.
"But I'm not Janet and Lennis won't accept that. I don't know why not."
I stopped talking.
Some days I can do this and some days I can't. Tonight I can't.
I know tomorrow Lennis will light up the hospital switchboard calling long distance from Oregon to find her daughter Janet, refusing to call her by the only name the hospital will know, Claudia. It will get ugly. Lennis, in her 94 year-old state, will get riled up something fierce and then she will call me to cry in frustration that her daughter's name is Janet NOT Claudia and why does her daughter do this to her? 

Lennis will also ask me if Ralph and Claudia are still together. I will tell her they are, with no break up in sight. It has been 50 years, after all. Lennis had her suspicions about Ralph when they were dating and she is still waiting to be proven right, just as Claudia is still waiting for her mother to accept her as her daughter.

Schizoprenia is a devil, determined to drive apart the stubborn women in my family. The thing is, Schizophrenia has no idea who it is messing with. I've never met two more determined people in my life than my grandmother and mother. Neither one of them is going anywhere, neither one of them is going to give in to the other. It will be a stalemate to the very end, like a chess game with no conclusion, just two statues on the board waiting for the other piece to move.

At least I know where they are. 

What's Love Got To Do With It?

As the indomitable Tina Turner wailed so brilliantly, "What's Love Got To Do With It?"

Actually, a heck of a lot. Love is kinda the point, right? My brother Rex was all about the love. His greatest joy in life was showing his love for everyone in his path. He didn't discriminate on who he gave his affection, time and attention to. As you remember from my book, that didn't always work out in his favor. He was almost killed, he was taken advantage of, he was ridiculed, he was rejected and yet, like a balloon full of helium, he always managed to rise above it and resume his quest to show love to everyone.

Rex paid no attention to holidays reserved for love, everyday was Valentine's Day for him. I wish you could have known him in person. If you did, you would have felt the same way as one of his Hospice massage therapist's wrote about him after his passing:

"Dear Heather (and family),

I just want to thank you so much for the opportunity to have spent time in your midst and, in particular, with Rex.

When Rex would say (as I'm sure he did to so many - friends and "strangers" alike) " I just want you to know that I love you"- I would hear him with such depth in my heart, for I knew that was the place in him where it came from.

"God is love, and whoever lives in love lives in union with God and God lives in union with him...There is no fear in love; perfect love drives out all fear." (1 John 4:16)

I have to say I don't think I have ever felt so in the presence of the pure essence of Love (God) as when in your home - for you all give that. Thank you so much. Rex was, in his unique way, a true blessing and also truly blessed to have lived - and died - in the ever comforting arms of Love.

Your Servant -
Linda Sherman

I have enclosed a poem by a friend of mine- Rex was our partner as "we move, we dance, we grow...to unsuspected new horizons."  God Bless

Love is movement:
from darkness to light
from thought to action
from ignorance to wisdom-
partnered with time
we move
we dance
we grow

But whether we plod through a day
travel the world or fly to the moon
the movements that count
the ones we remember
are gentle shifts within ourselves:

the letting go of an old resentment
the subtle step from fear to trust
the daring leap from the safe and known
to see if we can fly
the softening breath of forgiveness
the guarded move toward self-acceptance
or the lifting of the inner eye
from a clutched and treasured pain
to unsuspected new horizons

Annelou Perrenoud
1987

As Rex would say:
"Hello, my friend, glad to see you. I love you no matter what.
And if you don't like it, Tough Luck!"




Happy Valentine's Day, With All Our Love

Heather, Rob and family

 

Correction

My birth parents, Ralph and Claudia Wade, have read my book. Of course they would, it is about them. After Claudia read it the first time, she presented me with several hand-written pages of corrections that they wanted me to make. Honestly, I was a bit surprized. After thinking about it, I realized I shouldn't have been surprized at all. Everyone has their own perspective on life events and even siblings in the same family, experiencing the same situations, can walk away with differing points of view. My parents have their experiences, and I have mine.

The one thing I have prided myself on in the book is the facts. I spent hours reading and cypering court documents, old social work records and anything I could get my hands on that gave an objective perspective. No one was going to accuse me of altering or making up facts in my memoir. This work is not fictional and there was going to be plenty of evidence to prove its truth.

  That was all fine and good, until Claudia pointed out to me that I misspelled the name of her home planet, La Mordia. I assured her I didn't. I used the spelling (double and triple checked by myself) from the court documents presented to the US Supreme Court.
"It's in the Supreme Court records, Mom, " I said.
"Well, that's two things they got wrong," Claudia replied, without missing a beat.
She slays me.

I didn't give it another thought, thinking, "If the only factual error I made in the book is the mispelling of a planet that exists in my mother's mind, I am cool with that."

Yeah....if only Claudia thought the same way I do. But she doesn't. So for a year, it has been festering inside her soul that I mispelled the name of her home planet. Today she presented me with another court document that proves there is a record of another way of spelling her home planet's name. Claudia wants you to know this is the correct spelling and this proves the Supreme Court paper work was wrong.

I stand corrected. Below, in all it's glory and high-lighted in bold and italized, is the proper spelling of Claudia's home planet. To read the full document, the link to it is provided below.


"Dr. Morrison examined both Mr. and Mrs. Wade and testified concerning their mental and emotional "conditions." That testimony indicates Claudia Wade suffers from incurable paranoid schizophrenia and although treatment has reduced the level of her anxiety so that she can
"* * * operate on a minimal basis of caring for herself and living a fairly normal existence * * * "* * * * * * "* * * if she were to be given the care and responsibility of her children that this would be anxiety producing and this would be more than she could handle and would worsen the condition."
The record shows that Mrs. Wade's illness includes a systemized set of delusions by which she is able to maintain that as a child she was transported to Earth from the planet La Moria in the galaxy of Andromeda, and has since the age of 13 been regularly corresponding, by way of a messenger, with her family remaining there. Mrs. Wade also believes that her children will be able to receive messages from La Moria when they reach adolescence in spite of the fact that they are "part Earthling." Dr. Morrison also testified that Mrs. Wade's condition would not change in the *761 foreseeable future and that there were no social or mental health services available "that would help her beyond what she has already received." Ralph Wade apparently has an intelligence level which is within the "borderline range," and while he can do a reasonable job of taking care of himself he could not be expected "to cope with the problems of child rearing." Dr. Morrison also testified that the children are normal and active, and that, in effect, the necessity of their adjusting to, accepting, or compensating for the delusional peculiarities of their mother if they were to live with her would have a devastating effect on their future well-being."

http://law.justia.com/cases/oregon/court-of-appeals/1974/527-p-2d-753-2.html


And now we can all rest, knowing there is no D in La Moria, and that the US Supreme Court can indeed, make mistakes.
 I need a nap.

Ralph and Cluadia on their 50th wedding anniversay.

Congratulations!

Me at 4 yrs. old in Headstart Preschool

Next week, a friend of ours is signing papers to officially adopt a boy she has been foster mothering for the past year. He is a sweet 4 year old, with a typical boy level of energy and a fascination with all things superhero. I think his new mom is a superhero. She has spent the past year building a safe and secure relationship with the boy. When the judge declares our friend and her son to be a real family, it won't mean anything significant to him. It will just be a continuation of what he already knows to be true - that he is loved and worthy of  her time, effort and attention.

I am so happy for our friend and her son. They make a lovely family.

I didn't find my safe family until I was an adult and created my own, but I am happy for me, too. Every child deserves to be loved, to be secure and to know they are valued. Some of us arrive on the this planet with that gift already in place, some of us have to wait a little while for it, and others have to build their own version of family. No matter how it happens, it is always a cause for celebration when it occurs.

My family with my brother Rex, in 1997