Keeping Family Together

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  Sometimes I think my work as a mother is never done.  It would be nice if the kids were smiles like these are.  But unfortunately, being a mother, and especially a single mother is a job that is usually facing one situation after another that you have to try and solve.  So if you think it was hard before you have kids, wait until the thereafter.  Running this way and that to make it to the next game and the next class.  My mother was always out driving them from one thing to another, and I wouldn't have known what to do without her help through those many years of keeping track of the children.  But alas, I failed at that too, I didn't know during the time my sons were traveling the half of the places that they had been to.  They apparently have been all over this nice country of ours, unbeknown-st to me.  My son Shawn, was always the fearless wanderer and showed up in many a strange place.  Deciding that the best route from which to see the country was through jumping freight trains around .  He wound up at the Rainbow gathering in Florida, where he slept out in the woods and listened to music with his traveling pal Naomi.  Or going to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. He was a nomad and made me very aware that I couldn't partake in his rampant treks through the ravages of the world.  He wound up in abandoned buildings down in N.Y.C. with a large group of runaways who inhabited the streets of New York.  Getting down and dirty and apparently setting a fire to one place they had stayed, one of the girls of the group felt that was the way to deal with not losing their possession, what little they had.  I personally never tried these kind of travels, although I remember Shawn saying to me that I should talk, that I must have done some crazy stuff as a kid too.  It's amazing when things go unsaid, the kind of total presumptions that children come with. 
    No one every gave us a street map for child-rearing and the one's that did, I wouldn't have wanted to follow any way.  Sometimes I wonder if my children ever were really aware of the kind of freedoms that they have been afforded in growing up.  Although they can hate you when they're living through it all, I'm sure there are some families that they wouldn't have liked to have been born into.  In the scheme of things, it is very difficult when people try to compare me to other families.  My eldest daughter moved out practically in her pre-teen--early teens.  She spent the better part of her life over at her classmates household.  And each of them have gone through the "you didn't live up to our expectations" syndrome.  I'm always under the gun for scrutiny.  Things get really sticky with five children at hand.  And each of them is going in a different direction and each of them has a different agenda.  Between managing a household with 2 dogs, 7 cats, two turtles and a cockatoo, things got pretty hectic.  And Shawn was on the Gymnastics team when he was younger, he really had the physical capacity to do great things.  He learned very quickly and could master what was being expected of him pretty well.  Larayna, my youngest daughter became an excellent singer, she had the voice of a nightingale.  But as time wore on, so seems to be her interest in voice.  If you say to her that she should pursue it, then she complains that you're all telling her what to do.  And none of you know what it is that she really wants to do.  I guess it's true that I resented people trying to make up my mind for me as well.  Sometimes you just have to let them live their own lives, or else you'll be sorry later.  My mother has a yen for telling other people what they should do.  So that is a beef that I've had with her for a very long time. But there is very little about my past that I guess my children really understand about me.  It's strange, something I remember clearly that my elder son, Toby said to me when he was younger, he asked me if I was a hippie.  I don't know what instigated that question, but it always struck me as strange.  I never thought of myself in any classification.  But other people seem to think mostly in classifications.  I don't like that about our society.  I think that classifying a person is a very antagonizing way to manipulate a person downward.  It's like you need to be looking down on them in order to build your own persona up.  I don't like that about people, I personally find it offensive. 
    I just wanted things to go smoothly, but no matter how hard I tried to make that happen, I wasn't going to win.  Life was filled with difficulties and riffs between each one of the children on a daily basis. They talk about sibling rivalry, well my kids were at the top of the crop in that arena. I had to pull Toby off Liam many a time.  Liam, my middle son was always the quiet one.  But all the same he got around.  He has wound up with more friends than the lot of us.  I find it very strange that things can go from one extreme to the other in a matter of a few years.  Life with five kids is just like that.  You always have to watch out for the latest news from each child.  It's a balancing act.  But Liam, being slower than Toby, his elder brother, has since graduated with his Bachelors degree in English teaching, and who knew he would become a teacher.  Well, he hasn't actually done that yet.  He's playing music with his band; he plays the drums, and well I might add.  But I just think that whatever floats their boat is what they should follow.  As I was raised to believe that each person is an individual in their own right.  And that you can't mold a human being into something they're not.  Or force them to do something they're not ready to do.  So in the meantime, when Liam graduated from high school, they gave him an award being the only student to leave that school who was going onto a four year school.  He was in the remedial program, and he was very proud when he graduated.  Well after what we had been through with them, we were also when each of them had graduated. 
   Life seems to be a series of trials and in the long run, when you triumph over the barriers that are put in front of you, it is even more rewarding.  So along the way, we come up with those bumps and bruises, but when we pass through that next level, we remember all the sweat that has gone into all that time and we have still prevailed.  That is the most exciting feeling.  When Shawn graduated from his program, he couldn't have been more excited.  The pictures that we have of him on his graduation, he was grinning from ear to ear.  Things just seemed to come together for him at that point.  But after he moved away from home and tried to set up his home across the country, out in Portland, Oregon, he failed and wound up getting put in jail.  The problem was that since he was from out of state; New York, they treated him much more harshly than they would have a local.  So he has had a long series of hardships while becoming accustomed to the living situation in jail.  It really has been difficult from this end too, hearing these horrendous stories of what has been happening to him at the hands of the jailers.  They apparently are as harsh as the movies present them to be.  Although if you look up on their website, they make sure that everything looks like they are doing everything in their power to help out the inmates.  That seems to be the farthest thing from the actual truth.  The harshest set of circumstances, including my son having someone shot right in front of him and having the blood spatter on him.  It is always astounding to me how other people seem to take advantage of innocent people and make scape goats out of them.