Bouncing Back From the Trials of Life

Life Is Fickle

We moved into our new home six months ago. It’s more space than our six kids have ever had. The past two and half years we spent in hiding. Someone took it upon themselves to call every authority figure in our city and have us harassed. It was clear. They wanted our children NOT with us.

When something like this happens, the first instinct is to fight back, to retaliate. No one was coming forward. At this particular juncture in our lives, we didn’t have that kind of money. You know; the kind of money that helps ensure justice.

My husband had been out of the Army for a little over ten years. Sounds like enough time for a soldier to get it together, right? Well, it wasn’t & this did not help.

We didn’t know & still don’t know who called all the authorities, but we had some educated guesses. The police informed us that the type of person who does this, doesn’t stop. All the calls were anonymous.

From the separate agencies that were sent to check on us, we discovered the caller was a female and what we were accused of. She had told them that we didn’t have enough food in our house to feed our kids, firearms were left out unsecured, drugs were laying about, and that my husband was beating me. There were other accusations, but hey, I gotta keep something in my back pocket in case this stalker decides to rear her ugly hydra head again.

It’s easy to say, where there is smoke, there is fire. Oh, there was a fire, but not like the ones we were being accused of. The police found my home school lesson plans laid out. A math lesson was still fresh on the dry erase board in our school space. The officer walked through our home with a camera strapped to his chest checking every cabinet for food while my kids watched, confused. Sneaky squirrel, they were all full, no drugs, and no accessible firearms.

So, two years later, something good happens & here I am wondering when the other foot is going to fall. And you know what?

It does.

After three weeks of moving in, poop starts backing up my floor drain and saturating the walls, the carpet, everywhere racking up a 40k bill after just having made the down payment. My kids have to move out of their bedrooms and bunk in their siblings rooms for the next six months, the little nomads. We spend hours with plumbers, insurance people, and listening to the jackhammer break up our basement floor to remove ninety feet of cast iron that rusted out. Strangers were in our home for weeks.

Now, this is the part where I am supposed to tell you everything is candy canes and gumdrops and we all live happily ever after. I’d like to, and I will. I won’t turn this into a melodrama.

Before that though, I have some conjecture. I hate candy canes and gumdrops.

The pressure my family had been under was stifling at times. We coped and one could argue that we had flourished. The move wasn’t good or bad. It just was. Chaos, in her primordial suppositions, decided to spin fate’s wheel and bless us. Or, did she? Was God punishing me for turning away from Christianity? Had I stepped out from His umbrella? Was this His way of chastising me? Jesus bore my sins, but we all know fathers need to correct sometimes.

No.

None of those are the answers.

Freud would say, I have daddy issues. Who doesn’t?

Jung would challenge my collective perspective & Jordan Peterson would holler at me to take some bloody responsibility for my life. Well, hell, they’re all correct.

My pipes backed up because they were full of shit. Someone called the legal harassment squad on my family because we were doing something that they didn’t like, none of the things we were accused of but something they didn’t like.

I am guessing it had something to do with a couple of dead chickens, some overgrown weeds, and a few rabbits that tried to escape our urban farm, but who knows really? Cowards rarely come forward.

I am not being punished. This is life. As sure as good things happen, bad ones will too.

As long as there are omens and superstitions, there will be people that want to take advantage of those beliefs. Bad and good are perspectives . . . and realities because I still believe in absolutes.

Just because there is a birth, does not mean that a death has to happen. It will, but it doesn’t have to. Maybe there are demons and angels listening to your very thoughts and meeting them with temptations or rewards. Who knows? If there is, why should it matter?

If you fall short, does someone have to make up the difference other than you? Will reality as we know it bend over backwards to set the balance right? Maybe, but I’m not sure we are the best judges for even that.

So, I have decided to be more forgiving to this life. I don’t know all the answers. You don’t know all the answers. I promise I can verify this. The politicians don’t, though they want you to think they do. Same for the preachers, the gurus, the monks, the media, etcetera. But, nobody knows. I don’t care how near to death your near death experience was, you don’t know. You are still here.

I think my time is better spent trying to figure out what really is good or bad to me at this moment. Things keep changing. It’s one of those absolute thingies.

I’d rather think about how I can make my ten year old smile today, while giving her just enough to grow. I need her proverbially hungry enough to be curious and figure out more things on her own so that way she can keep going without me here some day.

When my kids ask me if I am still glad we moved after a huge down payment and over tens of thousands spent on a renovated basement I hadn’t planned on, I tell them, “Hell, yes!”

The next time you think of candy canes and gumdrops, I hope you think of my feces filled basement. I’m reframing your view. Maybe you will be at the movie theater or a midnight run to the gas station for snacks and hopefully, I will make you chuckle. You are privileged enough to do those things. As sure as good things will happen in this life, bad ones will happen for the rich, the poor, the everybodies. No one is so rich or so special or so perfect, nothing happens to them. Aren’t we past commercializing life?

Also, I seriously think you should give up candy canes and gumdrops.

Aren’t you an adult?