Life is Finally Back on Track (I Hope)

This is the first picture of all of our children all together ever. That in itself is a huge achievement, there's more however. I know it's been a long time since I posted on here, and I hope that I can manage to work it in to my busy life again because I enjoyed this outlet tremendously. In the last two years we have been able to bring Chris home to live with us, we moved into our first home (one of our own that is, not a rental), I went back to work full time, and my husband was finally able to quit his second job and pick up a more normal schedule working only one job. It has been a long pull, and a hard one too, but I think that makes it all the more worth it now. I think the thing that I am most proud of is the fact that both Chris and Junior (who are 18 and 17 respectively) are still in school. Both should have been graduating this year, but due to a lack of credits, were unable to do so. This happens to lots of kids every year, they either miscalculate what credits are needed and fall short, or they struggle in classes and are just unable to pass them the first time through. In some cases, kids slip through the cracks and manage to get pushed through to the next grade every year only to reach senior year with little to no credits and no hope of graduating. Our boys fall into to of these categories, Chris into the last one, a victim of a system that didn't care, and Junior into the category of kids that struggle but just fall short in the end. My pride is in the fact that unlike a lot of kids, our boys are sticking to it. They both will be going back to school in the fall, and with hard work should both graduate with the class of 2014. In all of this, my writing fell by the way, I would write when I was unhappy or when I was angry. Sometimes I wrote when I wanted to escape, but I didn't allow my writing to consume me the way I did when I wrote my novel Crossroads. None of the things I have written have flowed from me in such a torrent, but I did try my hand at a children’s story for my youngest daughter, Frances, and I enjoyed that very much. I'm still toying with the ending, and then I think I'll go to the local community college and see if I can find an art student to illustrate it for me. I have also begun a major overhaul of my novel, trying to get it suitable for publication (I haven't had any interested publishers, but I was thinking I might just pay to have it published on my own). It's funny that my novel flowed out of me so effortlessly at the time, but re-reading it with the perspective lent by the passage of time shows me how much my writing style has changed. I still feel passionately about the story line and plot of my novel, I just think that I'm going to need to put in a lot of time re-working it so that it can be more easily read and understood, and maybe even eventually successful.

Hectic Life

(Above: The first trip to see Chris after 10 years of searching for him. On the left is Junior, Chis is in the middle and Julia is on the right as they race up the hill.)

Okay, so I've been super busy... like always :D. Life has been hectic but good. I am back in college and am going into my 3rd quarter toward an AA in education, working my way to a transfer degree to a 4yr school. The eventual goal is to become a high school English teacher (crazy huh?). I have been writing short stories, working on my marriage and working part-time. It is a pretty full schedule, considering that between us my husband and I have 5 children, but I wouldn't want it any other way. My husband and I have recently found my stepson Christopher. There's a long story behind that, and I think I'll take the time to tell you about it tonight (even though I have a TON of homework to do).

So Chris is my husband Lee's son from a previous relationship and he is only about 3 months older than our son William Lee Junior. In the beginning of Chris's life it was hard for all of us (myself, Lee and Chris's mom Heather) to keep in touch because money was always so tight for all of us. We were all young, 17, 18 & 21 respectively, and we had no idea how to be grown-ups (even though we were all trying hard to figure it out). The lack of money had us moving often and not being able to afford a phone very often. Unfortunately for Chris, (for all of us really) this led to times when we would lose touch for a month or 2, sometimes as much as 6 months. Then there came a time when my husband and I were homeless and we left our children in my parents care to avoid putting them through living in a homeless shelter. At the same time, Heather and Chris moved. It was the biggest disaster that could ever happen to our family, because she had no way to let us know where they were going.
This led to a frantic search on our part for Chris, and it took about 2 years to finally find him again.

It was a hard 2 years, depressing and heartbreaking, fraught with worry and anxiety. We used public records and phone books, directory assistance and even took a few trips to Everett, WA (a trip of about 75-100 miles depending on where we were living) because that is where Heather was from and we thought she might go back. During this time, we moved across the state for a job opportunity my husband had. That made the trip to Everett about 300 miles and more than we could afford to spend. We did not give up trying to find him though, instead I decided to take matters into my own hands and invest 50 dollars that we really didn't have (it was meant for the power bill) in a people search service.

Right there on the phone they came up with several addresses and phone numbers (all out dated unfortunately) as well as Heather's aunt's phone number. We called her that night and gave her a message to give Chris and his mom to have them call us. It was a tense wait, but Heather called us back the next day and for the first time in over 2 years we talked to Chris (he was 4 years old at this point). It was heavenly to know where he was, and that he was okay, but more so to see him! We made arrangements to pick him up and bring him to Spokane where we were living within days. My sister-in-law Dolly and I went on a shopping spree for clothes and bedding (as well as a bed) for Chris (Dolly bought it all happily because we were broke).
We had Chris with us in Spokane for almost a month the first time Lee took the Greyhound bus over to get him. He got to know his younger brother Junior and his little sister Julia (it was a little rocky at first because they were strangers to each other again, after all Julia was only a couple of months old when we lost Chris), and of course us.

Lee and I treasured every moment we had with him and though we knew we could never make up for lost time, we certainly tried. We made as many memories as we could, trying to fill the void the missing years had left. We took the kids to Riverfront Park and fed the marmots, we went on picnics and just played together, bonding again. After the first visit, Lee went to get Chris on the bus about once a month for a week, sometimes 2. It was going well... And then it wasn't. I don't really know what happened, but again Heather was gone. It could have been anything, she was living on state assistance and social security, never getting much money, so maybe they couldn't pay their rent (I am afraid to ask why).

We were shocked and scared. Where were they? Was Chris okay? Did he have a place to live? Was he safe? It was the nightmare all over again. This time it would be the worst time, the longest time, the most frustrating and heart breaking time. It lasted forever (or at least it felt like an eternity to us). Time passed and we looked, and looked, and looked. We called every number we could find, including her aunt again. There was still no news, and after a couple of weeks with no word from Heather, we called her aunt back and threatened legal action if she wouldn't tell us where or how to get a hold of her. Nothing worked.

More time passed, and we all spiraled into depression. The kids missed their big brother, Junior even came up with an imaginary friend, his name was Chris. It was heart wrenching to watch the kids grieve for him, and worse because we were both struggling as well. We never gave up hope, and we kept on looking, but everything we did led back to disappointment. After 2 years we got a letter in the mail from the state of Montana informing us that they were going to with hold money from my husband's pay checks for child support!

This was exciting news because that meant that we at least knew which state Christopher was in, and we had a place to start the search fresh. We did online people searches in the state of Montana for them, but we could find no evidence of Heather ever having a phone, lease or utility bill in her name there. This in and of itself was not surprising because her only source of income was state assistance and most of those places will only give you an account or lease if you are employed. Heather had always depended on her boyfriend to put things in his name for them, and we knew that. We searched his name and came up with some possibles, but not the right guy.

We paid for yet another professional search, and were excited to find a Montana address for them, but no phone number. We were hesitant to proceed because we had no idea why she had left the last time, was she angry with us for something? Or was she worried we were going to try to take Chris away from her? If it was either of those reasons and we sent her a letter (we couldn't come up with the money to get to Montana on the spot) then she would know we knew were they were and she would run. So we waited, and while we did I started searching the big social networking sites (myspace, facebook & twitter at this point) again for any sign of either of them (Chris was 14 years old by now), and so did Lee.

One day he stumbled across Heather's myspace page even though it was a few months old, her only activity on it was from the day it was created. Still we both sent her messages and friend requests in the hopes she would decide to check it. She never did though. A few more months went by and we debated the pros and cons of just showing up on their doorstep in Montana, we had even decided to go for it with our tax return in February. Then one day Lee tried one more search of facebook and found Heather's page. We tried not to get our hopes up, there hadn't been any activity on it in a over a month, though she had actually used it frequently before that. Taking this as a sign that she might log back into facebook, Lee sent her a friend request with a message asking her to call or e-mail and giving her all of our contact information. Then we waited.

We waited an excruciating 2 days, then 3. Then Lee had the idea to contact her friends. He sent out friend requests to anybody that had directly commented on her wall, and scrolling through her friends he found her stepfather and her mother. He sent requests to them both with the same message about having Heather get into contact with us. We waited some more, positively obsessed with facebook, Lee's e-mail and cell phone, constantly checking to see if she had gotten in touch. It was unbearable, then Lee had the idea to go back to our original method of search, he called information. From her facebook page, we were able to ascertain where Heather's mom lived. He called information in that city and found several numbers. The first one he called was the right one.

After 10 years, we knew where Chris was, and how he was, and we knew that Heather would be calling in the next couple of days to talk to us. Even without hearing his voice again, or seeing his face, it was a very emotional time for us. We were afraid of how Chris would react when we did talk to him the first time, would he think we had abandoned him? That we didn't love him, or even bother to look for him? Too our great surprise, the same day we talked to her mom, Heather called us. Needless to say, we were over the moon with excitement and happiness.

We are getting to know Chris again, talking to him on the phone every couple of days and visiting as often as we can. We live in the Shelton, Washington area which is north of Olympia, and they live in the Everett, Washington area so it's a long drive to visit. The drive is about 120 miles, but hopefully we won't have to make it very often any more. Once Chris gets comfortable with us again, we hope he will be willing to come home to us to spend weekends and part of school breaks. The one thing I do know for sure is that now that we have finally found him, we will never lose him again. For one thing, he is old enough (he is almost 16 years old) to know how to find us again if something should happen and we lose touch again. For another thing, we have all of his grandmother's contact information and she always knows how to find them.

So our hectic life is starting to find a normal rhythm and our fractured family is now whole again. This time it will stay that way.

Ramblings

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, I won't bore you with life's little excuses as to why that is, I'll just jump back in. Spending time with my kids is always a very enlightening experience. My kids range in age from 15 all the way down to almost 3 yrs old. No matter how much I think I know, I am constantly amazed and surprised by them. Watching my not quite 3yr old, for instance, I have to ask myself when exactly she turned the corner from babyhood to being a preschooler? And just where was I when it happened? Every parent knows that time doesn't really pass at a fixed rate of speed. The things that we use to measure it, minutes, hours, seconds, days etc., are only a fools way of trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Only a fool believes that any one second passes at exactly the same speed of another. I mean, as a parent, one second of watching your child suffer, or one paralyzing awful second of knowledge that your child is too close to the street, passes at an entirely different rate of speed then any other average second of boring daily life. Then again, a parents life is filled with these scary moments until they begin to seem "normal", whatever that means. Anyway, all I'm getting at I suppose, is that time, like the summer sun in Western Washington, is unpredictable. Enjoy the moment, make memories that will last you a life time and try your best to be deserving of the gifts you have been given. After all, you can't turn back time and forever after this today, will become yesterday.

My Memoirs

I have decided to start writing my memoirs and to post them here. I know that it may not interest some of you, but if they don't, then don't read them ;).

I know that I’m not crazy. This is the foremost thing that I have to keep in mind as I write this, and that you need to remember if you read it. Questioning your sanity is normal right? If you have four kids and too much time on your hands, you probably would too. If your children were constantly telling you that you didn’t love them, that you wish you’d never had them, if they ground it into your head all day every day, that you were crazy, or just not good enough, I bet you wouldn’t be able to stop questioning your sanity.

Maybe this would’ve been easier if I’d grown up with a functional mother, or if she just would’ve cared more, but I doubt it. Having teenagers is supposed to drive you insane, so I must be right on target. How do they learn to push just the right buttons exactly at the right moment? Is it something they’re born knowing? If that’s true, I wonder what happens to the babies that get adopted; do they adapt and learn to be just like every other kid out there? I couldn’t have been this way to my mother, even with the problems we had, I never treated her like my kids treat me.

What do you think of when you think of your mother, the very first thing? For me it’s the smell of Budweiser and aluminum cans, cigarette and pot smoke. The sound of cards being shuffled is right up there too, as well as the feeling of being very tired but knowing that we couldn’t go home until she was ready to leave. I think of Aqua Net hairspray and Charlie perfume; bacon frying, coffee brewing and screaming. Everything I ever did was wrong, so maybe the sound of her screaming at me should be higher up on the list.

For all of my life I have always considered my maternal grandma, the epitome of perfection. I guess that’s how confused and needy I was as a child. My grandma was a beautiful person, warm, caring, gentle, authoritative, smart, sweet and sincerely loving. She was also an alcoholic. Everybody in my family either had a drinking problem, or was cultivating one when I was a child. Sure tons of families deal with alcoholism, but this family just happened to be mine so that made it different, right?

Most adults look back over their childhoods with generally fond memories, recalling all of the holidays, birthdays, family vacations or small things like bedtime stories and being tucked into bed by their parents. I remember the Salvation Army homeless shelter for families on 6th Street in Tacoma. I remember driving away from my father in the back of a beat up red-orange Datsun station wagon as my mother left him. We had some good times, but the real memories, the vivid ones, are the sad, scary or bad times. Maybe that makes me morbid or overdramatic, but it’s what I have, so it’s what I’ll tell you about.

Updates

So let's see, new things... I've had to put off the book on my tribal history because of some personal issues, but I hope to get back to it very soon. The goal of the project is to do a combination of two main things. First I want to document the tribes history, of course. It is a small tribe and not many people have bothered to write very much about them, so there's a lot of blanks to fill in. Fortunately there is a strong oral tradition, as in most Native American people, so it's just a matter of taking the time to listen to the Elders. The second part is the fun part, for me anyway. I'd like to weave the tribal legends into the book, there are so many and they are so vivid. It will be very interesting to see if I am able to integrate them into the book so that both facts, and the wonderfully detailed and imaginative legends of the tribe's origin can come alive and capture the readers mind and heart.

In the mean time, I have started on yet another novel. It has characters that my best friend and I came up with together when we were 12 and 13 years old. A project that she had faith that I could tackle all those years ago. (Ahhh to be that naive again... NOT! *Laughs hysterically*) I have finally started the book now though, and it's moving along very well. I'm about 100 pages in and the characters are still strong, are in fact, getting stronger. It is another Chick Lit book, but much lighter then my first, and pretty fun. I'm going to try to get in here to post at least once a week, but I have also started college this fall and things get pretty hectic so no guarantees.

A New Writing Project

I am very excited, I was approached by my grandmother about a writing project that I've decided to take on. I'm very excited, but also very nervous. I have said in previous posts that I'm Native American, but I'm probably the whitest Native you'll ever meet. My father is a fairly light-skinned Mexican Native American, and my mother is very Caucasian. Because of this, I'm as white as you can get on the outside. Inside, however, I've always been fascinated with the stories of my Indian ancestors. So I was very honored when my grandmother brought up the idea of me writing the history and tribal stories of our people.

The challenge is that it is a small tribe, and their traditions, like most Native American tribes, are largely oral. I think the best place to start is the small tribal museum on the reservation. They have what few artifacts that remain of a very old people, and a very knowledgeable curator, or so I've been told. Unfortunately I grew up away from the reservation in Tacoma, and so didn't get the chance as a child or young adult to get to know my very large extended family in the tribe.

I have the good fortune to have my father here to help me, though, because he plays a large part in the tribe and knows all the people I'll need to talk to. What I'm not at all sure about is interviewing the tribal Elders. I've decided to take a video camera along to capture the tone in their voices and stories, as well as to capture their expressions and mannerisms as they speak. I've never thought of being a journalist, or interviewer, but I think it will be a wonderful challenge for me to rise to.

At the very least, it will be an interesting journey, and I'll try to blog about it as much as I can. It should make for a unique story, and I'm curious to see how it will end myself. How will the Elders and the people of my tribe respond to the whitest Indian putting our story down on paper?

Music & Writing

I think I'll blog about music and how it affects what I write today. Or more precisely, the way that music changes things. When writing my novel Cross Roads, my taste in music took a dramatic turn, from die hard country music fan to die hard alternative rock fan. Interesting, maybe, but what is more intriguing to me is the fact that it seemed to change the tone of the story I was writing.

What started out as an innocent romance turned into a tale of love mixed with abuse and violence. In other words, something much different then I would have ever imagined I could write. That's not to say that the book is completely dark, like alternative music, it has sweet and funny points mixed in with the darkness.

I found myself listening to Muse, Green Day, Linkin Park, The Killers, The Vines and many others that have become personal favorites now. The surprise for me was, I'd always thought I didn't like that particular kind of music. Depending on how I felt at any given time, I listened to various alternative music obsessively while writing. As the words of the violent scenes flowed from me, I listened to heavy metal songs like Godsmack's I Fucking Hate You, or the darker alternative songs like Jimmy Eat World's Pain, or The Vines Fuck The World. (Two awesome songs with driving beats, both a little dark.)

Writing the love scenes and the light and humorous parts was easier, because that's more who I am. They were greatly influenced by songs with beautiful melodies and quirky lyrics like Grapevine Fires By Death Cab For Cutie, that while not exactly cheerful, spoke to my soul. I listened to a lot of Green Day while writing, songs like American Idiot and Longview, Everclear's Santa Monica, and Loser by Beck. Fun songs, in other words, and they contributed to the lightest parts of the story.

All in all, I guess that the reason I credit music so much in the way that my book turned out, is that before writing it, I'd never even heard of half of these bands. Since finishing my story, I still haven't gone back to country music. It's not that I don't like it, it's more that I've grown beyond it. Just like my writing style, I'm not sure that my taste in music will ever be exactly as it was before starting out on this obsessive compulsive writing journey, but I'm pretty happy with both just now. :)