Rube Goldberg Part II

(Continued from previous post)

I told him I really didn't want him blowing himself up with a lightning machine, so he promised to make it small to begin with. I told him he could get into trouble with Homeland Security for trying to manufacture toxic gases, but he said it would be safe under water. I pulled dozens of examples of similar inventions off the internet, demonstrating the prohibitive cost of energy and the knotty problem of pressure in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, but all he did was get giddy with narcissistic supply that I should care so much about his idea. I told him he needed to keep records and charts, but his attempt to draw a simple diagram resulted in confusion and was abandoned.

All the books he borrowed from the library were thirty or forty years old, and he wouldn't believe that engines nowadays are so well designed and tuned that nitrous gases were vastly diminished. He tested his prototype and bragged that the litmus strip turned the right color in the water. It could have been from anything, and the change was infinitesimal. Then he found out how much it would cost to put up a new power pole to provide enough energy to make the litmus strip darker, and he hasn't worked on it since.

The discussion about A.I. was circular and pointless. I remember what a mess the herd was when I first showed up, and how many breeds he had mixed together, how baggy the udders were and the splayed hooves made it hard for them to walk. How milk production went up substantially after my husband began his own A.I. program and got rid of the Jerseys and Brown Swiss and yes, Simmentals. The neighborhood joke was that it was a Rainbow Dairy, with all the different breeds mixed together. Someone even painted the mailbox with a rainbow and the Rainbow Dairy title.

You couldn't convince him of that, though. As my husband always says, Don't waste your breath. So when my husband and I were on a long-awaited trip half way around the world, and I was checking FIL's bank account on someone's personal computer, I found a check for $11,000 waiting to be cleared on insufficient funds. Yes, he bought overpriced Jerseys while we were away, and yes, I transferred money to cover it. The Jerseys are almost all sold off now, since several of them never calved. My nephew, who can do embryo transplants, refuses to get involved.

The milking machine was supposed to be based on the human hand instead of on suction, as dairy milkers are today. So I found dozens more similar patented inventions from one hundred years ago. The problem was, that the pressure from a rolling milker, if not calibrated properly, could tear the teat from a cow's udder, and no dairyman was willing to have these machines tested on their herds. Since this invention was third on his list, and he abandoned the other two due to lack of interest on the part of everyone he knows, he hasn't yet attempted to resurrect this one.

He also invented a teat dip that decreased the somatic cell count and mastitis in our herd--or was it that my nephew had taken over milking and kept the barn and animals spotlessly clean? He won't admit to that possibility, and he wants to patent his teat dip, but he didn't keep any records.

He has spent years and years and tens of thousands of dollars not only on these inventions, but on others such as the labor-intensive manure system (most of the labor spent unplugging pipes), feeders, a novel barn design (the barn collapsed after 30 years, the most inconvenient building I've ever been in), feeding programs with acidophilus and that magic elixir, iodine, etc. etc.

He may have occasionally come up with good ideas, although it's hard to tell since I have seen him take credit for things he strenuously objected to, to begin with. One example was working on installing generators on the local dam when he was on the board of directors, but like I say, it's hard to tell if it really was his idea. In later years he convinced on of his sons-in-law to take him to visit the Indian tribes at the headwaters of our watershed and tried to sell them on the same idea, as only the obsessive can do. The Indian tribes did not respond to his idea, regrettably.

His most useful development was an open pollinated variety of tomato he planted year after year and which locally bears his name, although gardener reviews of heritage tomato varieties noted the following: "Flavor was not overwhelming. Could have just been a bad year but I never grew it again." "Planted about 3 plants and got quite a few from them til the heat and stink bugs set in. I didn't note anything special about them except that the 'big red' notation didnt fit the tomato." Reviews are from several years ago, and the seed is difficult to find, if at all.

In all cases, the reason he did these things was for the good of humanity, for posterity, for the entire community and the larger world. From his perspective, one of the great tragedies of his life, no doubt, is that no one recognizes or responds to his sacrifice for all our sakes.

Rube Goldberg redux

". . . (It) doesn't matter what the work is, if he's doing it, by definition it's more important than anything you could possibly do." - Joanna Ashmun

As I mentioned before, my father in law once told me he was a genius. He really believed it, even though he would sometimes refer to his "Rube Goldberg contraptions" in a fit of false modesty. He had the expectation that if he wanted you to share in his work and triumph, you would be happy and willing to spend hours every day making sure his contraptions somehow made it out of vision into reality under his divine guidance.

When my husband realized how much of his time was being used up this way, he stopped letting it happen. My nephew, too, realized that all that talk never led anywhere, and stopped listening.

So FIL went elsewhere to get feedback--to engineers who told him it wouldn't work (which made him more determined), and engineers who told him it was an "interesting idea" in order to end the conversation, which gave him great hope; to machine shops in town, where he spent thousands of dollars having ancient engines "customized;" to friends he invited to participate in his great triumph, who now don't come around anymore; to college faculty members who must not have rewarded him with sufficient encouragement, since he didn't go back after the first visit.

I've mentioned already the manure communitor and the two embryo transplant Herefords, but that's just a partial list of his grandiosity coming to fruition.

After MIL died and FIL realized he had money, he asked me (captive audience at the time) to "advise" him on how he should spend it. He had three things in mind: (1) a "lightning machine" to trap nitrous oxides from engine exhaust as a fertilizer for his garden and pastures; (2) a perfect milking cow in one generation of embryo transplants, since artificial insemination really hadn't done anything to improve the Holstein breed, and (3) an alternate type of milking machine modeled on the human hand.

(Continued in next post)

FIL leaves home

My father in law gets teary eyed talking about his older brother (he had one brother and six sisters) and how wonderful it would have been if they had been able to work on the family farm together.

But I find out from his sisters that FIL was the family's black sheep. The father was sick and died young, but ornery until then. The mother depended on her sons to keep a high altitude, short-season farm going. FIL didn't finish high school until he got back from the war. Then he went on to get a college education on the GI bill.

What discipline he got was from spending time in the military during WWII. Even then, his stories of those years are of a willful young man who took risks without worrying about the consequences. He does tend to live in the present, and he still takes risks.

When the war ended, he discovered he liked living in warmer places, and to his credit, left home so he could grow warm-season crops. He never looked back. From what his sisters say, they didn't think he'd make much of himself, and were later surprised when he and his wife managed to raise a family of decent hard working children and hang on to the farm long enough to see it prosper under their son's management. I must add here that in talking to an old-timer friend of ours, who worked in a local retail shop and knew most everyone in town for decades, referred to my husband's family as poor. "Everyone was poor then," my sister-in-law said. "No," this sweet little lady protested. "Your family was poor."


Poor as in, the farm, all 320 acres and a 50-cow dairy, was never enough to even pay the bills, until my husband came back and took over the work and management.

Sometimes risks do pay off, in this case buying land as it came available without a single thought of how it would be paid for or who would do the work. My FIL has been a lucky man.

Producing Income

There were many "a-ha" moments when I first read through Joanna Ashmun's compassionate observations of narcissistic people. One of them was Strange Work Habits.
http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/traits.html

"Narcissists can put in a shocking amount of time to very little effect. This is partly because they have so little empathy that they don't know why some work is valued more highly than other work, why some people's opinions carry more weight than others'. They do know that you're supposed to work and not be lazy, so they keep themselves occupied. But they are not invested in the work they do -- whatever they may produce is just something they have to do to get the admiration and power they crave. Since this is so, they really don't pay attention to what they're doing, preferring the easiest thing at every turn, even though they may be constantly occupied, so that narcissists manage to be workaholics and extremely lazy at the same time. Narcissists measure the worth of their work only by how much time they spend on it, not by what they produce. They want to get an A for Effort. . . . "

My husband is known for being able to work most men under the table. He likes to keep himself busy, but more importantly, he knows how to work smart, most efficiently, and to direct how it gets done by using peoples' best talents.

When we first started farming we were under the impression that my husband's father had a good work ethic. FIL did stay out from morning until night and was exhausted at the end of the day. He would always show up late at meetings. His children remember being embarrassed weekly from always arriving late at church.

There is something to be said about someone willing to go out and do something, even if it isn't very productive. It's better than trying to get a couch potato to get off the couch. My husband knew after years of practice how to direct his father's labor so that at least some of it was productive. As the farm began to generate more and more of an income, MIL directed more and more of it to FIL.

It came to the point that he was being paid a very high sum well into his seventies, even though they were both collecting Social Security and she had a tidy income off of a big inheritance from her mother. I finally went to talk to her about how the expenditure could be justified.

She said it was because he worked so hard, for so long, every day. I knew from my husband and children, who helped him milk the cows, that he wasted a lot of time and resources at the task, to the point that I told him my children would be coming home at 7:30 pm whether milking was done or not.

Then I proceeded to outline his day to her. How much time he spent in his garden, how much time he spent in his non-productive hobbies such as "fixing" the manure ponds for the last 30 years, and his crackpot inventions. Milking the cows had been underwritten for 20 years (since my husband stopped doing it) by a hired person who could do the job alone; in effect, subsidizing the enormous amount of money he got for doing the same job. Not only that, but many of their household bills were taken care of using the farm checkbook.

If you asked him, he would tell you it was his "genius" (his word, honest,) that made the farm what it was, and thus deserving of not only respect but lots and lots of money. This is what happens when someone's imaginary, grandiose world is encouraged and supported by his enablers, who are then rewarded with a more peaceful life. It is a devil's bargain and a distortion of reality.

It finally got through to MIL that her husband's dirty, smelly clothes were a result of hours and hours of time spent in activities that had never and would never produce income. I even had arguments with FIL in which he insisted that his importance was above producing income (such a petty subject); his importance was related in some way to the concept of research and development. (See above paragraph about "hobbies.") Having one person in a three-person operation devoted to R&D is very, very expensive.

MIL was finally convinced that they had sucked enough out of the farm (I discovered at her death it was approximately half a million in about a dozen years) so they didn't need to take quite so much anymore.

The proof was when our nephew, who joined the partnership a year following MIL's death, took over the milking. It was a fight, of course, and they had to threaten FIL to keep him out of the barn. It wasn't his love of milking; he was constantly exhausted, and had been saying for more than a decade that he wanted to retire. What was really happening was that he didn't want to be proven unessential, which was what he had been for many years; he didn't want to give up his "control."

My nephew wanted several years of records of dumped tanks of milk because of high bacterial count or antibiotics, due to his grandfather's essential lack of cleanliness and attentiveness. My nephew and I came to believe that FIL's contribution was oftentimes a deficit, since someone else had to take time out of their day to clean up after him and compensate for his poor judgment. Besides the income lost from dumped milk and wrecked equipment.

He is good at vegetable gardening, but more on that later.

We threaten to leave

Ten years into it, we were raising our children in the house we built. I quit my job when my second daughter was born, and times were pretty lean, although we had plenty to eat. We grew a big garden and I canned hundreds of jars of tomatoes and beans and jam. On a dairy, at least, you can subsist. We survived a time of high inflation and paid off the bills that had earlier threatened to overwhelm us.

FIL had one leg shorter than the other, blamed on something that happened with horses while he was growing up. He walked with a decided limp and had one shoe sole built up. They wanted to do a hip replacement but because he was so obviously willful that it would be a mistake to let him pull it out by trying to push himself harder, they decided to let him suffer a few years more to get him to believe he needed time to recover.

He could hardly walk the year before his surgery, and he would have been in a wheelchair the rest of his life without it. By this time, my children were a great help to their father, so they did most of the work without any help from their grandfather at all.

Once when his parents were out of town, my husband dug into the financial records hidden under the landing. In an inspection of these, it became apparent that not only were they paying off the debts in their name with money my husband and children were generating, they were paying themselves half again more than we were getting.

It was all too much for me, and even for my husband, who had thus far been extraordinarily patient and unwilling to discuss things. But his legendary patience sometimes runs out. We had a meeting with them, and we threatened to leave.

In looking back over the meetings we had trying to set things right and fair and honest and open, it occurred to me only many years later that this was not how a partnership was supposed to run. Financial decisions were made arbitrarily and in secret. My MIL was so untrusting that she would not give us information we needed to do what needed to be done.

She obviously did not want her husband to know much of anything, even though in financial discussions his eyes glazed over and all he wanted to know was how much cash there was on hand. He was not interested in the financial consequences of decision making, or tax matters, or estate matters. All he was told was that there was no money, and not to ask.

It would take another fifteen years to gain MIL's trust. My husband talked to her daily, and eventually she and he became a decision making team that allowed things to progress in a way that never could have happened otherwise. This was only after the baleful effects of Sister Twin's taking up residence nearby, and the attendant and merciless criticism of my husband and his supposed manipulation and deceit in trying to take over the farm, were shown to be projections of her own desires to do so.

Still, I was worried about FIL's temper when it came to these meetings. I need not have feared. We geared the meetings unconsciously, it seemed, toward flattering his importance, something he could not resist. He responded by agreeing to everything we said. He couldn't help himself.

So they gave in to our ultimatum. Unless they wrote up partnership papers and provided some sort of estate plan that gave us eventual ownership of the farm, we would sell our house and find employment elsewhere. Of course it was my MIL who followed through on the legalities, since FIL's time was spent more importantly with other things, like trying to get someone else to unclog his Rube Goldberg manure system.

We were the gravy train, and when faced with their secure future pulling out when FIL couldn't even walk, they finally agreed to go to the lawyers and did what should have been done years before.

The youngest sister

My husband's youngest sister was a change of life baby. She was one year old when we were married and came to farm. The next sister was 16 years older, a senior in high school when we got there, and soon gone. So the youngest was raised as an only child, except for her older brother, my husband, 24 years her senior, who for all intents and purposes was not only a brother to her but who gave her a father's wisdom she has called upon all her life.

My MIL was able to raise this baby with all the enjoyment, love and affection she had not been able to give her earlier children. As the youngest sister, she was petted and coddled and expected to be the glue that helped keep the wayward parts of the family together. It was a weight this beautiful girl, smart and sane and sensitive and loving, never should have had to bear, and it nearly destroyed her before she was able to get away, following her through therapy, Prozac, and finally to a happy family life of her own.

A few years after we started farming, the Sister Twin moved up the road into an abandoned basement (now condemned) with her husband and several young children. She was married at 19 to a shy, academic, local young man. He had grown up farming and even with a college degree believed that all he could do was farm, even though he was allergic to alfalfa and disliked livestock in general and working with his father in law in particular. He never really was very successful at it, finally finding other sorts of work that suited him better before he was killed at age 39 when his pickup was hit by a train.

But the Sister Twin wanted to farm, mostly because we were already there and didn't deserve to be. Sister Twin would go every morning to her mother's with her children and stay all day, even into the night, so that when her husband came home for dinner, it was to his mother in law's. My MIL, who had never learned boundaries, was helpless once again, and the pattern continued for years.

Eventually Sister Twin and her family, now with six children, moved about 20 minutes away, which was not far enough. We found out later that every day after school she would call her youngest sister and complain about her life, that she shouldn't have to take care of so many children, and that the youngest sister didn't deserve to be happy without her and should come help her.

Our oldest daughter was 2 1/2 years younger than the youngest sister, and they were like sisters to each other. With one problem: my daughter was asked by her young aunt to accompany her often, but when these trips ever included the Sister Twin, I could count on the fact that my daughter would never, ever be home when I asked. It was sometimes half a day late, and it came to the point that I refused to let her go anymore. I didn't realize at the time whose fault this was, but the youngest sister was caught, unhappy, and afraid of my anger.

I know now how it happened. After MIL passed away from cancer, my husband and I began to realize the ferocity of Sister Twin's hostage taking, and since her mother, her original hostage, was gone, she would now start on the youngest sister and her oldest daughter. This, in fact, happened very quickly. Our warning to the youngest sister's husband, a protective and straight-arrow male, helped put a stop to it.

I've apologized to the youngest sister for the tug-of-war over my daughter, who I realize now was her thread of sanity when she was forced to spend time with the Borderline sister. She has forgiven me, as she does everyone, although she has not yet let the Sister Twin visit her family home in spite of pressure from her father to not be so unforgiving.

She does let her father come, out of respect to the memory of her beloved mother; he believes himself to be a good father, even though he threatened and bullied her all of her life and had continual arguments with her mother. For a year after she left home, until she had therapy, she wished and dreamed he would die, to her great and understandable mortification.

Getting Awards

My husband has an aversion to getting recognition for what he does, with one exception: He wants the farm to look good, and it does. He has an artist's eye and an understanding that something that is efficient, well run and organized is usually appealing and attractive.

I've discovered that some of his behaviors are a reaction to the excesses of his narcissistic parent.

One of his father's excesses is a need for external recognition that is sought oh so subtly. This is a common behavior of narcissists. I noticed it when my MIL kept asking me to type up applications for awards on the computer. She never learned to use a computer, believing she might become addicted to it (she was probably right in that) and had an old, impossible Royal typewriter that was painful to type on.

So I typed up many of her hand written applications for her husband's years of award-getting. I now understand why she did this: to pacify him, to provide him with Narcissistic Supply, to make life more livable for herself.

Some of these awards he had little to do with, but gave no credit to my husband, who as I said, had no interest in being recognized. There were environmental awards for keeping waste water out of the irrigation systems, awards for milk production, a Golden Years award for being 50 years in the dairy industry, and picture after picture of him in the newspaper. All carefully preserved in scrapbooks, or framed and mounted, lining the walls of his house. It makes him look like he was admired and appreciated and has made such a difference.

The strangest thing he has hanging on the wall is a 4H contributor thank-you plaque. Anyone who pays premiums for 4H activities gets a thank you card and a pressboard plaque.

When our children started out with their first baby lambs in 4H, we wanted to contribute back to the 4H County Fair program by sponsoring other peoples' children by buying their livestock at auction. FIL refused, however, saying we could spend our own money if we wanted, but not the farm money. As far as I know, he has never contributed to the County Fair as a sponsor, even though his own children showed animals at the fair for years.

As soon as we got hold of the checkbook, we began participating in fair auctions annually. Sometimes we had neighbors buy for us, and we would send the check in later. We always got sweet signed cards from the young people we bought the animals from, usually with a picture, sometimes with a wall plaque.

FIL has one of these hanging on his wall. It was most certainly not addressed to him, except by mistake. He most certainly did not write the check out, and would have objected to writing one. But he still hangs the plaque on his wall thanking him for participating in the 4H Fair auction. Perhaps if he realized he could have had more plaques lining his walls, he would have participated all that time ago.

It's an award, after all, and he deserves it.

Spending Money

My mother in law kept the books in an obsessive, secretive way. I was only able to figure out her motivations after her death. She never let her husband have cash in his pocket, which caused problems when we drove him places he wanted to go and we had to pay for everything. After her death, the money she had saved and invested became the object of his obsessive admiration.

Because of how she told her husband only part of the truth, (for example, how much money was in the farm accounts,) the farm was able to survive. To her credit, she was as honest as she could be under the petty tyranny she lived under.

My father in law is not only appallingly greedy, he loves spending other peoples' money and is very tight with his own. He has only a rudimentary clue of how economics work at all, thinking of budgeting as something someone else should take care of.

Whenever my husband and mother in law were gone more than 24 hours at the same time, it was a standing family joke that my father in law (FIL) would go to an auction and put too much money down on useless equipment.

I remember one thing he bought for $7,000, a comminutor, a machine that breaks up solids so you can run it through a manure system. He thought he was inventing an earth-shattering new process that would revolutionize the industry (much, much more on his crackpot inventions later) so he spent hours and hours of time and thousands and thousands of dollars pursuing this while leaving the day to day grind to others.

Needless to say, the comminutor was a bust, never used, and he sold it discounted to the next person. Someone made money on the deal, but it wasn't him.

He also bought two Hereford cows (not dairy cattle) for breeding purposes. The first was named Pansy and the second Pansy 2. Both were undersized and bought for more money than they were worth. This would have been funny if it wasn't such a waste. He was going to use egg implantation to carry forth the Holstein breed using Hereford surrogates. My husband would have refused, except that FIL can never figure out how to do anything by himself. He never called anyone to do the implanting, never prepared the cows for implantation, etc. etc. He usually just expected my husband to follow through on all this for him so he could take credit for the miraculous results.

Consequently, the Herefords had regular calves by regular bulls and were sold soon thereafter, for no profit, naturally.

Three years before she died, MIL took her husband's farm checkbook away from him because he would write checks on invoices, which messed up the bookkeeping, (which by then was my responsibility,) or wrote checks for personal items, etc. etc. The Sister Twin got wind of this and told everyone that I and my husband had taken away his checkbook and wasn't it awful and how mean we were.

Immoral and Bad

It became apparent early on that some things were important to my father in law, including the need to be obeyed immediately and without question. Anytime you disagreed with him, you were to considered reprehensible not because you were seeing things in a different way, but because you were immoral and a bad son for not adopting his view. This in spite of the fact that the way he did things was often unproductive and lacking in efficiency and common sense.

It is characteristic of narcissists that they do not ask questions unless they have to, because this means they are vulnerable and need something. It also means you have failed in your duty to read their divine mind. Instead of "Will you please pass the sugar?" they will make the audible statement, "This cereal needs sugar," and then expect you to run get the sugar bowl for them. In this way they assert their divinity and your subservience.

If he said something like, this portion of the pasture isn't being properly watered, it meant that he was not only giving you responsibility for all the pastures being properly watered, but that he would take credit for everything you did right. And blame you for anything that went wrong, even if it was his fault.

A pretty sweet way to get through life, to be justified in everything you do, and always have someone handy to blame things on when anything goes wrong.

It's Not Their Fault

When it comes to family dynamics, a parent has a difficult balance in giving each child individual attention while treating all the children with fairness and equanimity.

When a parent is narcissistic, nothing the parent does or says makes sense until the child realizes that the family dynamic is all a sacrifice to this parent's ego. The family direction and resources are not dedicated to the education and promotion of the children; the resources including the mother's time and efforts and the children themselves are to be expended for the benefit of the narcissist.

In this family, a set of twins, a boy and a girl, was added to three older siblings, two girls and a boy. These three older ones were cheerful and obedient and helpful.

What I have been told is that the twin girl was sad from an early age, and the twin boy negative. This is how they are now. Their neediness and dependency put great pressure on the growing family, especially since the mother, an only child whose father was killed when she was two, and whose mother never remarried, was unprepared for the challenge of a large family, especially since she got little help from her husband.

It was obvious that the twins were the problem children in the family. The excuse was that they grew up in the sixties, so it wasn't their fault.

They are a year younger than I am. I grew up in a very large city where the sixties were a full-blown force to be reckoned with. It was not easy, but I did not grow up sad or negative. These two grew up on a farm, isolated by time and space from any sixties radicalism to be spoken of, and even now their struggles and never ending needs and complaints are explained away by the surviving parent as the result of their growing up in the sixties. It's Not Their Fault.

Family gatherings

When I was growing up, most of my father's extended family lived close by. He had two brothers and one sister, and our cousins were a joy.

(My mother had one younger brother who was a fighter pilot in Viet Nam and ended up living in Oklahoma and then getting divorced. We were never close to those three cousins, two boys and a girl. One of the boys and the girl eventually took their own lives. My uncle remarried happily but then died in his 60s of bone cancer.)

We had the 4th of July at our house, which had a big back yard across the fence from scrubby hills. An uncle would take us on walks try to scare us along the way with his stories. We had a barbecue and lit fireworks until everyone had to go home.

For Christmas Eve, we crowded into my grandmother's little apartment and had a family buffet. My father's family was smart and funny and quiet, so you would hear murmuring with punctuations of laughter. Such a nice atmosphere. My grandmother wouldn't give it up even when she was near the end of her life.

It took roping and hog-tying to get my husband's family together. There was no gathering of family except on Christmas Day at my in-laws, and that was sporadic and disjointed. So we started the 4th of July and the Christmas Eve traditions at our house. We had 35 or 40 for dinner, except for the sulky adults who felt slighted for the evening and either sat in a parked car in front of the house or stayed in bed at home daring someone to come get them.

For the 4th was barbecue and homemade raspberry ice cream(the raspberries were ripe and I had plenty of cream) and fireworks. It was often cold, windy or even rainy, and more than once we lit fireworks in the driveway while we sat bundled in the carport. For Christmas Eve we had a Nativity scene, complete with sheep and camels and angels, and there were children running up and down the basement stairs, and food scattered in all the rooms. Until eventually, everyones' family grew old enough that they started their own traditions.

My mother in law added a Midsummer Eve's pancake dinner on the wood stove outside by the grapevines in her yard, and a Thanksgiving clam chowder open house in her kitchen. Everyone behaved themselves (except for the sulky ones sitting in the car) and surprised themselves by having a good time.

At events like this my father in law usually sat quietly by without offering to do or say much of anything. I found out decades later from FIL's younger sister that in growing up, their family did not have any holiday traditions, either, and it was apparent that my MIL and her widowed mother were a stranger to them as well.

My instincts serve me well

I never thought of myself as an intuitive person, being by nature logical, but I had to develop my instincts as a mother. When you have five active children under the age of nine, it is an essential skill to develop. It is a constant listening, a reconnoitering, knowing where your children are at any given moment, at least until they are old enough to watch after themselves.

We knew of a young family where the parents were both killed. The sister and brother in law flew immediately to where the children were, put them on the plane, and took them home. It was proximity that eventually gave them legal guardianship of the children.

Early in our marriage, before they were all born, I knew that if anything happened to my husband and me, I did not want my in laws raising my children. I did not like how my youngest sister in law was treated by her father, I did not like the stories I heard about how he beat his children with whatever was at hand, and how he said things to them like, "Your best isn't good enough." I didn't want my children to ever be devastated by hateful things coming out of a parent's mouth, although they heard such things from their grandfather. We were able to mitigate and turn these into life lessons.

I did not want my children to have the same experiences I heard about. I wrote a holistic (handwritten) will giving the guardianship of our children to one of my sister's families or one of my husband's sisters. I hid it in my desk drawer for many years.

Fortunately it was not used, and I finally told my husband about it. He nodded his head and said it was a good idea.

We raise five children

We had five children in nine years, two girls and three boys. They have been a revelation to me. My husband and I are constantly amazed and gratified by the lives they live, their talents, the people they married, and the way they are raising their children. I don't know how we were so lucky, but we are.

I remember the years we spent with little children and no money as full of sunshine and hard work, swimming and canoeing in the pond, sliding down the ditches in the hot sun, setting up tents under the trees in the back yard, hoeing in the garden, canning hundreds of jars of tomatoes and beans and grape juice and jam. I knitted and sewed and quilted and wrote in my journal and played with my beautiful babies.

Twenty five years after my last baby was born, I don't have as much time any more, even though my children have grown up and gone. Maybe it is because it was mostly before computers took over our lives.

Our children were raised within a stone's throw of the narcissist grandfather and the personality disordered aunt and uncle. The grandfather they learned to avoid as much as possible, since they had to milk the cows with him once a week. As adults they endure him with a certain exasperated constraint. Their grandmother was like an interesting character out of a story book, whose excruciating 55-year role was to mitigate the strangeness of their grandfather. She showered all her grandchildren with affection and good conversation. The aunt and uncle twins are (then and now) understood to be wacky and irrational.

One thing for certain, my children can handle knot-headed people they come across in their lives.