Category: Life changes

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

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When I was twenty-three, my marriage sank to the bottom of Lake Despair.  Okay, it hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the four years that it lasted, but I had tried to make it work for the sake of the son my husband (now ex-husband) and I shared.  Tomcat was three and a half the day our divorce was finalized.

I spent the weekend I turned twenty-three moving out of the home we had created, leaving the life we had made for ourselves behind.  He refused to sign the papers accepting service at first – he didn’t want a divorce, he said.  But here’s the thing: He’d been looking for a place to move, away from me and our son and closer to the mistress he’d been seeing for four years, closer to the son he shared with her.

The day we were scheduled to appear in court for the hearing on the stipulation, he didn’t even bother to show up.

Twenty-two

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Photo by Kay Kauffman

When I was twenty-two, my marriage was falling apart.  My life was a shambles.  But even as my marriage was ending, my brother-in-law’s was just beginning.  As my twenty-second Christmas approached, he and his fiancée asked that I take their engagement pictures, which I was happy to do.  I love photography and at that point in my life, I hoped to be able to earn a little extra money from doing something that I loved.  It didn’t work out, but maybe that’s all for the best.

Twenty-one…

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Oh, twenty-one, that eagerly-anticipated age of majority.  I’m actually not sure which age young people look forward to more, eighteen or twenty-one.  Both ages are ages of majority – at eighteen you can vote and smoke and get your driver’s license if, for some reason, you don’t have it already (because, believe it or not, I know a few other people who finished high school without one).  But at twenty-one, you can legally drink, and I know many people who anticipate this event with as much, if not more, excitement than the ability to drive.

Twenty

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When I was twenty, I returned to college.  I took a semester off when Tomcat was born and transferred my credits from Wartburg to a community college a little closer to home.  I was no longer working toward a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, but at least I was still working toward a degree.  As one of my floormates from Wartburg put it, a degree is a degree is a degree.  While it may not be the one I wanted, it’s better than no degree at all.

During my time at MCC, I was selected for their honors program, which left me speechless and flattered (okay, not truly speechless – that’s only happened once, but definitely shocked).  In order to obtain my degree with honors, I had to take several honors classes and attend a certain number of honors seminars, one of which was mentioned here.  I took honors art appreciation, honors music appreciation, and honors American Indian history.  It was either that or honors computer applications.  I thought history would be easier than computer, but I was wrong.

The professor I had for American Indian history was brilliant.

Be orange!

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My first year of college was an eventful year in more ways than I had ever anticipated.  I was the only kid in my class who dreaded high school graduation; though I was excited about the new opportunities I would have in college, I was terrified of leaving my friends behind and starting over.  A few people from my school went to the same college I chose to attend and, as a private college, it was much smaller than the state universities so the class sizes were comparable to what I’d experienced in high school.

But I was on my own, for the first time.

Entering Teen Town

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Ah, thirteen, that magical age that most parents dread.  And with good reason – the teen years are notorious for being way worse than the terrible two or troublesome threes ever dreamed of being.  My teen years were every bit as dramatic as any soap opera, and I’m sure everyone can relate.

An avid diarist, I read back through some of them once some years ago and realized that a.) as a teen, I was truly awful and b.) if my kids are anything like me, my uppance will come.  All my teenage entries were generally some sort of variation on the theme, “Blah blah blah my life is awful blah blah blah everything sucks blah blah blah no one likes me blah blah blah I am undateable blah blah blah my life is over.”

Naturally, being a teenager, there was a whole lot more swearing in there.  There were even some pictures cut out of magazines and taped in for posterity and late-night drooling.  There were also the requisite doodles of hearts and boys’ names.

Not all of this drama was of my own making, however.

Love-Me Plant Lady

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I’ve been trying to get a bunch of things done today, so I’ve been ignoring my computer.  When I finally took a few minutes to check my email, I noticed I had a new one from my aunt with some information about where I could view my cousin’s wedding pictures online (I posted a few of them back in July when I wrote about the wedding – you can read that post here).

I just finished looking at the pictures.  They were awesome!  Aaron Borchers did their wedding photography and he did an absolutely fabulous job.  But that’s not what this post is about.  As I was looking through the pictures, one member of the wedding party stood out to me (and no, I don’t mean the bride, though she was gorgeous, or the groom, who looked quite dashing in his tux).

More memories from the year I turned twelve are this-a-way! Follow me!

Old friends are the best!

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Growing up, I was the oldest kid in my neighborhood by a couple of years.  There were only a few other families with kids around as we lived in an older neighborhood.  A couple of kids were three years younger than me, a couple were five or six years younger than me, one was nine years younger than me.  The closest kid my age – my best and oldest friend, and my maid of honor both times I was married, she is awesome – lived three and a half blocks down the street.  While that wasn’t exactly far away, the situation didn’t exactly lend itself to easy visitation, either.

After my mom passed away, my dad used some of the life insurance money to replace our sidewalk (which really wasn’t sidewalk so much anymore as it was part of the yard) and to build a garage.  One day when I was eleven, my sister and I and the aforementioned best friend were riding our bikes around the newly-poured driveway and garage foundation (the garage had not yet been built).  One of the neighbor kids wandered over and wanted to play with us.  She and my sister were pretty good friends, even though my sister is four years older.  My sister has a talent for making friends – I think she was good friends with every kid in our neighborhood at one point or another.

Anyway, we decided that we didn’t want to play with her that day.  As a rule, I never wanted to play with this particular girl as she always kind of got on my nerves.  But how many people always love all their siblings’ friends?  Anyway, since we didn’t want to play with her, we told her to go home.

This didn’t go over very well. At all.

Ten is for friends

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Yesterday I wrote about my mother’s diagnosis with cancer.  Despite all the treatment she received and all the prayers said on her behalf, the cancer spread rapidly and she died the year I was ten, one short year after her diagnosis with breast cancer.

My mother was 31 years old.

I have now lived nearly two thirds of my life without my mother.  I remember her, but not as well as I would like.  I am lucky that I have had people to ask about her over the years.  She also evidently enjoyed writing, as I once found a notebook filled with poetry and a partially-used diary along with a couple of papers she wrote while in college.  I treasure these things for the insight they’ve given me into a woman I barely got the chance to know and for the insight into the child that I used to be.

Ain’t nine fine?

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As you can see from the strap around her neck, shutterbug-ism runs in my family. 🙂
Photo courtesy of Martha DeGroote

Well, no, actually.  At least, not for me.  If you thought my seventh year was bad, hold onto your hats.

When I was eight, my mom went back to school to become a medical transcriptionist.  She finished her program a year later and was offered a job at a local hospital where she had interned while studying.  But within a month, it was clear that all was not well.  A visit to the doctor, followed by a mammogram, confirmed the truth.

She had cancer.

A mastectomy was scheduled and chemo was ordered.  But with a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, a cure was a longshot.  She did everything she could to beat it.  Prayer after prayer was said by more people than I can count.

We spent a lot of time together that year, visiting places like the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend.  But we also spent much time apart, as she traveled to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for treatment.  She even got on an airplane for the first time in her life and flew to Texas to visit a childhood friend.  The time apart was hard on me, as I was very close to my mother.  But it was not as hard as what was to come.

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