How Do You Say Goodbye?

It has been a long time since I posted. I didn't know what to write, where to start. I had so many things going on inside me, yet I felt empty. I feel empty. My daughter is gone.

My sons are gone too, but in their case I can be big about it and hope that they have a super summer with their dad. And pray that he lets them come back home. Last time he didn't, but it took a long time for him to get this second chance, so for the boys' sake I hope he returns them to me. I will be on pins and needles until I get them back on August 28th. I miss them, but I have to believe that they will come home to me. 

My daughter is a different matter altogether. I miss her too, but even more because I know she won't be coming home at the end of the summer. She has made her decision. She is going to stay and go to school in Hungary. She is going to live with her dad. She doesn't want to live with me. How did we ever reach this point? How could this happen?

My baby girl and I used to be thick as thieves. Mommy and Daughter. The Girls. We did everything together and we had fun doing it. How could I lose her after all that? The only answer I can come up with is that I lost. I was the weaker one. The loser. My husband is strong. He used every trick in the book. Parental alienation. He turned her against me. I lost.

Sometimes I think I should have fought back more. But what more could I do? I told her I loved her. I kissed her goodnight. I showed her I loved her. I showed her I wanted to do things with her. Did that not disprove all the nasty things Dad said about me? I guess not. At the airport, she didn't even want to give me a kiss good-bye. Not even a hug. She was like a horse with blinders on. Looking forward. We were at JFK but she was already in Hungary, living with Dad. What kind of a mother doesn't even get a good-bye from her child when they won't see each other again for a year? What kind of a mother doesn't get a single tear, a single "I"ll miss you?"

Needless to say, I haven't been very joyful now that I am alone. Not at all. Too busy sitting on the couch and staring into space, I haven't done a heck of a lot. But yesterday I left the apartment for the first time. And today I sat down to blog.

I have come to the realization that there was nothing I would have done differently. I wish to God I hadn't lost my daughter, but I wasn't going to stoop to her father's level to fight for her. That is why I lost. I am reminded of something a german theologian (his name escapes me just now) wrote: "God doesn't preserve us from all hardship, but he preserves us in all hardship." What I am going through now, what I have been going through the last few months and indeed the last two years, certainly qualifies as hardship. When my mother found out the kids are going to see their father again, she got angry at me for not telling them about him. About all the things that he has said and done. About the kind of person he really is. She said she would tell them. We had to fight fire with fire. But I wouldn't let her. As I said before, I wasn't going to stoop to his level. He may not understand what it does to a child when you badmouth their mother to them, but I do. This is all I have in my defense. I stayed true to myself. True to my values. I fought hate with love. I lost, but I didn't cave. I know who I am and who I want to be. I only wish my daughter saw it too.

Hello Again

For the second time in a row, I got a "Hello" today when I dropped my daughter off at school. The first time was Friday. (Yesterday was a planning day, so no school.) Today, another "Hello" as she got out. How long will this lucky streak last? (There are eight more days of school before vacation. Dare I hope?...)

My Daughter said "Hello" (!!!)

Hello All,

My apologies for my prolonged absence. Things have been so bad and stressful and difficult, I just didn't feel I should come online and be the Voice of Doom. Things have been HARD.

This morning, though, a ray of sunshine through the clouds: for the first time EVER, my daughter replied to my "Have a nice day" with something other than the slamming of the passenger side car door: she said "Hello." (In Hungarian, hello is used as a general greeting. You say it when you come up to people, but also when you take leave of them.)

I have no doubt that this was a consequence of yesterday's meeting with our social worker. It was a pretty heavy meeting, with a lot of hard things said. Basically, it was an hour and a half of bawling. I had a migraine headache for hours afterwards and my eyes hurt for the rest of the day, until I finally went to bed and sleep restored them to their almost-normal state.

I think yesterday my daughter finally got a sense of what marriage to her dad had been like for me. Without badmouthing him (that's against my values!) I finally made her understand that I didn't leave him on a whim: I had my very legitimate reasons. So today I finally got an acknowledgment to my "Have a nice day." It's a big step.

Some of the stuff that came out in yesterday's meeting has me so outraged that I feel like I might explode, but I won't dwell on that now. Today's post shall remain a happy one. This morning was a small victory. A Small Miracle. :o)

Moment of Truth

My free yoga classes are all used up. I can't afford to pay for yoga classes. I only earn them by doing a seva (volunteering). I won't get any more unless I am called in if one of the sevas cancels.

That means I have to start doing yoga on my own at home, to be responsible for my own practice.

For the past few weeks, I have been very good about doing yoga at least once a week, usually I even got to the yoga centre twice in a week.

Can I keep it up on my own? We shall see and time will tell. My intention is there...

Wish me luck!

Standing The Test of Time

My dad came to visit us this weekend from New Jersey. We had a nice visit and my dad told me something that made me think about how everything seems to have become much more disposable than it was in the past.

My dad was wearing a forest-green tee shirt on Sunday and he mentioned that he had bought it in the GDR (the German Democratic Republic) a few years before we moved to Canada. I was really amazed. We came to Canada in 1983. That tee shirt is over 30 years old! It doesn't show it a bit. It could be any shirt that one can buy in a department store. Or could it? Would your Zellers, Walmart or even your Sears purchase last that long? I highly doubt it. Things just aren't made to last any more.

This morning as I gave First Son his breakfast of Alpha Bits and milk, I took a good look at the spoon in my hand before I gave it to him. To the untrained eye, it would just look like any unassuming children's spoon. But I know that this spoon was my brother's when he was little. My mother saved it and gave it to me when I had children. The spoon is about 40 years old!

In my kitchen cupboard, I still have a red plastic sippy cup that my grandmother gave me for my children. They have outgrown it, but I am hanging on to it. It used to be my mom's, so it is over 50 years old.

To me, these things are pretty amazing, but it also makes me a bit melancholic. So many objects, like my son's spoon, are a part of our simple daily lives, yet they hold the stories of generations. I wonder if future generations will appreciate their simple endurance of time. They are like the stories our elders tell us, bits and pieces of the past.

I think that it is important to talk about my parents and grandparents to my children, as well as about my own childhood, but it saddens me in a way that they will never truly know how it was for us. Sometimes, on a cool summer morning like we had this morning, the freshness in the air reminds me of fresh cool mornings when I was in grade two. I remember arriving at school, looking forward to the day. Everything was cool and fresh, but there was excitement in the air because the end of the school year was only three or four weeks away. I wonder if my kids feel the same way about this morning.

First Son has taken to writing "novels" on the computer. (They are each a page or two long. lol) This morning he was typing after breakfast and he asked me if there were cars and airplanes in 1987. This made me laugh, but it also made me realize he knew nothing about what life was like when I was a child. I mean, he knows I came to Canada in 1983 on an airplane and he knows we had a car when I was little, but he can't put two and two together and see that that was my time, the time when I was a child. It's weird. Maybe it's just his age. He is only eight, after all.

I do talk to my children a lot about the past, for example when I tell my son that his uncle ate with the same spoon when he was little. I truly hope the values that are intended with comments like that will sink in, along with a little piece of myself and who am I. What we hold in our hearts is all that is left to us of the past.

The Book That Apparated

A few years ago, a little bit before Easter, I was just about to leave (I don't remember where I was going) when I noticed a book on the bench in my front hall. It was a simple green paperback with the title Pâques c'est quoi? (What is Easter?) I assumed it was from a friend of mine and put it away for later reading.

I did actually read it later and found it very interesting. It talked about the ransom, which I had never understood. I had been told before that Jesus died for our sins, and that by doing so he saved us all, but I never understood what that meant. How did that work? My first source of information about this had been my grandmother, but her explanation didn't satisfy me. She only repeated what I had already heard. For her, it was a matter of faith and she accepted it. But I didn't understand it.

This little gem of a book explained the ransom in terms that I could understand. It explained how the Israelites sacrificed lambs, goats, pigeons (etc.) to God to absolve them of their sins. The sacrificial animal had to be perfect, strong and healthy. By sacrificing the animal, the sins were taken away. In a similar way, Jesus was a sacrificial lamb. He was a perfect man, without sin. What made his sacrifice even more special was that he was God's son and God sent him to Earth with this precise purpose, that he may be sacrificed and save humankind. Jesus gave himself willingly, knowing that this was his Father's will.

After having read Pâques c'est quoi? I wanted to thank my friend for having left me the book. That's when things got a little weird. He said he hadn't left it for me! (Even though he had visited either the day of or the day before I found it in my front hall.) I trust him and I know he didn't play a trick on me. He even said that if he had left me a book, he would have left a better one. He thought that this one was too simplistic. (I may have been miffed at that comment, but I didn't mind as long as I liked the book and it helped me understand the ransom better. Maybe a more complex book would have left me just as lost and confused as before.)

Still, the question remains: where did the book come from? My friend came up with a theory, but I'm not sure I buy it, so I don't know what to think.

This all happened the year of the big OC Transpo bus strike in Ottawa. That winter, I had a friend who lived across the river but worked here in Hull. I worked in Ottawa but the strike didn't affect me because I had a parking spot and took my car to work. In the evening, I would drive home and either pick my friend up at her office or she would take the Quebec bus to my house and wait there, then I would drive her home. I didn't want her to be waiting out in the cold, so I left the side door unlocked so she could let herself in. As it was winter and very cold, I usually left the door unlocked, not wanting her to wait outside. I didn't have anything of valuable in the house, nothing that might be stolen, so I was comfortable doing this.

The theory is that I must have left the front door unlocked when I walked the dog and that I wasn't home when someone came to the door. Perhaps the door opened a bit when they knocked and they entered and perhaps called out to see if anyone was home. When no one answered, my friend thinks the person left the book on the bench and went away. This doesn't make much sense to me because if I ever left a door unlocked, it was the side door, not the front one. But the book was in my front hall.

There will never be any way of knowing. Was it someone at the door? Did the book magically apparate from somewhere? Was there divine intervention? All I know is that I must have been meant to read this book, because it was perfect for helping me to understand. Any simpler, and it may have just repeated the same things I had heard before, like a children's Bible might. Any more complex, I may have still been left in the dark. It was perfect for me, and that's all that counts. :o)

Holy Smokes! I'm Marilla Cuthbert!

I don't know wether to feel angry or relived, but mostly I feel ashamed.

Remember the Nintendo 3DS consoles the boys got from their grandparents? Remember how I posted that they took them to school without my permission and had them stolen? Remember how only First Son even fessed up to it? Remember how Anne of Green Gables confessed to having taken Marilla's broach and dropped it into the water, and how she only confessed so that Marilla would let her go to the picnic?

Need I go on?

I am going to go on. Not because I'm particularly proud of myself, but so that you, Dear Reader, will know that I always write the truth on here. I am not out to make myself look like some superhuman supermom. I won't hide the bad stuff.

The kids and I have been cleaning house and purging like crazy lately, tossing some things in the recycling and putting others aside for the garage sale next weekend. We have been digging right down to the bottoms of the closets, reaching to the darkest back ends of all our drawers. In our front hall closet - way in back and off to the side where it's hard to get at from the ridiculously small closet door opening -  was our old recycling box, the little green one that we used before the big blue bins were distributed by the city. There were a whole bunch of things in there, from my winter boots to outside toys like old badminton rackets and hai-lai bats... and First Son's black Nintendo 3DS, complete with its orange Diego protective sleeve! Ho-ly Smokes! This after he confessed to having lost it at school!

I am not ignoring the fact that Second Son's Nintendo had also been thought to be lost. That one being blue, I found a replacement on kijiji and bought it, only to later find the original at home. We ended up selling the replacement for the same price as we had bought it for. Ironically, I just found a black one to replace the one First Son lost, and I had already set up a pick-up time to go get it. Needless to say, I cancelled that.

I asked First Son why he had said that his had been stolen at school, and in the teeniest, tiniest voice imaginable, he said, "I didn't know what else to say when you kept asking where it was." Have you ever felt like a bad parent? Well, I know how it feels.

I felt so bad for First Son. I feel like I pressured him into confessing. I had to apologize to him big time.

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So ends the weird tale of two Nintendo 3DS consoles that were received, lost, replaced, unlost, almost replaced again, and found. Again.

Lesson learned? Yep. No more jumping through hoops to try to right all wrongs. The Nintendos were lost. I should have left well enough alone. We found them both in the end. They were here in the apartment all along. I could have saved myself a ton of trouble.