End of the School Year

We are finally at the end of what has seemed like a very long school year!

I must take a moment to thank my parents for all of their help!

My dad's wife picks up my son every Tuesday from school. She and grandpa have dinner with him and bring him home. This is very special, consistent time for him - and he really enjoys it!

My mother has picked up the kids 2-3 times a week throughout the year. She has the doctor, taken them to the park - you name it. We have a long drive every morning to school, so I know it is a labor of love for her to come all the way from her house, to both schools, back to our house and then back to her house. (Several hours of driving each day.)

Mom, I couldn't have done it without you!

I feel so blessed to have such wonderful parents - and I know the kids are extra blessed to have amazing Grandparents.

It was a long, hard year, with many challenges we did not expect - but we made it. Apart from a good, strong family, I don't think there is anything more important than education. Thank you to my family for all their help making sure the kids get a good one!

I am also grateful to my ex-husband for paying for it! There were times I didn't think we would make it, but we did! We had not counted on this expense - nearly $30,000!!!! - but when my former father-in-law backed out of his commitment to send the kids to school, their dad made it work. So, that is one thing to be grateful about for sure!

I wish my husband's family would have spent more time, money and attention on their children while they were children. It would have been less expensive in the long-run than drugs, alcohol, rehabs, and therapy. When you let a child grow up in peace and with love, there is a lot less likelihood that they will grow up with psycological or addiction problems. And, oftentimes in a dysfuctional family, education is your only way out.

My wish for every child is that they can obtain the same quality of education my children have been able to get so far. My feeling is that if we reallocated our military budget to our schools, and fostered the growth in our own children instead of mutilating and killing other children, the world would be an entirely different place.

Some Thoughts on Death

Another day at the hospital with my grandmother and her death is bringing up so many things for me.

My husband has tried to be very supportive of me and I appreciate that. But I can not help but remember how he responded while my grandpa was dying.

I thought I had gotten over that, but I have not. I still am resentful. I think, why is he suddenly being so nice now when we are nearly divorced? But years ago, when I was his wife, who had been with him through the recent death of his mother, bore him 2 children and suffered a miscarriage - in the midst of caring for my dying grandfather - and he told me to "Get off the cross - someone needed the wood."

Yesterday a woman that I adore from church, who is much older than me and has known my grandparents for 30 years, told a story that also probably brought back that memory.

She talked about how after her second divorce, she decided to rename herself. And she took away her middle and last names, and gave herself the middle name of the daughter she had miscarried and a new last name.

It was a beautiful name.

That resonated so well with me. I still think about that child a lot, and to me, she was a girl, and she would have been named Grace.

My grandmother and I spoke today about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today and their utter meaninglessness to both of us - and that was another resentment that came up for me strongly. We here in the United States cling on to our own lives so dearly. We will do anything to avoid dying. And yet we seem to have no problem with the deaths of "others" who we perceive to be so different from us.

I remember when I was in Lebanon, one of the hardest things for me to deal with was the death of my first husband's childhood best friend. He was only 8-years-old when the Israeli soldiers killed him.

I will never forget going to his parents home with H. The way his father sobbed. And then I sobbed, and H sobbed. But I could not stop.

I remember that my sister-in-law came to me in my room after hours of this. She took me square by the shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Everyone dies. Everyone dies."

I have never forgotten those words. I have never forgotten how senseless his death felt. And I think if more Americans saw that, they would realize that war is never a good idea.

My sister-in-law's words have carried me through a lot of deaths though over the years. And she was right about that. We have a culture here in the US that does not acknowledge or accept death. But death is inevitable for all of us.

The combination of the fear of death and medicine for profit is a very bad mix.

I also spoke to my grandma about my other grandma today. I spoke to her at length last night. She told me again that she plans to just be here and happy with all of us one week and be "gone" the next. She refused chemotherapy or any other treatment. She just wants to be as healthy as possible naturally as long as she can and then she will chose her time.

My grandma thought that was horrible, but I relate to that more. I don't want to live on 15 medications on a good day. That is not life. My grandma is nearly 93-years-old. Some of the things they are suggesting for her are insane. That's not even humane in my mind. But she is afraid. And fear makes for good profits.

The only conclusions I can draw is that all of us have worth. And, we all die.

I adore both my grandmothers. I adore that boy that died just from the words of his family and the love of that first husband had for him.

None of us has greater or lesser worth. The death of one person is just as painful for their loved-ones as my grandmothers deaths will be for me.

There is no sense in death. You just have to make peace with it.

And I can accept the deaths of the matriarchs of my family. But I know how hard for me it has been to lose a child that essentially never even existed. I have never been able to make peace with wars that kill children who do.

Prayer Flags

We headed to church yesterday after a few weeks off from our beach and camping trips. I'm very glad we did because we had a special service where we all created prayer flags.

They team up all the kids with elderly people in the church so they all have a special friend called a Grand-Friend. My son's Grand-Friend was out of town, so they teamed him up with another woman. My daughter is too young for this program, so we went to sit with them and we made our flags. She was a lovely woman who had recently moved here with her husband from the Bay Area. We had a very nice talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and many, many books. I have just finished re-reading A Farewell to Arms, and I had forgotten how good (and funny and sad) parts of it were. There were also a lot of good quotes on war. "There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."

We talked about the book and some of the other books I have for the kids, one being Why War is Never a Good Idea by Alice Walker. She has grandkids so she wanted to check them out.

She did a flag for peace. My son did two flags. One said, "Dear God, thank you for the Earth and for food." The other read, "Dear God, thank you for our bodies and fun."

My daughter scribbled on three and asked me to write "Daddy" on them.

Afterwards we put all the flags together on a long string and hung them up outside. We said a special prayer together and went back into the sanctuary to finish the service.

We took a look at the vegetable garden and could not believe how big some of them had gotten! The cucumbers were enormous! It is looking more and more like a real garden. The vegetable garden is a project the kids have worked on to benefit the food bank at our church.

My dad came over to take my son on a bike ride, and my daughter and I had a quiet afternoon.

Yesterday was a hard day for me. I have not been sleeping well, so I don't think that's been helping. Sometimes I can just forget about everything and enjoy my life in spite of it, and other days everything just hits me hard.

When we talked about the different kinds of prayer in church, all the kids said what they did when they prayed. Most of them talked about praying with their fathers. Somehow that just hit me. I have a lot of memories of praying with my dad. We always said grace before meals and he came and said a prayer with me every night before bed. It just made me really sad.

The kids had wanted to call their dad in the morning, but he didn't answer. They tried a few times and then I sent him a text letting him know they were trying to call him. No response all day. I texted him again in the early evening and was like, are you planning to talk to your kids today? Finally he called around 7 and couldn't understand why I wasn't thrilled. I told him it wasn't just not talking to him today, they hadn't seen him all week. He started with the excuses, and I told him that he didn't see them break down over it and he had no idea what it was like. He said I need to be more supportive of him. I told him I was as supportive of him as I could be right now. He's still in San Francisco with his friends.