Learning to Cry (5 page)

Father

I woke up in the middle of the night crying again. I felt myself shaking and couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. My dreams are always of a similar nature. They start out well, running in the fields, playing with the kids, kite surfing in the ocean (which has always been something I wanted to try), but the dreams always ends in death. Somebody dying, or getting hurt, or about to die. Somebody getting hit by a car. I see it happening in slow motion, but I can’t stop it. I can’t control it. I feel like I have lost any ability to affect my surroundings. When did I become helpless? I thought parents were in charge of their children.

Melissa entered middle school with high expectations. She struggled a little toward the end of grade school, but she was very bright. She could do whatever she set her mind to. The scary part was what she focused on at times, but at 11 years old, she was heading out on her new adventure. Cheryl had her registered for classes and made all the preparations. We both attended the meetings, but her mother had always insisted on controlling this aspect of our children’s lives. Interestingly enough, she demanded this right so firmly, yet she complained incessantly to our friends that I didn’t participate enough in their school. The irony.

Most of our marriage, she travelled. She was gone the majority of the time during the week, and the au-pair and I were left to tend to the children. I am not sure how I would have gotten by without somebody around to help at times, but then there are moments when I felt I was rearing four daughters instead of three. Granted it was different with most of our au-pairs being in their 20s, but still, they did have their limitations. As with all young adults there is the drinking aspect and the inevitable car crashes. Luckily, nobody was ever seriously hurt, but every single au-pair had at least one fender bender. One crash was actually quite extensive.

I am not sure if having the au-pairs help raise the kids was a positive in the end. Our first one stayed for two years, but all of the rest were around for only one. It seemed as soon as the kids got attached to an au-pair and developed a bond, she would leave, and a new one would show up. We really only had one bad experience, and we endured it for less than a month. We actually had to get her removed. She and Cheryl clashed from the beginning, and the au-pair had the audacity to tell the mother of my children the things she was doing wrong. She actually said to her that if she, as a woman, loved her kids, she would be at home rearing them, not off on business trips. Damn, now that was funny, but not very wise.

With our jobs going well, we jointly made the decision to purchase a vacation house up in the mountains. We had been going there for several years, normally in the fall, and had looked at several houses already. I admittedly had an alternative motive at the time. Our marriage was getting more and more rocky. I was beginning to feel we were never going to make it through the thick part of things. Through thick and thin, but we were mired for so long in the muck, I had now forgotten what the thin part felt like.

The house in the mountains felt like an opportunity to renew things.  Give all of us a fresh start. The kids enjoyed being there. Time just seemed to slow down the second you opened the door in the little town. There was skiing in the winter and a lake in the summer. We really could use the house all year round. We were also excited about the prospect of renting the house as a vacation home. The house was split in two sections, and we could use the little apartment while renting the rest of the house out. The rent should have paid for property taxes and upkeep at a minimum.

Melissa was in 7th grade, and we were packing to get ready for our weekend away. We had been several times already, but it was still new so the excitement of the preparation was fresh with anticipation. Melissa was bringing a friend with her this weekend. She had been asking since the beginning, and we finally felt it made sense. The lower level of the house was not rented so we would have plenty of room for her and anyone else, for that matter. When you added it up, our little mansion was well more than 4,000 square feet.

The little girl that was coming along as Melissa’s friend was named Shelly. We had known her for a few years now and felt comfortable with her evening out our entourage to six. Her parents were not friends of ours, but we had met them at several school functions. Shelly had spent the night at our house on numerous occasions. She spent the previous Saturday night at our house, and the girls, as always, had gotten along quite well.

Since we were not leaving until the next day, it was odd when Shelly’s mother called and asked to speak to Cheryl and me together. We tentatively got on the phone and anxiously awaited the delivery. Shelly’s mom asked us if we had noticed or seen some diamond earrings. Apparently, Shelly left them in our house when she spent the night. We both shook our heads in agreement. We had not heard anything about missing earrings. Shelly’s mother then told us that not only had Shelly told Melissa about the situation but she, Shelly’s mother, had also called Melissa, as well.

According to Shelly’s mom, Melissa’s original story went something like this: Melissa had the earrings and was bringing them to school. On Monday, when she showed up and didn’t have the earrings, she emphatically stated that she had forgotten them and would bring them the next day. On Tuesday, Melissa said she could not find the earrings. She didn’t know where they were and had not been able to locate them. Now things started getting a little hairy. The story shifted back and forth from forgetting them to not finding them on several occasions. Shelly’s mother did not care one way or the other.  She simply hoped to retrieve them because they had been her mother’s.

After a very lengthy stay on the phone, we hung up with the promise that we would attempt to figure things out. We called Mellissa into our room and began the discussion. We told her everything we knew and asked her if she could locate the earrings or if she knew where they were. She vehemently denied any knowledge and, as was now becoming her normal routine, became very defensive. After you deal with somebody for a long time period, in this case Melissa’s entire life, they develop patterns. It was easy to see that Melissa was lying. The difficulty, as always, would be trying to figure out the truth.

With kids it always seems that the real story lies somewhere in the middle. Damn, with adults you could say the exact same thing. Nobody ever seems to get a story perfectly straight. I guess if everyone looked at the same thing and perceived it precisely the same way we would never have any disagreements. Life would be simple and easy going. Sadly, we would morph into the grey zone, and we would lose our individuality. Everything has a double edge to it.

So Melissa said she had never been able to find the earrings. Not only that but her friends were now ganging up on her at school, calling her names, and making it uncomfortable to be around them. Her closest friends were all siding with Shelly, and they were pointing fingers at her, calling her a liar, and threatening her. As a parent you always want to believe your child. You never want their lives to be uncomfortable or unsafe. I just don’t get it. How can you protect them when they make it impossible to be protected?

We called Shelly’s mother back. I informed her that we would not be able to find the earrings, but I would happily pay whatever they were worth. I felt bad they had been lost. I could not figure out what happened, and we were at a dead end. Ah, if life were only that simple. Shelly’s dad got on the phone, and the situation devolved substantially from there. He was a known alcoholic and not the brightest guy on the coast. He launched into a monologue about the Korean War and how it should have been won by the United States.

You might laugh at that, but I am dead serious. He kept going on about the parallels of life and war and how we needed to protect each other. We are all on the same team, and he wondered how I could not understand this. When he had been in the war, life was simpler. He protected his friends, and they protected him. Everyone watched everyone’s back. The conversation then moved to some of his family history and how he came to live on the coast. He worked his way up to the house they now lived in, and we finally got to a conclusion. While this sounds lengthy, the conversation didn’t last more than 15 minutes.

He was obviously drunk, and nothing flowed from one topic to the next with any logic. It wasn’t like you got to the finish line and leaned your head back saying, “ahhhhhh, now I get it.” You just leaned your head back and thought, “holy shit, what the hell was that?” To sum things up, we asked Shelly and her friends to stop picking on Melissa. We offered to pay for the earrings and were told no. We endured our lecture, and at that point we all moved on. We never did have Shelly over to the house after that, but sadly this was not the end.

The next day was Friday, and school was bad. We had planned on picking Melissa up after her final period for our trip of now five people, but were called in to see the principal at lunch time. Shelly it seemed had decided to take matters into her own hands. She and some other girls, all of which we knew, had cornered Melissa and held her down while Shelly hit her and poured soda over her head. Interestingly the truth of the earrings came out, and Shelly now knew where they were, but all of the girls were caught and sent to the principal.

We happen to know the principal very well. He had been Melissa’s principal in grade school. When she had graduated, he was promoted and followed her to middle school. Cheryl and I were one of the largest donors to the school, so we talked to him quite often. When he called us in, he was perplexed about what to do.

Melissa had stolen the earrings and bartered them for some pot. I thought he was joking because Melissa didn’t even smoke pot. On that we all agreed, but I guess this was her first attempt at ascertaining some in the hopes of seeing what it was like. Shelly and all of the other girls found this out, but their interrogation methods were not appropriate. So the dilemma was to suspend them all for a week or let them all off, after calling everyone’s parents, and see if we couldn’t put this to rest. I chose the latter, and we grabbed Melissa and left. Most of the other parents were not there yet. We had been the first ones called.

It was easy to see that things were escalating. Melissa was facing more serious issues, and she was not handling herself well at all. She screamed at us when we got in the SUV, telling us that they were lying, and they had beaten her up. She was spouting off about being a victim, saying she had never even seen any pot. How would she even know how to buy any? We grounded her, of course, which led to more screaming. With that, we packed up the rest of the kids and headed toward our happy vacation home. Things were spiraling out of control.

I have no doubts that pot is available in middle school, but the things that kids do astound me. Melissa had a pool party on her previous birthday and invited a bunch of girls and a few boys over to the house to celebrate. One of the little girls did not go in the pool because she had already started her period. This was during the summer of their 6th grade year. Come to find out three months later she was no longer enrolled in middle school but was now living with her grandmother in Arkansas. The rumor was she had gotten pregnant.

At the time I remember thinking it didn’t surprise me. Her mom was known for being a little loose around town, and it appeared the daughter was following in her footsteps. Isn’t it odd how we judge people? I didn’t know this family. How was I to understand what their situation was or what rules they lived by? As I would soon discover, it could easily have been my daughter heading off to her grandparents, as well. No father ever wants to imagine his little girl having sex -- especially at the ages of 11 or 12 or 13.

What is the rush to grow up with kids today? Don’t they understand that once they grow up there is no going back? You can’t have your innocence once it is gone. It doesn’t work that way. Virginity is yours to have up until the first time you have sex. When that first time occurs, it is all over after that. Everything else is just the next time. My heart was breaking inside. My head was hurting from the escalating tension with Cheryl, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold it together. Was this what life was meant to be? How many chances do we get to do this correctly? Is it just the one shot because I was now seriously thinking about asking for a mulligan?

The saddest thing that came to mind that day was our two little girls. They were the ones who were getting the short end of the stick. In life there is only so much energy to go around. There is work, the house, finances, kids, activities. You can only do so much. When one area of your life starts sucking up more energy you subconsciously shift things around, taking your allotted effort and moving it to the place requiring focus. It is something similar to the shell game they play on the streets of New York City. If you take it from work, you could potentially get fired. If you take it from the household chores you might soon find yourself without a house. My guess is when one child acts up your energy diverts from the good children to the one with issues in most cases. I know it did for us.

We were slipping into a pattern where the two little ones were lacking in attention. This became normal for both of us. It isn’t like we ignored them. It was more like they somehow fell down in the priority list. I think Cheryl compensated for this by telling me it was all me. She enjoyed pointing her finger, but most of the time she was pointing it from a hotel room. She was never really home. Ah, the irony of self-defined elitism.

There was one instance when we were skiing with some friends. The busy-body ladies coupled up and complained that I was only riding with Melissa on the ski lifts and not Amelia or Cassandra. Amelia had asked to ride with Cassandra at the time, but the two pretentious mothers didn’t bother asking. As they were both prone to do, they readily pointed their fingers at their husbands. Heaven help us if either one of the wanna-be Stepford wives ever actually took responsibility and helped out themselves. They were too busy chatting for that to happen.