Get back into the game following life-cleating

SIBLING TEAMMATES – Connor and Kate both wrestled for Union City Middle School this year.

Coming home from my daughter’s bedside at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan for an all too brief 24-hour break, I felt like some kind of groundhog that had burrowed up from its underground existence only to be blinded by the sun.

I spent time with my son, who, despite being given great care by my nephew’s family and helpful classmates’ parents, was feeling neglected by his own. I watched his track invitational, took him to a Young Marines encampment in Battle Creek, and yelled at him about leaving dirty socks in the dining room. Just like always.

Between the swearing in the car, the teasing for a fast food restaurant and the subsequent ignoring me over Big Macs while swiping my phone to Facebook message his girlfriend, our Sunday felt like old times. Except for the conspicuous absence of his sister, Kate.

Born 14 months apart following major gynecological surgery that threatened my ability to bear children, my two kids have gone through life pretty much as bookends. People rarely say “Kate” or “Connor” separately. They run their names together like a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream: “Connor and Kate” aka “Double Sib Trouble.”

They were reared like twins. Unable to afford babysitting, I took them almost everywhere with me, including to business meetings, funeral visitations and even on dates. While unusual, it’s helped them develop social skills beyond their years. They deal better with adults than do most adults. As a result, Kate is winning rave reviews in her current role as hospital heart surgery patient. She’s community property. Everybody knows her.

By default, my kids are comfortable in new situations and adept at meeting people, down to offering firm handshakes. They put others at ease with small talk on a variety of topics, using questions to engage and draw out information. Watching Connor recently in conversation with a 90-something family friend, I noted the depth and thoughtfulness of his responses. Other times, he’s rude, crude and stupid, obviously my son.

Kate is a force of nature, fully-alive. She never met a person she wasn’t willing to talk to. With socializing a top priority, she’s as deeply kind as she can be shallowly catty. Kate’s the kind of kid who alternates between doing her parents proud and making them want to do her in for what she gets herself into. That said, she has a really big heart, shoots from the hip and tends to hit only bullies. You never have to wonder what Kate is thinking because she’ll tell you!

Given abundant time to think over the past three weeks of Kate’s hospitalization, I’ve decided having a critically ill child is really not my style. Not that I think it’s anyone’s cup of tea, really, but I’m the parent who told a crying Kate on the sidelines of a soccer game (after she’d just been cleated in the thigh), “It’s gonna hurt whether you are on the sidelines or out on the field, so decide where you wanna be.” She wisely chose to get back into the game.

I’m not a stand-by-the-bedside, cool compresses on forehead, hand-wringing giver or receiver of TLC kind of person. However, that’s exactly what was called for early during Kate’s highly unfortunate and shockingly serious health episode. I’ve even branched out into toileting, showering, feeding and breathing checking – parenting skills I thought we’d outgrown.

Watching Kate clumsily eat orange sherbet after the ventilator and feeding tube were removed, I cheered like when she’d graduated from Gerber cereal during babyhood. And I actually applauded and photographed her catching a large purple ball tossed by the OT. Milestones and stepping stones. While I was worthless doing helpless, my best skills get used post-intensive care, now that Kate has achieved rehab unit status.

“C’mon, do two more!” I challenge as she struggles with in-bed jumping jacks.

“But it hurts,” she cries, her life-saving, surgically-broken sternum protesting her efforts. It’s not fun to get cleated by life.

While the source of the infection that led to bacterial meningitis, gastrointestinal bleeding, pneumonia, endocarditis and stroke remains unknown, there is one given: Miss Kate has decided to get back into the game!

Child’s illness becomes instant game-changer

If you would have told me a month ago I would be penning this, jobless, from the Ann Arbor Ronald McDonald House, I would have thought you were smoking something. And given what I’ve gone through lately, I would have asked you to pass it to me so I could take an extra-large hit.
I almost didn’t write this, but I have never missed a column deadline for seven years and don’t intend to allow destruction to gain the upper hand by voluntarily throwing in the towel. So this is written as an act of optimistic defiance; publicly sticking out my tongue and saying, “My family and our God are tougher than our circumstances.”
Somebody needs to take a stance because a lot of what’s most fearful in life has recently ambushed me. First, I was fired from my job the day after Easter. I won’t go into detail because it goes without saying that being fired is a powerful blow, especially to a single parent. But destruction was only getting warmed up.
That was day one of my children’s spring break. While I couldn’t afford a vacation for us someplace warm, I sprang for a cheap hotel with a pool in a mid-Ohio city (technically, we were heading south) where I was slated to attend a seminary orientation session before taking online courses toward my chaplaincy goal.
Long story short, upon nearing our destination, we got a flat tire, the repair of which ate up minutes on the early arrival shot clock and made me 30 minutes late for the orientation session. Trying to return home the next day, our car was side-swiped in traffic, necessitating waiting around for a police report and lamenting having raised my collision coverage deductible.
These things were scary, difficult and inconvenient, but paled in comparison to what happened once we got home. Due to suspected flu, my daughter, Kate, had stayed home with my mother instead of going to Ohio. Kate’s symptoms had worsened in my absence. She had periodic fevers, chills and headaches: Flu 101, I thought, in concurrence with the urgent care staff – until she went into seizures on Saturday night.
Thank God I got fired earlier in the week, for otherwise I wouldn’t have been sitting, applying online for unemployment, at the computer next to the couch on which she had been reclining and eating a Popsicle as a cooling mechanism. As soon as she stopped chattering at me, I turned and saw a blank stare and highly dilated pupils. Uh oh!
I knew from having a sister with epilepsy that something was wrong neurologically. Then what appeared to be a seizure began, but didn’t stop. I called a friend, who responded quickly. Together we loaded Kate into the car and drove to the Marshall’s Oaklawn Hospital ER. From there she was airlifted to the pediatric intensive care unit at Bronson Hospital in Kalamazoo. Two days later they transported her to C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor. Suspected flu quickly became re-labeled bacterial meningitis, pneumonia and a stroke caused by bacterial vegetation that broke off from where it had attacked and perforated a mitral valve, then traveled to her brain to cause a stroke.
The stroke affected the temporal, occipital and parietal areas of Kate’s brain. And despite mega doses of antibiotics targeting the bacteria that created the vegetation and the infection coursing through her circulatory system, the risk of more bits of the vegetation entering her bloodstream looms large.
The response of moving ahead with open heart surgery to address the valve and vegetation issue was not a safe option so close on the heels of her stroke. Without additional brain healing time, there’s an increased likelihood the anti-clotting compound used during heart surgery might lead to a bleed into the brain in the already affected areas and beyond. Nothing to do but wait.
Waiting has never been my strong suit, particularly with so much at stake. But there’s no choice. I walk the hospital hallways in silence, wondering about the outcome; wondering about Kate’s future; wondering about mine. That said, I trust the surgeon’s visible hand and God’s invisible one. Miss Kate will make it.

Nice person assumption has limited shelf life

“He’s a nice guy.” How many times have we heard that and its gender-adjusted variation, “She’s a nice gal”? It’s one of those innocuous statements that’s as much filler as is plugging in a “nice” someone on the dance card of your life when you are feeling desperate and just need a body to fill a role.
I think back to my father’s milk hauler, who hit on me when I was barely starting to wear a training bra, let alone board the dating train. He asked if I wanted to go out somewhere for a “real nice” dinner. In return, I told him that while he was “nice enough” (and I was jailbait), I reserved my Saturday nights for babysitting jobs because I had driver’s training the following summer and was saving toward a car, hoping to buy something “nice and affordable” when the time came.
See what I mean? “Nice” is chameleon-like in how it shape-shifts according to context. More often than not, nice serves as a cover-up, especially with dating.
When a friend used the descriptor “nice” during my teens, it meant the guy she wanted to set me up with likely had acne twice as bad as mine. In my 20s, nice meant the blind date in doubt was socially-retarded. In my 30’s, nice meant he might be successful, but equally boring. In my 40s, nice meant the guy was a pansy, living in an ice shanty after being taken to the cleaners by his now-ex, who left him for a bad boy met at a NASCAR event. In my 50’s, nice means the guy has maybe a few teeth and morals left.
Even though “nice” rarely means “nice,” we can’t stop saying it. Of course, there are some truly nice people out there. So to convey actual niceness, you must say, “She is GENUINELY nice,” as opposed to innocuously or artificially nice. But I’m wondering how long does nice last, even when it is genuine? Does the expression, “once a nice guy, always a nice guy” hold true?
Once acquired, the Dudley Do-Right image is pretty hard to shake it, short of ax-murdering someone at vacation Bible school. Even then, your attorney might advise you to excuse it as a mere misunderstanding. Even more interesting, you might be tempted to excuse yourself, too.
I didn’t have the time to perform a literature search on this one, but I suspect that once we label ourselves as being “nice” or a “good person,” we continue to believe it forever, despite however much evidence we display to the contrary through our thoughts, words and actions. Based on my observations of myself and others, “Nice for life” is a bigger-than-Paul Bunyan myth.
Having recently been sacked by someone who, undoubtedly, thinks of herself as a nice person, I can attest the nice assumption has a very limited shelf life. She may once upon a time have been a genuinely nice person, but that ship sailed long ago, without informing its delusional passenger.
How would one retain his/her niceness journeyman’s card? Good question, so pay attention. As a licensed social worker and certified family life educator, I have to complete an average of 15 and 20 annual continuing education units (CEUs), respectively, to keep current in my field. It’s how each discipline keeps practitioners focused on continued self-development. Nobody assumes our credentials are good for a lifetime. Further, ethics education is a mandatory component. Honesty and accountability are considered to be as important as skills. Amen!
“Nice” plays by a separate set of rules. Like mail-order minister ordinations, “nice” requires no study, self-examination or tune-ups. That renders character optional and/or secondary to skills. You can easily rest on the laurels of childhood Catechism values, avoid accountability and pretend you are still nice. No moral auditor bloodhounds will track you down and demand to see a list of your self-improvements. But maybe they should.
When I confront un-nice behavior from self-proclaimed nice people, including myself, the most common defense is, “But, I’m not a bad person.” News flash: the absence of bad does not guarantee good. Genuinely nice people hold themselves accountable for nothing less than doing real good.

Cause of the Grange far from a lost cause

April is many things to many people. However, for column purposes, April is National Grange Month. I will be referencing all things Grange, but mainly the Fredonia Community Grange #1713, to which my family belongs.

“What?!” I hear people say in disbelief, “Granges still exist?!” Rest assured, they do. I’ll tell you about that and more. But first let me define some terms.

A Grange is a fraternal organization, “frater” being Latin for “brother.” That means the organization is a brotherhood or type of affiliation where its members come together for mutually beneficial purposes – social, occupational or shared principles.

The official name of the Grange is The National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry. It was founded in 1867 by U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Oliver Hudson Kelley. In traveling through the south on official business, he became disturbed at the absence of sound agricultural practices. So he founded the Grange for educational advancement and social purposes.

The name Kelley gave the organization reflects its farming focus, as husbandry is the care, cultivation and breeding of crops and animals (hope no one thought it was some kind of matchmaking group where women went to find a husband). While the agricultural education aim was likely foremost in Kelley’s mind, the conviviality aspects of the Grange were what the farming community more lingeringly embraced. Hence, its modern-day appeal to a wider cross-section of people.

In rural communities, where many families remained relatively isolated outside of trips to town for supplies and church activities, the opportunity to gather socially was especially appealing. The depressing economic climate of the time, featuring low farm commodity prices, growing indebtedness and discriminatory treatment by the railroad, became a rallying cry for the agricultural sector.

Banded together, the newly-formed Grange Movement members took action. The Grange became known for grassroots, non-partisan advocacy, something that remains one of its values today, along with being family-centered, knowledge-focused, and community service-oriented.

I grew up on tales of the Grange, specifically the Nye Grange, which was the social hub of my father’s youth. Good food, information, music and dancing. My Aunt Sharon (Katz) (Smith) Goble, who grew up in Rural Branch County, saw my recent Facebook post about the Fredonia Grange Family Night Out and said she was delighted good, old-fashioned Grange halls still exist.

“I remember attending Nye Grange Family Night Dinners before 1946, when we moved from Burlington Road closer to Union City. After dinner we’d all go upstairs. Members of the Grange made up the band: Art Hagerman was a fiddler and dance caller; Pauline VanSchoick played the piano,” Aunt Sharon recalled. “My Daddy (Lewis Katz) taught me to dance by standing on his shoes. The younger kids would fall asleep on the pile of coats stacked as a soft cushion for them … Such good memories!”

Well, such memories are not distant to those of us who belong to Fredonia Grange. We hold potlucks and educational meetings on the first and third Saturday evenings of each month, along with a stringed instrument musical jam/dance sessions each Wednesday night at our Grange hall on C Drive South, a few miles outside of Marshall. The public is always welcome.

Grange meetings start with prayer, the singing the National Anthem and recitation of the Grange salutation, “A good Granger places faith in God, nurtures hope, dispenses charity and is noted for fidelity.” We don’t just say the words, but strive to embody them.

While times have changed over the past 148 years, one constant is the fellowship found among Grangers. Fredonia Grange is a second family to me and my kids. Our Grange family has come together on so many community projects, from community pancake brunches, benefit softball games, Outdoor Safety Day, Relay for Life, our kitchen at the Calhoun County Fair, to relocating the Houston School and Old Maple Grove Church to the fairgrounds, that we work like a well-oiled machine.

Fredonia Grange is the epitome of community-building: always ready to lend a hand or give funds. True to our motto, we are “Good People Having a Good Time for a Good Cause.” My dad would be pleased with our community contributions. I know I am.

Hotels rooms bode ill for personal morale

I am not much of a traveler. Usually I blame my small dairy farm heritage for it because our family had too much responsibility with twice-a-day milking to lift our noses from the grindstone long enough to read a travel brochure. Travel was something other people did.

My friends whose parents worked at factories that shut down for two weeks over the Christmas and New Year’s Eve holiday were always the lucky ones who traveled to Florida or at least as far as the Carolinas each year. I remember hating their cool butts while I was still in Michigan, freezing mine off, feeding and bedding cattle and shoveling manure. Their brightly-colored, sandy beach scene postcards with their “Ha ha, you’re not here” subtexts wedged themselves in my craw worse more firmly than the sand between the senders’ toes.

I grew up thinking that someday, when I officially “made it,” I would travel to exotic locations and send postcards to my childhood friends and actually write on them (on the cards, not the friends) “Ha ha, you’re not here.” But as an adult, I’ve been hard-pressed to spare the cash for the stamps, let alone the trips.

God gets the first 10% of my earnings and he has done an excellent job providing for my needs. However, my wants have been left wanting. The basics, from groceries, to heating fuel and electricity, to insurance, to home and vehicle repair, to kids’ expenses, continue to consume all my earnings.

Additionally, the advent of the Internet, on which I am and my kids are expected to transact work and school business, and the cell phone on which I am expected to be reached, and the television on which I can no longer get reception without a satellite dish, have heaped more unwanted expenses onto the pile. At the end of the month, there’s less than nothing left, including time. At this rate, I’ll have to steal a postcard to send. No end in sight.

Divorce’s financial reality has severely limited my travel, except for work, which basically amounts to the irony of going to an interesting place, only to see its airport, conference rooms and hotel rooms, with some good restaurants thrown in. Worse, it further underscores what an economic have-not extra I am on the set of the depressing reality show known as my so-called life.

Hotel rooms, with their full-length mirrors, illuminate realities I would prefer not to face: I should be at the gym rather than sitting in my car, commuting long distances; I should have those suspicious moles looked at; and I should be at home, investing more in my kids than my 401(k). Things are not looking good on multiple fronts and backsides.

I check into hotel rooms where I am able to quickly climate-control my surroundings using the thermostat, unlike at home, where the combination wood/oil furnace and high ceilings make temperature adjustments akin to trying to about-face a battleship: it neither turns on nor costs only a dime.

I relax and watch a television roughly twice the size of my family room model, with no one interruption of viewing by pseudo-urgent demands. Before retiring, I step into the shower, noting a professional did the caulk job around the edges, unlike my DIY home caulking efforts that look like Lucy and Ethel frosted the cake with a garden trowel.

The unexpected force of the hotel shower stream bowls me over, simultaneously reinforcing applying my eagerly-awaited income tax refund toward having a real plumber investigate why my home hot water has been reduced to trickle. Sometimes denial is the only affordable alternative.

When I fall into my hotel bed, it’s between triple-digit thread count sheets, unlike my own sheets, which are much more like a PGA nine-hole golf score, with a weave as obvious as a children’s summer camp loop potholder project. The hotel mattress is so revitalizing it shouts the next rotation of mine back home needs to be out the window and onto the curb for garbage pickup.

But alas, I still have many miles to travel. My faith and I remain at the transport station, waiting for a ticket to prosperity. Postcard forthcoming.