The Best Of Us

it might take a lifetime..

First of all, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read the last story. It was a difficult process to pull together in short version., so I appreciate it. I received some nice feedback and inspired a friend to do more research about her family! She even shared a family murder mystery. I also heard from some of you in social media and private messenger. Thank you beyond words :)

Recently, I plugged a hard-drive in, looking for a picture, and stumbled across a letter I wrote to my three adult kids in 2018. At the time no one lived with us, the hateful neighbor hung, shot and killed a cow in his backyard, after years of being an abusive backyard dog breeder, and tensions were rising in our country. I saw and heard everything for years. Finally done, devastated, we went to the beach, talked it out, came home, listed and sold our home in one week.

Don’t write letters in the heat of any moment. Just pray. Only pray.

Our dating years began in 1983 in El Toro, California, in a grocery store produce section of Lucky’s where John was a 21 year old clerk and I was 22. It’s a funny and romantic story that lead us to a local Mongolian restaurant, every Sunday afternoon, in the same parking lot for months. John was young and restless. He didn’t want the “key holder” union job with a grocery store for the rest of his life. We’d definitely be retired by now but it was never him. John had a wild spirit and was deeply independent. I was more than attracted to that.

After many months of dating he took an opportunity to learn the electrical trade from his older brother. He would drive from Orange County to Upland, Ca. everyday. I can still see myself pulling into the parking lot of Lucky’s on his last day. I was renting a home in El Toro with two roommates and baked him a sheet cake. I looked for the first box person coming out of the store and waited for him to help a customer. “Excuse me, can you please put this in the break room.” It said, “Good luck John.”

John would excitedly begin a second generation family trade. I couldn’t stand being apart from him or seeing him beyond tired, so we made a decision that we would be married eventually, and rented a cabin together in Mt. Baldy, where he and his brothers grew up. It’s a special little community above Upland and a short drive down the hill to work. I signed up with a temp agency and worked all the time until placed in a permanent secretarial job in Pomona, Ca.

On April 20th 1985 we got married in that cabin, in front of family and a few friends. It was the best day of my life. About 6 months into marriage I arrived home one day to see a “for sale” sign outside of our cabin. Miffed we were given no notice, John decided then and there that we had to own a home and not move again for a long time. “No more moving that old ridiculously heavy upright piano.” John had saved $5,000 and we put it down on a 1955 major fixer-upper in Upland. My parents, who both worked full-time in the San Fernando Valley, and John’s second to oldest brother, helped us load an old jalopy stake-bed truck with all our possessions. We stuffed John’s old VW Bus, my Subaru and John’s rented work truck with everything else and traveled down the hill into a new life. We’d spend all our non-working hours fixing up our fluorescent lime green house with the white rock roof. It was Christmas time, so we hung red lights on it. We dreamt of a family but John wanted to “be done with the house” before we had kids. In my estimation that would have taken the entire 15 years we lived there, so yeah...

After a few years he would open a non-union electrical business with his oldest brother. He eventually branched off and invested in his own small electrical shop, right after making our biggest move ever. If you have owned your own business or are married to a business owner, you understand. John has been working, more than full-time since he was 16 years old. What kept him going was his love of music and playing his upright bass. He still plays, played at church for years, took up cycling and never missed one of his kid’s events or milestones. Looking back it seems impossible.

The first 10 years of marriage he was a workaholic struggling to grow his business. We rarely saw him for dinner. I was from a traditional sit-down-and-eat-at-6pm-with-your-family-kind-of-wife. He had a single mom and was on his own a lot growing up. You didn’t give him timeframes. I was blessed to stay home. I had to. It was more than a full-time job. I can still see him smiling, playing his acoustic bass, like therapy, dirty and tired.

A small business owner stays in business because they truly love what they do. They see all the wins as great victories while they fight never-ending bureaucracy, regulations, back of the line high interest loans, high insurance rates in all forms, and on and on to remain open. They develop a fighting spirit and hold deep values. John’s energy actually made a neighbor come over with an empty bottle. Opening the door, she laughed saying, “can you put some of John’s energy in here?” He helped so many neighbors like her. I can still see him leaving on a Saturday morning with a sledgehammer to go help a neighbor remodel a bathroom. We had two kids and were supposed to go to the beach. It was stressful. We still had our own projects, and he was keeping mad hours. It was a combustion center and I learned to try and keep up - but it really weighed on me.

Our first baby almost died and spent a week in the hospital. It was terrible and we felt shame over our birthing center decision for years. Our second baby was riddled with allergies that doctors diagnosed as asthma until she was eight. We had many doctors appointments, e.r. visits and an eventual week-long hospitalization with RSV Virus. While she struggled she would also develop a speech impediment by three years old. We couldn’t afford professional speech therapy so I signed up for a free evaluation by a speech teacher, in a trailer, behind a local public school. I took a big packet home of how I could help her. I searched the web and waited for public school to provide her with one half hour a week by first grade. We went onto have a third child, 8 years after the first, and he would also have his own struggles. It was a normal family life. Our home was feeling small in size.

Years later, as our kids were all in some form of school, through John’s encouragement, I signed up for some photography courses at a local college. I loved taking pictures of my family. It grew some confidence and got me out of the house. I had no goals but to learn the camera. A master teacher asked me if I would work with her here and there. This is how I became a professional photographer. I was able to work/edit from home except for when I was shooting. Photography fulfilled a deep artistic need. I kept my business “family first” and many clients became like an extended family. It challenged and fed my soul. I loved to please people.

What would make me sit down and write a letter that painted a completely horrible life?

When I wrote I was highly emotional and packing down an 18 year family home with 33 years of memories stored away in it. We had family get togethers there, family weddings and I began my career there at 40 years old. There were reams of memory boxes, neatly packed away, from the start of their lives through high school. There was so much stuff. I often ugly-cried. It took me 40 days and I did it completely alone while John worked. We knew it was best but he was conflicted. All of our hands were in the construction of that home. It was one of his biggest accomplishments and he battled big for it. My heart ached so bad. It was painfully quiet.

We fought 75% of the time over parenting and I felt I lived with organized chaos for a husband. We needed some “no’s and boundaries” for years. We trusted God in our finances and business, but in parenting and dealing, we were on opposite planets.

I sat with my laptop one evening, surrounded by boxes and typed “we gave them everything so why are they so mad?” The first thing that came up was a man saying almost these exact words on a psychology site. He had achieved successful kids, but had probably emotionally damaged them and he should own it, was the answer. I saw this as a sign and began to write to my children.

Sobbing, I painted their entire life as a complete let-down. I called myself selfish and asked for forgiveness for causing all of this. I was positive we had abused them over and over. I felt compared to the perfection and happiness they had found in their lives, expressed hope that I could enjoy my grandchildren, thanked them for “letting me see them, saying I would never hurt them.”

hurt them?

This was the lowest I had ever sunk. Inhuman to each other, victims of each other, and 100% drained of what we needed from each other. I truly was sorry but where was the perspective?

Both of our longtime homes would come with neighbors that only Satan could conjure up. It would be a curse and a test to “love thy neighbor.” During our life we also had bad health scares, accidents that landed me in the hospital, a death of a best friend, deaths of beloved pets, terrible business scares and we survived the Grand Prix fire 3 years after building our family home on a wing and a prayer budget. By the time we we had pulled our utilities, to legally get our children into our new home’s school district, the public schools turned us down for “legal over-crowdedness.” With three weeks to spare we were renting a home, while building, in another school district. It was the end of summer and John said we had to choose private school and he’d work harder? I just enrolled in college courses! We landed the last two spots at a private Christian school back in Upland. The youngest would follow. We moved into our second home and traded a new community for the next 18 years. Spread thin, it deepened my craving for the solid, steady communities other people seemed to have.

I loved listening to music as we drove or ask the kids about their day. For years John would play his bass with our youngest singing at school talent shows. During that time there was gymnastics. Then weekly piano lessons were kept up until the end of Jr. High. He would want to go to a charter art high school in Orange County. We had already conquered so many mountains. The hours were unreal. Years of AYSO, high school football, soccer games, track meets, for the oldest, random art classes, basketball, track for the middle.., school functions, dances, and theater productions. It was a blessed life. More fun was seeing all three kids into college and watching them graduate. I would tell anyone who asked that our path was a “God thing” because we learned to “see our children as individuals.” Less kids in class, more individual focus. It took everything we had financially and John was pleased to work harder for it.

I could never be more deeply sorry for fighting with my husband. It was not healthy for any of us. The hardest part of our life was lack of support. We were monsters of independence and victims of circumstance. Too blessed to be frustrated yet fought like exhausted three year olds. We called my parents a lot. Our biggest cheerleaders and wonderful grandparents who bonded deeply with our kids despite moving to Oregon when the first two kids were small. Always a blessing.

We spent nearly one day every weekend at the beach in the summer, watching our kids play in the water and eat sandy pb & j’s until they were exhausted and hungry for the best dinner we could muster up on the way home - which was usually a sun-drenched sandy drive for a burger or tacos. We traveled to a magical grandparent land in Oregon for years (often while my husband worked to keep our business running), camped in the early years, snow skied a few times., and tried. Grateful for time together.

Four years have gone by now and I see clearly a human being who desperately had “ideals and scenarios” for what a family should look like. As an immigrant I could only dream about what I didn’t have. I loved having family gatherings. Everything I truly wanted was a lesson in “be careful what you wish for.” I see an extremely important apology in this. I also wish I could have accepted, more often, how uniquely God made my husband., early on in marriage.

In the last paragraph of my letter I said this:

“I would like to begin again with dad in our next home and I have no expectations of any of you. I only have one hope and prayer. That is to give love, feel love and be the person that God intended me to be. Healing with distance is something that I know you have all needed. I also need that. I hope to see each of you when it is in your heart to see me. I hope to have time with the babies as well. They bring so much joy and I love them very much.

I will love each of you forever and ever. That is something that no matter how wrong I’ve been, I will never waiver. I ask for forgiveness and understand that it might take a lifetime.

I love you, mom”

What’s done is done. We moved and did exactly that. Our grandchildren were our greatest joy and a breath of fresh calm air. They always say the gift of grand-parenting is you don’t have all the parent responsibilities going on. The beauty was that this time He never let us go no matter what shook around us. We saw that and we felt that through the renovation of our third home, the painful grief of estrangement and the gutting death of my dad. We didn’t crumble. We didn’t fight. We didn’t cast Him aside thinking we could do it better alone.

Our family looks different now. There are no more ideals or scenarios. Just todays.

Last weekend, I officially forgave myself. I stared at the remaining remnants of framed pictures, that made my heart ache, and packed them away. I pray every day and keep everyone near my heart. God gave us a refuge and a mostly peaceful neighborhood. He used every difficult time for good.

One day the best of us will be found again… all together.

“It might take a lifetime.” 1 Corinthians 13:4–8a

Beautiful Siena. My first grandchild.

Next up: My husband says that my next story should be about Corgis. That might just happen - stay tuned…