Looking at Life from the Long End

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It’s really kind of strange. When our own children were babies - and at 14 months apart, they were babies at the same time - we were positively terrified by them. Or maybe by our own perceived responsibilities FOR them. We spent many a long night just watching them sleep, deciding what we would and wouldn’t do in relation to the way our parents raised us, sowing the seeds for all new mistakes we invented along the way.

We didn’t have much furniture, being in the Navy and having to move every few months. So when hubby was at nuke school (that came between A-school and sub-school) in Bainbridge and we were living in falling-down WW-II housing blocks in Aberdeen, we put a mattress in the middle of the living room floor, pillows against the walls against which we could sit.

Daughter, our eldest, was just new to walking and didn’t mind having to crawl on soft living room floor one bit. Son wasn’t yet a year old, crawling and rolling was his main means of locomotion. I recall days and weeks spent doing nothing (apart from the usual cooking, dishes and laundry) but rolling around on that mattress with them laughing as hard as they could. Or just watching them wrestle with each other. They were so beautiful! So new, so promising. So much our responsibility!

Our neighbor downstairs was on welfare. Had four children - all girls - and one on the way, her occasional live-in honey (and father to all, far as I could tell) was a truck driver, “home” only now and then. We often heard them fighting when he was around, and her yelling at the girls when he wasn’t. They ranged in age from 2 to 6. Blonde haired, blue-eyed, they looked amazingly alike.

That neighbor apparently wasn’t as worried about the future of her offspring as we were. One day I opened the door to go to the laundromat and found all four of them sitting at the top of the stairs looking hungry. It wasn’t 7 a.m. yet.

All kids look hungry when they’re at your door or in your kitchen, any time of day and all the way through high school. I already knew this from raising my own little brother and sisters, there being 5 children in my own family. They usually lack proper boots and coats and hats in bad weather too. Wise to that game, I knew it wasn’t a sign of abuse. Just kids being incorrigible.

So I invited the girls in, fed them cheap cereal and applesauce, then dropped them off at the building stoop as I headed down the block with mine in the double stroller with laundry baskets stacked atop the sunshade.

Naturally enough, they appeared on my doorstep regularly from then on. Even after the new baby was born, Mom apparently locked them out early and didn’t open the door until late. I didn’t have the balls at the time to complain, so that little apartment with the mattress on the living room floor was home for nearly 6 months to six children. I’m sure the complex neighbors thought they all belonged to me. I didn’t mind all that much.

Soon hubby was transferred to Philadelphia in transit, then on to New London for sub school, I went with the children to stay with his parents in Oklahoma, then with my Dad in Kentucky when hubby went on his first Polaris patrol. Never saw or heard from those pretty little girls again, have no idea if they all grew up and if they did, how they turned out.

But I’d bet you a fin that if you knew one or more of them today, and asked them about their “difficult childhood,” they’d say they remember the lady upstairs with the babies, who had a mattress on the living room floor instead of a rug, and enjoyed nothing more than playing with them all day long. And who made really mean PBJs and oatmeal.

After the Navy years, as our kids grew up, there were of course many more strays. Sometimes our kids would bring them home, sometimes they’d just find their own way to our home. It was always crowded, I always cooked for a crowd, and it was a very rare evening hubby and I ever got to spend alone. Ended up actually adopting three teens of a friend who died, I consider the rest adopted as well even though we never went to court. Their children count among my grands too, and still the house is usually overflowing and I still cook for crowds.

We thought that when ours grew up (finally!) they’d leave home and start their own lives, I’d be able to actually wear some of those sexy nighties hubby gives me for Christmas and birthday every year, but which I never get to wear. It never worked out that way, though. I’ve got a wonderful collection of soft, silky, frilly little nothings that still have the tags attached, some of them 15 or 20 years old! I am pretty sure I wouldn’t look so good in them anymore even if I did get the chance to wear ‘em.

And you know what? I don’t believe I’ve missed a darned thing! Once you start looking at your life from this end of it, and start weighing the pros and cons of what dreams you had that never came true versus what nightmares you had that did come true, wearing sexy little nothings doesn’t seem to count for a whole lot. If in the end a life is valued for how it touches on and affects other people’s lives over the course of the journey, then I must be very rich even though it’s sometimes a struggle just to put food on the table. And that’s worth more than that red silk teddy with the Belgian lace… which I’ll probably leave to one of my beautiful daughters - tags still attached - when it’s a certifiable antique. They’d love to have it!

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Filed under Relationships, Adoption, Marriage, Older Children, Family Life, Child-Parent Relationships |