Schroeder

 

Our marriage was suffering, our kids were growing up, and we decided we could use a house with a different layout. When we drove by the house on Schroeder it looked like a great neighborhood and when we walked into it for the first time it seemed even better. Looking back I think we were in love with the huge living room window and as we turned around all we saw, in the distant dining room window, was a Japanese maple backed by a gigantic swimming pool. The whole backyard was a swimming pool, complete with water slide and steps on the wide shallow end and a diving board on the smaller deep end. A rose garden surrounded the pool and there was a big screened-in porch off the deck. Inside were five bedrooms, three and a half baths, two family rooms, a formal dining room, formal living room and a sprawling kitchen with a patio door looking out at the pool. There was even a balcony off the master bedroom and a fireplace in the main level family room. It seemed too good to be true and we bought it.

We lived there until both boys graduated from high school and it was a trip. The first thing we noticed right after we moved in was that we would find the front door wide open on many mornings. We began double checking to make sure it was locked the night before and we made sure Becky locked it when she came in late at night. That mystery was never solved. 

One night I was in bed reading when my husband came in and went into our walk in closet to change clothes. He did this because the big patio doors in our bedroom provided a clear view of anyone standing up at night with the light on if the curtains were open and I liked to watch the water shadows on our wall when I went to sleep at night. But I was not sleeping this time. I saw him come in and walk into that closet out of the corner of my eye. I continued to read for a while and he didn't come back out, which finally seemed odd. I yelled at him and asked if he was okay, but he didn't answer. Finally, I got up, went over and opened the doors to the closet. No one was in there! I couldn't believe it. I knew I hadn't seen him come out, so I went downstairs and there he was in the family room. Fully dressed, reading one of his technical magazines. He said he had not come upstairs at all and he thought I must have been dreaming. I know I was not.

There was a small hallway between the front foyer and the back of the house where our kitchen and family rooms were. It had a half bath and that was all. I can't tell you how often someone thought they saw someone standing in the doorway to that hall. Sometimes at night I would see someone in my peripheral vision there too. No matter how hard we tried no one could figure out what was causing this sight. There was just no explanation for it.

We had a lot of vandalism in our pool area from people who had a problem with the previous owner, so we installed outdoor motion lights. We never caught the people who destroyed our mailboxes, or our pool robot cleaner, but we did catch a lot of raccoons and opossums , and, once, a fox, who crawled in under our porch when they came up from the Constitution Trail that ran behind our neighborhood.

Birds, mostly ducks would fly into the dining room window, stunning themselves and sounding like a small bomb had gone off. In the winter ducks liked to fly in and swim in the water that collected in the top of our pool cover. They made a lot of racket as the males chased the females round and round trying to mate.

I was still working part time at Noah's Ark. The boys had part time jobs after school and Becky was working at Hardees, but we had many social events at this home. First of all it was perfect for Bridge nights. It accommodated my Dream Group when it was my turn to host. We even had our shamanic meditation group meet there, because there was room for everyone to lie down and travel and still hear the shamanic drumming.

Jimmy had found his place in high school He was an outstanding student who reveled in the social life available to kids his age. He was on the Valentine court and wrestled varsity. He was in the next to the top band class and that caused many problems. The band teacher wanted him in the top band class and Jim refused. He didn't want to devote that much time to band, which was already pretty time consuming. My husband and I were band parents and traveled everywhere the band went to play or compete and that was a lot of work. It was a class (5A, I think) band. We would carry the timpani around the football field and set it up for a performances, or do whatever needed doing.The head band teacher had bought our house on Nicki Drive and blamed us for problems they had after they moved in. In the end problems with this teacher cost Jim National Honor Society and we took him out of high school and put him into college early to avoid more problems. The school superintendent lived across the street and he sympathized, but could do little more than advise us. We bought Jim a used guitar and he taught himself how to play. A couple months later he qualified for the classical guitar classes at the University and that became one of his majors. He was now a psychology and performance major with a minor in German. He published under his professor in psychology and went to Austria with the Honors program to study for a semester in Vienna because of his music major. 

Bobby finished junior high and began high school.  He also began going places with one of my friends in the dream group. Tom was an ex-chemist and psychologist who went to our church and did an internship at Noah's Ark so he could experience young children. He and Bobby would take long bike rides through the countryside, or go to indoor climbing gyms to practice belaying. They even did some climbing competitions and Tom taught him to drive a stick. Bobby ended up joining our dream group too, because of him.

The basement pool table was a hit with all the kids, but the backyard was the big draw in this house. Everyone loved the pool. When we had our house blessing we invited seventy people to come and join us. Our new priest knocked on the door and asked to be let in. Then he went to each room and blessed it. I've always assumed if there was anything unusual living there, besides us, it probably wasn't evil although that is not why we did this. It was more of a social occasion and reason to show off the house than anything else. The day of the house blessing a big old possum came up and licked the grease off the bottom of our gas grill while our enthralled visitors watched. Pretty typical for this house I would say.

My husband bought me a used white convertible and put a new roof on it. It was beautiful and my license plate said, MRS A 2. That was because MRS A was our neighbor's plate! My husband drove it in most of the parades around town, as did hers. White convertibles are very handy for displaying pretty girls. He bought himself a Jeep that he could take apart or put together like a large tinker toy. He liked to take the roof and doors off and drive around the countryside. The kids learned to drive on an old Buick Skylark we bought for cash (and he immediately burned the engine out on it when he forgot to put oil in it, so we had to put a rebuilt engine in it.) We didn't buy them cars. I figured those were things they could purchase when their studying paid off and they wanted to buy something.

Television was something I had carefully controlled the whole time we had children. Instead of just aimlessly watching it, we read books, played family games, rode bicycles, or participated in local events. When they graduated from high school, we bought each of them a television.

Becky was dating now. She was twenty two years old and working. We took half her pay and put it in a savings account for her in lieu of rent. Over time I noticed she seemed to be getting heavier, but she insisted she could not possibly be pregnant until I finally insisted she see my gynecologist. She caught the chicken pox right after that and I gave her some crystals and taught her how to focus on them to help with the itching. She had some false labor pains, but used the crystals to work through them. Then one night Bobby woke me up and said Becky was sick. 

She was wearing long harem pajamas with elastic around the ankles and I'm glad I told her to throw on some clothes while I called the doctor and her dad started the car. We drove up to the corner across the street from her elementary school when she stood up and exclaimed, "Mom! The baby slipped out!"

I looked back and there was the baby swinging from its umbilical cord through the leg of her shorts! I don't remember how I got to the back seat, but I scooped up that tiny baby and it was barely bigger than my hand! It was silent and I knew you couldn't spank a baby that small. I tipped her forward and used two fingers to rub her back while saying, "Brooke Michelle You breathe for Grandma!" And to my great relief she began to mew. She sounded like a little kitten, but she was alive and, I hoped, well. Then I said, "Welcome to the world Brooke Michelle. I am your grandma."

We arrived at the hospital minutes later and they carried her in on Becky's stomach, leaving my husband to park the car and me to find a place to wash my hands. I remember opening the bathroom door in the waiting room and a big man was in there peeing. It felt as surreal as the rest of the night. The Peoria hospital sent an ambulance straight down with lung surfactant and they transferred Brooke to the intensive care nursery at St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria. Brooke is now Social Worker!

This was just the beginning of a very long and very rocky relationship with Becky, the baby's father and his family. Becky, even though in her twenties, was still pretty immature and she was very possessive about the baby. She would only allow us to see her if she was with us, but she lost interest in sitting there quite soon. It was several months before Brooke could go home and even then premature baby clothes were too big for her. Becky moved in with the father and thus began many years of on again, off again relationships with our own daughter. She had another premature baby (Tiffany) with the same man and we learned about it through a friend.. We saw her babies when it suited her or she needed us. She remarried when both Brooke and Tiffany were under three and one day I went to visit only to find her in bed with the baby and the older two eating peanut butter out of a jar in the living room. That marriage disintegrated too, mostly because Becky still had needs that mature men couldn't deal with. She delivered a son conceived when her ex-husband raped her just before she married her second husband. They put that baby up for adoption. Her second marriage produced another girl, Alicia whose father got custody of her when they divorced.

The best thing about her son's adoption was that Jim, who was adopted, was old enough to understand what was happening and be part of it. He watched her go through counseling and helped us make a book for the baby about her childhood. He watched us decide which of the prospective parents might be a good match and he was there when we handed the new baby to his new adoptive parents. Ironically they wanted to keep a name Becky had given him as well as using one of their own, so he ended up being named the same as Jim. James William was adopted in an open adoption and they kept in touch with Becky through Babyfold until she lost touch with them and never really reconnected.

Life was never straightforward and easy on Schroeder. Our old church hired a man who lied about being a priest and we changed churches. We loved our new minister and I began printing a church newsletter that came out once a month. I stopped teaching Sunday school and attended the adult Sunday school. Jim was the first child confirmed by the new Bishop and our priest, John, the one who blessed our house, took him out for burritos the Saturday before. Jim always told people all you had to do to join the Episcopal church was eat a burrito as big as your head! (That was the way that restaurant advertised.) The Bishop loved telling people his first confirmand was an angel. That was close to the time when both boys began digging in their heels and not wanting to go to church anymore, so it was a little embarrassing when the bishop came to visit and in front of the whole church said, "My first confirmation was an angel! Is he here now?" He was not.

In the summers I went on retreat for several days with my friend Sheila to the Benedictine Monastery (not called a convent although they were all nuns) One time I felt homesick and called my husband, but it annoyed him. I learned why later.

On Jim's eighteenth birthday we went to Red Lobster and when we came home my husband told me he would be serving me with divorce papers the next day. He said he would keep the house and I could move out and get a better job so I could pay him child support for Bobby. I was in shock. He had moved out without warning once before, but I thought things were better now.

The next day was our big Fall parent meeting at Noah's Ark and I was scheduled to read Leo the Late Bloomer, like I always did, to an auditorium full of parents that night. I got up, showered, dressed up and filled a cooler with Diet Coke. Then I wrote a letter to Bobby, our only child still at home, telling him how much I loved him and laid it on his bed. I took the book I was reading and took a Xanax. I was so nervous. I just wanted to be calm enough to get through the meeting then I planned to drive out to the country, take the rest of the bottle and read until I fell asleep. Hopefully never to wake up.

While waiting to go into preschool, I still felt so nervous I took another Xanax and then another. I was so worked up they didn't seem to be doing any good, so I took more. Finally it was time to go inside for the meeting. I got out of the car and found myself tipping towards the stone wall of the church, ripping the should of my dress! One of my co-teachers saw me and I have no memory of walking down the stairs to my classroom. I vaguely remember sitting in the big rocking chair as Janice got ready for the meeting. It turned out she had also called Tom, the psychologist friend who was in my Dream group and like a second father to Bobby. Tom was out of town, but his wife came and picked me up. I thought I was being very chipper and normal as she drove me to the emergency room where they had me drink a glass of charcoal. 

I woke up in a huge, empty room the next morning.  All that was in there was my bed and a bathroom that had little teeny tiny towels with a camera on the ceiling. A nurse told me to shower and get dressed, then she took me to a room where they gave me my dress and a thread and needle and told me to repair the rip in my dress. I was in the psych ward! 

Most of the other patients were older teens or young adults, but there was one sad man who was bipolar. Every day the nurse would come in and ask if I wanted to hurt myself and of course I said no. (Lying at first, of course.) Then she would unlock the little locker with my deodorant and toothbrush in it and let me shower. After that breakfast came to my room on a tray and then we had a day interspersed with art therapy, drug classes, group therapy and free time when I either played the piano or played ping pong with one of the boys. I had guests around noon and my friends came bringing books about St. Therese who did simple things with great love, or books on divorce. Tom's wife sent him with the name of her old divorce attorney, and Tom kept me up to date on how Bobby was doing. He made a special effort to be with him during all this. 

I met my psychiatrist who treated me like an intelligent mature adult and had some concrete suggestions for how to support myself if I got divorced. My friend, Sheila, brought me a gigantic pink and white teddy bear who took up half my twin bed, but who I slept with every night. I was there for two weeks and then the night before I was to go home Becky went over to our house and found her father upstairs filming a woman in our bed! He told her he was just interviewing her to be a maid, but Becky called me crying. 

They made me stay another week after that.

When I went home Sheila's husband went in first and walked through our house to make sure nothing strange was going on. That night my husband came home from work and told me he was so moved by me wanting to kill myself that he had cancelled the divorce. To prove his love he bought a new mattress for our bed, one no other woman had slept on, and promised to build me the house of my dreams. He actually said this should prove he loved me, because I knew how much he loved money and he would never waste it on something like a house if he didn't mean it. 

I should have known better. We had been to many counselors in the past and nothing had ever changed, but I wanted to believe him, so we began to think about building our own house. 

I found out much later that it may have only been that he discovered his divorce attorney was known for draining every last cent from his clients, often leaving them with nothing to mediate except how to pay him. My husband may or may not have loved me, but he definitely did love money.