GEM Explodes

After seven months of living out of the RV at the horse farm we were ready for change. We looked at our options. We thought about living across the river in rural Clark County; we looked all around Western Washington County; we considered Spokane; and even a commute from out in the gorge.

Then I started getting calls from Hawaii.

Kris and I were married in Hawaii and the kids came along for the wedding. I lived here in 2004 for a few months while working on a project for the Hawaiian Islands Blue Cross/Blue Shield organization. I love it here and Kris always wanted to live on an island.

Why did we consider moving away? The kids were at a different place developmentally than they had been when we put this parenting plan into place. That coupled with the GEM's worsening personality disorder led the three counselors we worked with--Kris's, mine, and the children's--to  the conclusion that the best thing for us to do would be to withdraw from the fifty-fifty arrangement and try and stay in the kids' lives from a distance.

In early April of last year (2012), we missed a payment at the kids after-school program. They sent a note home to Sarah's house saying that A couldn't come back until the payment was made. I went and got A from school the next day and took her over to the after-school location. In the meantime, the GEM rushed early from work, grabbed M from downstairs in the building I was in and raced home and called the police telling them that A was missing.

The cops called me. The weird thing is, the year before, in the summer, the GEM decided she wanted the girls for a particular weekend. Rather than work it out with me, she just didn't return the kids to me on Tuesday and kept them for an extra week.

When I called and asked her to return the kids, she refused and when I asked what I should do; should I call the cops? She told me that I could go ahead and call the cops, but this was a civil matter and they wouldn't do anything about it.

Now here she was trying to get the police to arrest me for custodial interference. I told the cop that called me that this was a civil matter, as I'd learned from her the previous summer. He called back a half-hour later and said the GEM was on the phone with his sergeant trying to get him written up.

By the time we got over to the GEM's house to drop A off, she must have been in a frenzy. She came stomping down the middle of the street, straight at our pickup and grabbed Kris's door handle, opening the door as we slowly drove past. She did the same with the back door, where A was sitting, and then punched the side of the pickup bed.

We drove up to the top of the cul-de-sac and A jumped out, saying, "I'm outta here!" She ran past her mom who was headed straight for Kris.

Screaming yelling threatening nonsense ensued. We handled well and left.

Fathering

As the sun's light faded behind the deep blue-green silhouette of the Oregon Coast Range, I looked down the hill to A and M, playing with friends just met in the excited, cautious way kids naturally do when in a new situation.

This is our new life. I don't know where it's going, but it couldn't stay there. We've embraced change and launched ourselves into a future of indeterminate place and time. I realize that the kids are at a different place developmentally, than they've ever been. No longer fully dependent on us, they have begun to be excited about their friends and their social lives, learning how they fit in and what pleasures there are in being an individual.

When A was born on the last day of November, I was in the room and excited to greet her; as well as stressed since her birth didn't go smoothly. The doctor thought she was trying to come up 'sunny side up' and spent a lot of time trying to get her flipped over. Eventually, when she arrived, she was a three on the Apgar chart and a team of nurses standing by was able to quickly get her up to a seven. Nonetheless, she spent the first couple of days in the baby ICU.

I spent most of time in with her, trying to maintain skin contact with the tiny little new arrival. She seemed hearty to me and that has been the truth of her life. She's a competitive, driven little kid. She does well in school and has been a solid athlete in every sport she's tried.

I am her father, if not completely, and I may not ever know. Most important to me is that I love her and I can see the positive qualities I've helped build in her. She knows me and knows she is supported in this world by a man who will always be there to protect her and champion her.

Vagabonds

When Kris was young she told her family she was going to live on an island someday. Her father scoffed at her, spitting out, “No you’re not! You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’ve known her long enough now to realize that she dreams about how to make more of her life, but she also activates those dreams.

She’s not a fly-by-night, run-off-on-a-whim sort; she will focus herself on a goal and keep moving toward it. I love that about her. I think it takes a lot of faith and optimism to follow a long path to a worthy goal. I very much appreciate orbiting Kris’s bright star; the faith I’ve struggled to maintain in my life is stoked by her steady, soft, determined drive.

Kris and I always talked about what we should do, where we should go, how we wanted to live. We kicked around ideas about next week, next month, next year, and our golden years. We worked out a long-term plan to sail around the world; spending an entire Saturday in an office with a whiteboard and sticky notes, planning our future and putting it all into a spreadsheet.

Over the past seven years, we have traveled a couple of times a year over to Wyoming to spend time with Kris’s aunt, uncle, and cousins on their ranch near Centennial. We rode Harleys over there a few times, traveling two-lane back roads through beautiful Western vistas. On one trip we even took a look at Centennial’s historic hotel, with an eye toward buying it; trying to imagine if living and working there was a thing that we could do. We finally decided to rent out our house and move out to the country and look for a home that we could rent or buy that would allow us to increase our animal herd.

At New Year’s Eve on the ranch in Wyoming, Kris’s cousin had offered to send that new little filly over to Oregon for Kris and the girls to raise. That seemed to be the activator for us and we made the move out to the country six months later. We upgraded our RV and pickup to allow us to live comfortably with the girls having their own beds and room. And we relocated to the farm where Juno was being boarded.

The first day as vagabonds was a bit of a stress. With Kris having absconded to Eugene to work the Olympic Track and Field Trials for Nike, I was left alone to load up the rig and drive out to the horse farm and plug in. After getting setup and plugged in, I was able to sit back and relax for a moment and realize that everything was going to be okay. It was the longest day of the year and the weather was perfect. The girls stayed outside until nearly 10 pm, playing with the other kids at the farm and riding horses in the outdoor arena. It was a well-needed idyllic counterpoint to a very stressful week.

Aloha

Kris and I have been advised to drop off of Facebook for a while. We will still post on our blogs and answer email and phone. Please stay in touch. We are very happy with our new life direction and each of you KNOWS how much we enjoy sharing our happiness with you, since you, of course!, know how much we enjoy sharing in your lives!

Aloha nui loa! We look forward to our shared Mai Tais in paradise!

Band of Horses

It was a hard decision when it came to the moment we had to make it, but we turned on a dime—maybe a quarter—and started into action making the move from Portland to Honolulu.

The biggest challenge has been moving all our farm animals off to new homes. And the hardest part of that was telling the kids what we were doing and how we were going to do it. Aoíbhinn came up to me in February and told me how happy she was to have Juno as her horse and how lucky she felt. She said, “I just realized today, dad, that not many people have a horse of their own. I’m pretty lucky.”

That moment was a good one and I love that she was so openly appreciative of this gift in her life. She was a joy to watch as she came home every day, changed into her barn clothes, pulled on her boots, and strode off to do her horsey chores.

When we picked Juno up in Wyoming, she was a wild little seven-month old filly. To get her in the trailer, it took three of us in a narrow chute and two attempts. The Oregon vet who worked with her when she arrived was truly surprised at her transformation a year later when she came out to do some work on her. That wild, skittish little filly had evolved into a sweetnuzzler. I have no doubt that transformation was all of the love and attention she got at that barn and Aoíbhinn was at the center of it; spending her time learning from the older girls as they worked their horses and showed her the ways; and then putting in hours and hours working Juno, playing with her, and grooming her.

I get it now: the love of a little girl for her horse. I’ve been lucky enough to see it up close. I know now why my wife wanted to create her own life on a farm and surround herself with those animals. What started out with a dog, then a cat, grew through a couple of pygmy goats and into a full-fledged goose, horse extravaganza outside Gaston, Oregon.

We spent over nine months living out there, me commuting to Vancouver the whole time; forty-plus miles each direction. It took us more than a half-hour to get from the kids’ school to home each night and we’d do it again in the morning to get them to school on time.

I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.

GEM FU

This one may be a bit intimate; if you read this blog and enjoy the lighter side of living in Hawaii, or the fun of catching waves on O'ahu, you might skip this one.

I've been listening to Marc Maron for a few years now. If you haven't already, check out his podcast WTF. He interviews just about every contemporary comedian and the time he spends with each of his guests offers close intimate looks at the inside lives and motivations of some people we see from a distance; maybe a distance we don't recognize when we are laughing at somebody's schtick on a stage.

I'm also a fan of Teri Gross's Fresh Air radio show. She similarly cracks open people we see in People, or wherever, on a regular basis.

So, this morning, I'm listening to Gross interview Maron, which of course offers me omphaloskeptic levels of meta-introspection and it affects me in a righteous way. Life is a real thing going on all the time and we experience it on a daily level, with some distance, or, if we are lucky, we experience it in a deeper way for brief moments.

So, this is where I take a left turn.

I love my children. I have been blessed to know four beautiful struggling humans, who each have a joy within them that I experience regularly. Not daily, not like I'd like. But I have been able to experience intimately the individuals they are.

Okay, so enough prelude. I've been struggling for a while now. I asked Kris to marry me on a surprise trip to San Francisco just over seven years ago. I knew a co-worker of her's and was able to arrange to have her sent to the City for a supposed work trip, and I met her at the airport there and surprised her with a ring and a proposal.

We had a wonderful weekend, which we both look back on with many fond memories.

However, we have to keep a separation when we look back on that moment, because the woman I dated and had my two youngest children with (referred to here as the GEM) got the news from a former co-worker (who we'll call the motiveless malignant) on Monday, when we returned to Portland, that Kris was happily engaged. The GEM got Kris's number and called her directly and left a VM in which she tried to derail our happiness.

Since then, it's been a constant struggle to keep the GEM at a distance, while trying to keep close to A & M and be the best father I could be for them.

I want to be clear at this point that this post, this telling of what's going on is not meant to be an FU to the GEM. I'm certain there are elements of FU in this telling, because I'm human. I'm not Jesus. I'm flawed, but I also have been able to recognize that this struggle the GEM continuously foists on us, is a chance for me to evolve as a human in my brief lucky chance to experience life on this planet.

Even labeling her The GEM is sort of an FU. It is an acronym for green-eyed monster. Not long after Kris and I got married, M was having nightmares about a green-eyed monster. Kris created a label for a spray bottle that looked very professional and contained some lavender essence in water and was called Green-eyed Monster Spray.

Each night we would spray under M's bed and in the closets and around her bed so she could go to sleep in peace, knowing the monster spray was vigilantly protecting her through the night.

We sprayed our own bed one night when we had had nightmares ourselves about the GEM's latest escapades.

So, that's me owning up to my FU behind calling her the GEM; it's a way of dehumanizing her and pushing her away.

But I want to reiterate that I don't want to tell this story for the FU reason. I have avoided writing this down for two reasons. First is I don't think FU gets anybody anywhere and second is my fear that my children would stumble across my words at an age where they weren't quite ready to come to terms with the fact that their mother has a severe personality disorder.

So, why write it out now?

Good question. One I'm going to work on answering.

Second south swell of the season

I spent about two-and-a-half hours outside at Publics; caught three big bombs with lots of carving and lonnnnng rides. Very fun.

A little sponger mayhem on the inside