Showing posts with label COA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COA. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Rich Farmers ~ Excerpt Two





Having lugged my behemoth accordion to school on the bus for show and tell, the plan was to have Dad pick me up after school, so I wouldn’t be once again burdened with the hernia machine that was making me tilt sideways as I tried to heft it.

I pulled the heavy case out onto the sidewalk, let it hit the ground, and I stood there and waited.

And I waited.

By the time I saw the last straggling teachers, and then the principal, stroll out to their cars, I realized it was probably time for Plan B.

I should have walked back inside earlier, and asked to use the phone in the school office to call my mom, but I didn’t want to have to carry that hateful thing back with me once again.

And now it was too late. The school was locked up. Everybody had already said their goodbyes.

The closest place I knew that had a pay phone was the Laundromat downtown, about eight long blocks away.

I was thankful, at least, that it was September, and still warm. I had enough problems.

After taking one last long look down the empty street in front of Valley Elementary, and still not spying even a distant glint of my dad’s car, off I went.

Read more here

Rich Farmers Update and a Preview

I have sold three copies of Rich Farmers!  Scoff if you will, but I didn't expect to sell any!

Within the next couple of weeks, Rich Farmers should be available on iTunes and other places that I haven't decided upon yet. 




Excerpt:



Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t pack more stuff.

This place was tiny.

Not the motel itself, but the living quarters.

Curious as I was to check out the place, I despised the little kid who showed me around.

While Mom and Dad were huddled with the woman they’d bought the place from, Elsie; pouring over balance sheets, David Lee, Elsie’s son, became my official travel guide.

“Now, this is my room,” he intoned.

Well, no. This is now my room, and will a bed even fit in here?

Stomach churning, as I pranced along the short household tour, I tried to stop thinking about the new school, the new kids, that I would have to face in a couple of days.

Jay and Lisa were lucky. They’d have plenty of time to assimilate. Me, I was about to be thrown into the fire.

“Here, behind this sliding door, is the office. Right off the living room!”

Seriously?

Our privacy stops at this door?

How quaint. And I hate it already.

The little second bedroom was little, all right. A set of bunk beds hugged one wall; Jay and Lisa would be on the bottom bunk, me on the top.

There was room enough for a narrow dresser on the opposite wall, and a wooden door was built into the wall at the foot of the bed, opening up to a closet with three shelves, where I would stow my important possessions; i.e., my record player.

I felt unable to catch my breath.

I’m going to live in here?

It’s about three steps from my parents’ bedroom!

Life truly sucks.

On my farm, I could stretch my arms out wide, and not touch anything. Here, in this room, I couldn’t even stretch out my arms.

What had I gotten myself into? And can I just go back?

“Here’s the bathroom.”

Well, isn’t this nice? I have to get up at seven. If I’m quick, I can jump in the shower and wash my hair before anyone’s the wiser.

My big brother had pulled up behind us in his red Ford Fairlane. He got out; stretched.

“This’ll do”, he said.

“I can remodel a whole bunch of this stuff.”

My brother’s girlfriend, Kathy, was back at home. It was a drive, but he’d gladly run it.

I didn’t know anybody, and there was nobody worth knowing, least of all David Lee.

Jay and Lisa toddled on over, past the pines, and made the acquaintance of our new neighbors, the Merkels.

Friends for life.

I had nobody.

I shook a sheet of loose-leaf out of a folder, and wrote a beseeching letter to Cathy. “Come visit me!”

I was keenly lonely. And alone.

Read more here

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Rich Farmers



Excerpt:



My little Minnesota town mostly tolerated the river. The Red, eleven months out of the year, was kind of puny and babyish. Sure, it was banked by shady trees, and it was a lazy place for a waterside picnic. But it was no Missouri.

Once a year, though; that one month in the spring, the Red River turned into a hysterical, sobbing woman. When all the ingredients got stirred together just right; the ice jams, the melting snow creeping across the flat plain, the up-up-upping of the thermometer; well, then the Red wreaked vengeance on those who ever dared call it puny.

Sherlock Park, home to the town swimming pool, and the corny bandstand, where oompa-oompa bands serenaded clumps of families sitting in the shade; was but mere blocks away from the Red; but it seemed so much further away to us kids. At least until the flooding began.

The First National and Sacred Heart Church and the American Legion Club were only two blocks down and one block to the right of the Louis Murray Bridge, give or take. My town was a little town, and it took its nourishment from the skinny waters that confusedly wended their way north, instead of south, like a normal river would.

Every spring, my big brother got out of classes to help sandbag. High school kids are inherently altruistic, especially when they have the opportunity to get sprung from school.

It wasn’t just the Red that flooded, though. Every body of water that was man enough to call itself a “body of water” lurched like a drunken sailor and went knocking on doors. That included the coulee across the road from my farm.

What that meant for me was that the school bus dropped me off at the top of the hill, and set me on a journey of red rubber galoshes busting through banks of sloppy snow, as poor little me finally made my way across the field and to the waiting arms of my front door.

It wasn’t bad enough that the country kids (I say derisively, although I was one) made fun of my name, and called me “Bushy Tail”, as I sat, grumpily bumped up against the vibrating school bus window, all the way to town.

But I hated winter, and I hated post-winter; with its stinging slap across my face, taunting me with a squinty-eyed vision of someday-wildflowers bursting through hillsides that were currently drenching my snow pants up to the knees.

Read more here

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

COA Week ~ Hug a Kid Today

Missed My Childhood to Play Parent

My parents would fight almost every day when I was little.  I was afraid of my dad because he drank a lot.  I never knew what he would do to my mom or me or my sisters.  I always felt like he might hit her or one of us.  On those few occasions when he did actually hit one of us kids, I would tell myself we deserved it because we had done something wrong.

I was young so I really had no clue what was going on with him.  I just knew he would come home drunk every day, fight with my mom and ruin everything.  I always tried to keep the other kids out of the way.  I would make dinner for them and then take them upstairs to do homework – out of sight, out of mind kind of thing.  The fighting would go on until he eventually fell asleep.  I would hear my mom on the phone with her sister afterwards, she would cry and swear she was going to leave him, but she never did.
           
In the morning, the house would be very quiet.  My mom didn’t get out of bed so I would have to make breakfast, pack lunches and get everybody out the door on time.  All this while trying really hard not to wake up either my mom or dad.   This went on for years.  My dad never did quit drinking and my mom never left him.
            
When I grew up, a friend convinced me to go to an Ala-non meeting.  I really didn’t want to go and didn’t think I needed to talk about any of this because my dad was no longer around.  Boy was I wrong, I had a lot to say and a lot of feelings about my having to pick up the slack for my parents. It really did help simply to tell someone else my story.

Anonymous, Ohio


Me:  Anonymous is what we call the "Family Hero".



“This is the child who is “9 going on 40.” This child takes over the parent role at a very young age, becoming very responsible and self-sufficient. They give the family self-worth because they look good on the outside. They are the good students, the sports stars, the prom queens. The parents look to this child to prove that they are good parents and good people.

The hero is the fixer-upper, the glue that holds the family “in place.” The hero keeps the wounded family functioning (at least on the outside) and takes up the slack where the parents don’t have it together. The hero may get the laundry done, fix meals, mind the smaller kids, perhaps even nurture a disabled or dysfunctional parent (as when the hero child tends to the needs of an alcoholic mother or father). The hero may or may not receive praise and support within the family, but from the outside, the hero is acknowledged as the trustworthy, conscientious, mature, capable kid. A born negotiator, a placater (sic), that recognizes in advance the waves that might rock the family boat and tries to still them, and may even use an occasional white lie to keep the family friction to a minimum.
The Hero is the one who needs to make the family, and role players, look good. They ignore the problem and present things in a positive manner as if the roles within the family did not exist. The Hero is the perfectionist.

As an adult the Family Hero is rigid, controlling, and extremely judgmental (although perhaps very subtle about it) – of others and secretly of themselves. They achieve “success” on the outside and get lots of positive attention, but are cut off from their inner emotional life, from their True Self. They are compulsive and driven as adults because deep inside they feel inadequate and insecure. The family hero, because of their “success” in conforming to dysfunctional cultural definitions of what constitutes doing life “right”, is often the child in the family who as an adult has the hardest time even admitting that there is anything within themselves that needs to be healed.

This child provides the self-worth for the whole family and keeps the secret the best of anyone. However, the shadow or inner feelings of the HERO are related to their feelings of guilt and inadequacy, which they cover up by overachieving and people pleasing. The stress and responsibility of their role is incredible. The task they have set up for themselves is way beyond them but they keep plugging away thinking that they will eventually be able to make everything in their family ‘all better’.”

The shadow, underlying or unconscious feelings are fear, guilt, powerlessness and shame.

Adult Children of Alcoholics

That was me.  Or, more accurately, I guess, that is me.  

Adults, watch for kids like this; the super-responsible ones.  They're too young to be so responsible, and they deserve to be kids. 

Let's try to not let this endless cycle repeat and repeat.  Nobody can shake the alcoholic and the co-dependent to make them concentrate on what they're doing to their own kids, because they're too enmeshed in their own circumstances to even think about it.

Somebody needs to step in.   

Saturday, February 9, 2013

My Book ~Update


For better or worse, my manuscript is done. 

Sure, I could keep fussing with it, but I have to draw the line somewhere. 

Truth is, the reason I have kept fussing with it is because I'm afraid. 

Some poor fool is going to buy it, and say, "Well, that was a waste of $x.xx!" 

Or, "Who told this imbecile she knew how to write a book?"

Or, "There sure are a lot of boring parts in here!  Good thing I have this handy push-button on the side of my Kindle, so I can fast-forward!"

Or I will scroll to my Amazon page and see that nobody has purchased a copy, and I will feel like a failure.

Or, somebody will buy it and give it a scathing review (given a choice, I'd go with nobody buying it).

I guess sometimes in life one has to make that leap.  I've only really taken one leap in my life before this, so I'm hardly used to jumping.

I have contacted a book formatter to help me.  Very soon, this whole thing will be a reality.

And then, what will I do with my time?