Unpredictable: The walk in and out of darkness

1 My Beginnings It all started for me in a city in Northwest, Ohio, in February of 1971. It was a cold winter morning when I was born. The moon was in its first quarter, and my astrology reading said I “have great faith in life and bounce back quickly from disappointment and failure.” Great news for me! I was going to need this edge to survive an unpredictable childhood. When I was born, the world was being introduced to “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour,” the 26th Amendment lowered the United States’ voting age from 21 to 18, and “Masterpiece Theater,” “All in the Family,” and “The Electric Company” premiered on television. Cigarette sales topped $540 billion (despite a partial ban on cigarette advertising). A report from British experts likened the mortality rates from cigarette smoking to that of virulent cholera or typhoid epidemics. Concerned about inflation, President Richard Nixon announced a “New Economic Policy’’ that included a 90-day wage freeze, the 1 HONEY KASPER imposition of a 10-percent import surcharge, and a freeze on the con version of dollars to gold. My mother and my three older brothers (ages 2, 5 and 6) were living with her mother at the time of my birth. My parents’ divorce was finalized a few days before I was born. I was born in the cold blizzard conditions of the early morning hours. My mother had been baking cookies in the kitchen because she couldn’t sleep when she went into labor. After leaving the hospital, we all continued to live with my grandmother. I don’t know how long we stayed with her. Then I moved with my mother and brothers into another home in the county. I know at some point, when I was still a baby, I was dropped off back at my grandmother’s. No one knows how old I was but, supposedly, I had a swollen stomach, and looked like one of the malnourished Ethiopian children. My grandmother took me to a very well-respected doctor in northwest Ohio, and he said that I was severely malnourished. He advised her to take me home and love me and try to feed me the right things. He said that if I survived, I would have medical issues for the rest of my life. She took the challenge on and never wavered. Because of all the broken family lines of communication, I didn’t know that I was malnourished as a baby until I was 39 years old. I had suffered through many surgeries and health challenges by this time. My first word was “strawberry,” which as you can imagine is my favor ite fruit. I usually joke that I liked strawberries more than my parents. At eight months old I had my first surgery on my ears. By the time I was 10 I had nine ear surgeries. An acquaintance mentioned to me that when he worked with the school system, he witnessed students with pus-filled ears coming to school and how horrible he thought that was; he wondered what kind 2 UNPREDICTABLE of home life these students had to come to school this way. I could relate to that because I had this same problem. That was me with pus f illed ears. My ears were always hurting; I remember that from when I was young. I remember even as I grew I would need to use ear drops. My grandmother used to give them to me, and I remember how it burned as it went from my ears and into my throat. I would cry and carry on because of how bad it felt. It seemed as though nothing the doctors did helped. I would have tubes placed in and pulled out of my ears. I couldn’t go swimming much, as a youth because of this. When I was a baby, we lived in another house in the same city. The story I was told by my mother and grandmother was that one day when my mother was at work and my cousin was babysitting us, the house caught on fire when my cousin left us alone, and my middle brother decided to make breakfast and dumped hot grease in the garbage can. I was the only one who didn’t get out of the house. The fire department came and rescued me. They said when the fireman picked me up; you could see the outline of my body on the bed. In 2012, I spoke to my cousin about this for the first time, and she told me quite a different story. She said that she never left the house and that she was in the basement doing laundry when my brother was making hotdogs in a skillet and the grease caught fire and he threw the entire skillet in the garbage. This caused the garbage can to catch fire. He opened the door two separate times yelling down in the basement that the house and kitchen were on fire. By the time she came upstairs the fire was out of control, and she had my brothers go outside and go next door to call the fire department because we didn’t have a home phone. She said she was going to get me out of the crib and grab the puppy, which she did before the f ire department even came. 3 HONEY KASPER I believe that my mother wanted us to feel isolated from family, and that is why she made up the other version of the story, so we wouldn’t talk to others about our circumstances and the way we lived. I don’t feel this is an assumption. Our entire relationship, as my brothers and I grew, we were constantly poisoned against getting to know others in the family by the way she spoke about them. I know them now, and they are good people who have their own stories about her, which match what I know from living with her. 4 2 Fond Memories I loved riding my bike, climbing trees, playing soft ball, roller skating in front of the house, collecting bugs, and just be ing a kid. I treasured the times I spent with my grandmother helping her bake, picking berries, listening to a story or two, and brushing her hair. She had the most beautiful shiny, soft and silky silver hair. It was so long she mostly wore it up in a bun, but when she let it down it went down below her hips. I lived with my grandmother, full time, until around kindergarten when I started to live with my mother and brothers in a home about 20 minutes from my birth location. I went to kindergarten for at least part of the year. I have very vivid memories of this school from the playground and its monkey bars to the classroom. Teachers would come and take our class to the gym for parachute games, which was one of my favorite things. They would also take us to the library in the school, and I remember the librarian telling us 5 HONEY KASPER kids that we could check out books and take them home! This was so exciting to me. I remember questioning her about this because it seemed too good to be true. I just loved these activities. After school I went to the daycare across the street from the school and would wait for my oldest brother or mother to pick me up. Usually it was my oldest brother that picked me up. Our mother wasn’t home much, so even at that age my brothers and I had to take care of ourselves. During my time at the daycare, I was hit by a riding toy truck driven by a little boy in class. I fell and broke my nose. The school called my mother and told her I was hit by a truck. She supposedly rushed to the school to find it was a toy truck. I remember being taken to the hospital and my nose being bandaged up. I remember going right after this to pick up one of my brothers from Boy Scouts. The boy that hit me with the toy truck turned out to be a cousin of mine. I remember social workers coming to the door and questioning us, but we weren’t supposed to talk to them. One time when we heard someone come to the door my mother told us that we should go and hide. We hid under our mother’s bed, until she called for us to come out. I remember staring into my brother’s eyes as we hid, thinking someone was going to come and do something bad. When the person left, my mother took us to the window and said, “Do you see that car across the street? That is your uncle, and he is here to kill us for your dad.” So my brothers and I really thought our dad wanted us dead. I remember standing there looking at my brother who was closest to my age, our eyes wide with fear. I remember one time when we were home alone and my two old est brothers were wrestling, my oldest brother didn’t see a needle in 6 UNPREDICTABLE the carpet and it went into his knee. I’m not sure who took him to the hospital. I just remember him screaming. My grandmother would come and pick me up at the start of the weekends and bring me back for school on Monday. I’m not sure why she never picked up my brothers. She was always worried something would happen to me because I was the only girl. After a while of her doing this, I started living with her full time again. I didn’t mind living with my grandmother; I was never hungry and I knew I was loved. She believed in old-fashioned things: everything should be homemade, you don’t spend much money and you squeeze every penny you can. She didn’t care about the fashions of the world and didn’t care about who was the famous person of the era. She was raised a Mennonite, as was my mother, but somewhere in her adulthood my grandmother decided to become a Baptist. From what my aunt told me, my grandfather started to go to the church and Grandma checked it out, too. The rest was history. We went to church every Sunday and Wednesday. She was very active in the church. My cousin-in-law (he was married to my cousin) worked there, and after Sunday school I would help him see people out of the church. Once he asked me in front of a depressed man, “Are you going to heaven when you die?” I said, “I sure am.” He then told the man that if I could know it at such a young age, he could know it also. This was something I really enjoyed being part of. I really believed I would go to heaven. I believe there are people on this Earth who know from a young age that they are meant to do something; they are protected. 7 3 No Accidents There are no accidents, no coincidences. My family believed strongly in this. I remember participating in Sunday school classes and art activities and watching Christian groups that visited the church for different holidays. I remember at Christmas that some of the youth from the church would play the bells. I thought it was so neat. These memories are from my entire time living with my grand mother, standing beside her and singing church hymns, Go Tell It On the Mountain, How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace! How Sweet the Sound, and At the Cross. Talking with people after church, I remember sometime around the age of 7 or 8 when the pastor’s wife asked, “Does anyone feel led to come down?”, and I felt so drawn to it. I went down and I prayed with her, and I felt so loved and so much peace. I knew God was real; I could feel him with me. Family was important to my grandmother. She would share family photos with me of her grandparents and great grandparents, and take 8 UNPREDICTABLE me to family reunions and to her childhood stomping grounds. She would talk to me about their accomplishments and their hardships. She had a lot of pride in our family being pioneers, how they sacrificed to provide a better life for their families. Her maternal grandfather vanished one day and was never found, leaving her mother orphaned at a young age. Her husband, my maternal grandfather died, when she was 56 leaving her a widow. He was only 58. They lived through the Great Depression, and through war; her great grandfather was the only one that returned from the Civil War. He had been wounded in the hip, and still continued on the March to the Sea and then to the Grande Parade after the war, which he traveled to by train. All of his brothers died, and a number of brother-in-laws died. She recognized that alcohol was an issue in the family and was very much against strong drink, through her daughter, my mother’s actions, and I believe she had some siblings that had alcohol issues. She really didn’t discuss it with me, but it was something that she faced. She wanted me to feel connected to them, too. I know that now, looking back at those moments, she would try to tell me about our family heritage, but back then I was too young to understand this. A person’s heritage can give them such pride – or, of course, shame. I am so proud of the family I am from. I don’t concentrate on the ones that have fallen short of this. I can’t; I must concentrate on what I can do to make those that did good proud. To be the best person I can be, for my family, my country. I say my country because every generation of my family has served our country, and we owe them more than can ever be repaid. For a short time, when I was around the age of 5, I remember be ing at a house where my mother and brothers were. My grandmother was there for me a lot, too. I had speech delays, and my grandmother 9 HONEY KASPER would speak to the teachers about me. My speech was so bad that I remember being at a grocery store with my grandmother and when we were checking out, the girl behind the cash register asked if I was re tarded. I didn’t understand what this meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. My grandmother started yelling at her, asking her what was wrong with her to say something like that. This had really upset her. I re member around the holidays my grandmother would purchase sugar cookies in a tin from a bakery in the county. In the spring, the cookies were formed to look like flowers with dried cherries in the middle of them. She would use the tins for her sewing items or for the family photos. They were always so neat. I know this must seem like a silly thing to mention in a story about one’s life, but it’s the little things. She had so many old, unique things in the house: a long canister with a king’s crown on it that made a neat whistling sound when you blew into it, the Fisher-Price musical television, a rolling teddy bear that you could attach a string to and take for a walk, a monkey that frowned. So many little memories that filled my days with entertain ment. My grandfather’s binoculars also became a favorite. Of course climbing trees was high on my list: to climb up high and watch the neighbors go about their lives. My birth mother lived in the same city around this time but I don’t remember having a bedroom at this house, and I think I was living with my grandmother. A neighbor lady of my mother’s; who lived right next door to us had grown daughters and no granddaughters to pass her dolls onto, so she gave me four dolls to take home. I don’t remember having dolls until I lived with my grandmother. (Maybe I did, but I remember the excitement of receiving these, and it seemed like such a big deal.) I felt shocked and honored that she wanted me to have these. I remember 10 UNPREDICTABLE looking at them, tracing their faces and eyes with my fingers, and thinking how life like they were, how pretty they were: one with red hair and blue eyes known as a Playpal Companion Doll and one with white hair and blue eyes and I believe she was a Ruthie Doll, one with brown hair and green eyes that was as tall as I was she is known as the Patty Playpal doll. One was known as the Baby Crissy Doll that is now considered a vintage doll from 1973. She had red hair that grew longer out of the top of her head and she had dark eyes. I knew they would be great friends. I treasured each and every gift that I was given, and I still have these dolls because I chose to take care of them. My brothers were different in this respect because even though they appreciated things they were given, they would destroy them when they became angry and frustrated. At times they would destroy each other’s things and sometimes their own things. These behaviors would continue into adulthood. We moved quite a bit, so I’m not sure how long we stayed in each place. It seemed that when I was older and living with them again we moved two to three times a year. My grandmother worked as a school crossing guard on a railroad near her home.