Well, it’s time to pick up the continuing tale of some of my relatives. The term “relatives” is a word that, for the most part, describes people we didn’t choose. They’re just there. I don’t consider “relatives” the same as “family.”
I know I’ve already talked about my mother’s death, but I need to re-cap some things, for clarity’s sake. These were times that I crossed paths with the nuclear family I was born into, usually in similar fashion as that of a comet that passes near enough to the surface of Earth so that a child can wave at it.
*****
I’ve written about this before, but when Eric and I had been married about nine years and had two kids, Grandpa Ware decided to pay for a trip to California for our whole family. By that time, of course, Eric knew the whole story of what had happened with Grandpa and his inappropriate behavior towards me during the summer after my freshman year of high school. We had discussed all of that and kept no secrets between us. But I had also decided all that was water under the bridge and I had forgiven him. So we decided that a trip to the West Coast would be fun for our little daughters, who had never seen such a thing as a beach, not to mention Disneyland.
And yes, there was a time at the beach. Grandpa decided we all needed to go for a swim, and then he strongly suggested that Eric take the kids and go looking for shells. I wasn’t very comfortable about being left all alone with Grandpa, but Eric said he would not go far, and he would keep an eye on what was going on with us. It turned out that Grandpa had actually spent the money to fly us all to California because he specifically wanted to ask my forgiveness for what he’d done so long ago. So, I heard his confession and his apology. And it seemed heartfelt.
“Of course I forgive you,” I told him, with a big smile. “I couldn’t have gone through life without having already done that long ago.”
Then Lisa broke her finger, out on Grandpa’s porch playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” with a lawn chair and Grandpa felt terrible about it, so he paid the bill at the (better) local hospital, where they wouldn’t have even let us in otherwise. But Grandpa and I felt reconciled. Life went on.
*****
Not long after that, Dad dropped in unannounced, on the same day we were going to see Ronald Reagan at the Purdue Airport. We were all inside making a large pro-life sign to bring to the airport when he and Angela pulled up in their RV on the way to see Angela’s daughter in Michigan or Minnesota. He said he couldn’t stay anyway, but he had noticed on the map that we happened to be on the way to Angela’s daughter’s house, and he just needed to borrow our hose to fill up their water tank.
These were the kinds of run-ins that felt the most annoying. Dad didn’t ever plan any trips in his RV to our house in those days, even though they had moved to Southern Indiana. We were an afterthought, and Angela didn’t get out of the RV. Finally, Dad began to come now and then to one of our events – a graduation, a wedding, etc. He never spent the night and sometimes Angela didn’t even come with him. We never did figure out what was wrong with Angela, but there seemed to be some kind of competition going on -- his kids vs. her kids.
*****
One December, my mom decided to move to Indiana, so she and John showed up on our doorstep out of the blue. They had been living in Georgia and suddenly decided to head up north for a while. Probably John needed a job again, but Mom was always more hirable. She got a job at MBAH Insurance in Lafayette pretty quickly and they found a place to rent in West Lafayette.
While it was nice that Mom could be in the vicinity for Christmas that year, she and John were Californians and did not adapt well. January was tough. John kept parking on the grass just before it snowed and couldn’t get the truch out without having it dug out of the mud and towed off the grass. Eric was always having to go rescue them.
Then, just when it seemed they were out of the woods because it was beginning to show signs of spring, Mom announced that she was leaving. Because of the woods. She said she was miserable because she was allergic to the flowering trees, so they packed up to move back to California. This was the reverse snowbird effect and we didn’t understand it. I wrote her a sad poem and gave it to her, telling her I had been excited to have her nearby … but was very sad to see her going away again. She was learning to love our little family: to rock a baby to sleep, to sing a duet with me at our church, or to teach a knitting class at the homeschool co-op. But she was determined to leave.
It wasn’t till later that I found out Mom had actually left because the workers at MBAH had had some kind of party, and overhearing the talk about it, she thought she was invited but wasn’t … so, feeling offended, she had quit her job. I guess Mom had inherited my “stupid gene,” the one you have growing up as a military dependent that gives you the tendency to solve relationship problems by moving somewhere else and leaving the old location with a raspberry. So now they were back on the road to California.
A few years later, they moved to Alaska. They had been on a cruise, paid for by some insurance money from an auto accident, and fell in love with Ketchikan, where it always rained and the chances were good that you would never be sunburned. But they missed the family. So when the opportunity came up, Mom begged Grandpa Ware for an “advance” on her inheritance, and then talked us all into flying to Alaska for Rennie’s second wedding, out on the beach. It was to be a family reunion. The Haley family was supposed to sing a song or something. Chris was just a baby and hadn’t learned how to sing yet (another year and he could have done it!) but the girls and I sang a trio of “Morning Is Broken” with an accompaniment tape by the Second Chapter of Acts.
Fishing in Ketchikan -- Me with Chris, John, and Rennie’s son Joey
It worked out okay at first, being there with Mom and John, Rennie and Dan. Rennie married some guy whose name I cannot remember but he was a photographer or something. Her son Joey was well-behaved, but her daughter Gina terrorized Emily in the back seat of a car while we were going somewhere together. And then Dan came unglued because I had brought my favorite pro-life shirt with me – the Statue of Liberty holding a preborn baby. Mom was crying because we were yelling at each other, and she asked me why I had done this to my brother. What was I thinking? I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong – it was just my favorite shirt.
Unfortunately, the marriage Rennie embarked upon that weekend didn’t last long, either.
Another time, Mom found some money, and she and John left Ketchikan to come for a visit. She wanted to celebrate Christmas while she was in Indiana, even though it was actually Halloween. She brought gifts and had us decorate the tree and make a Christmas dinner. When the trick-or-treaters knocked on the door, we opened it and yelled “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!” which very much confused them.
But John wanted to go fishing while he was in the area and couldn’t get a fishing license. He loudly badmouthed Indiana, using foul language, and talked about how much he hated the whole state. That produced in me a quiet anger – like a pot coming to a simmer just before it boils. Without turning around from what I was doing on the computer, I asked through clenched teeth, “WHY, then, did you even come to Indiana if you hate our state so badly?”
The answer probably was related to the insurance company party, but he avoided answering, laughed, and patted me on the head with his big paw, making some crack about short people. For the record, I detest being patted on the head like a child. In fact, I would have hated it when I was a child, too. I asked him to stop but he only did it all the more and I exploded and smacked him. My mom was pleased to take her husband and leave the next day.
*****
Grandpa drove out from California to visit us in Burrows once. We weren’t home when he arrived, so, since he always had his tool box with him in his truck, he took the opportunity to tighten our front door knob.
There are always attempts to lump people together into categories. Today it’s Blacks, Asians, and White Supremacists. Back then, there was a popular tool mentioned on the radio program “Focus on the Family” that showed people could be categorized by their personalities as Lions, Beavers, Otters, or Golden Retrievers, and I was pretty fascinated by that idea back then. Studying the lists of character traits, I was pretty sure Grandpa was a Beaver – careful, precise, and planned. I was pretty sure I was, at least.
Grandpa had fun with our burgeoning family and for some reason, we went with him to Fort Wayne, to the mall there. I really can’t remember why, but I think it had something to do with a Disney store.
But he also noticed that our toilet was running slow, so he decided to take it out and replace it with a new toilet at his expense. He found out when he removed the toilet that it was a stray crochet hook that had clogged the drain, and now that he had smashed the old toilet to find the crochet hook, we definitely needed the new one.
So he bought one, and I watched him install it. Some of my readers may remember the way our house used to look and how the steps to the basement were in the bathroom, just opposite the toilet. Grandpa had to install this new toilet with his body stretched out on the basement steps – a little uncomfortable, to be sure. I watched him put down a ring of a blue gelatinous substance and then I saw him lift the toilet and put it down, smack dab across the blue mass. Nope, not a beaver, must be a lion! And he said I should have stopped him.
When Grandpa left to return to California, it was early in the morning with a withered apple that was the only fruit we had left, while I was making homemade English muffins galore, for the family breakfast.
But the hardest part of his visit was that he thought I still “loved” him. I think his mind was already going, but after everyone else had gone to bed, Grandpa tried to catch me and kiss me.
“C’mon over here now and kiss me. You know you want to!” he said. But I was always able to side-step his approaches and remind him that I was married. And of course, so was he.
After that, Grandpa just decided that he wanted to help us with our house payments. He said he was helping everybody else, so he wanted to help us too.
*****
When Lisa was 16, she heard about the castle that Calvary Chapel owned in Austria, that they’d turned into a conference center. She heard that members of the Calvary’s could go there and volunteer. You just had to come up with the funds to buy a plane ticket to get there.
My mom had a great idea for that, and it was to have Lisa come to Alaska to work first, in a salmon processing plant, to earn the money to go to the Castle. In Alaska, working in the salmon cannery was akin to de-tasseling corn, which is where all our local Hoosier kids could earn summer money. She only needed to borrow the money to get there, and then she would be rolling in dough and able to pay back the debt, still making enough to travel to Austria.
So Hopeful Lisa set out to do that. But she was unprepared for the strong stench of the fish and found she was unable to handle the work. Mom helped her locate another job at a clothing store / gift shop that the cruise ship tourists frequented. Mom was excited about the idea that they wanted Lisa to dress in a fancy period costume, but upon questioning her, I found out that in Ketchikan’s history, the only women who lived there were those who rented their bodies to service the lonely loggers. I decided that frilly dresses with long feathers and fishnet hose were not suitable for our daughter and told Mom to instruct the store that she was NOT to dress in their period costumes.
I thought I had dodged a bullet, but there was more, and that was related to us by her anxious fiance’, who had spent much time on the phone with her. Here’s what Lisa wrote about her experience recently:
I mentioned this in my post about when my mother died, a couple weeks ago. At this point, I am very glad I am not related to John anymore.
*****
I’m not sure what brought it on, but at one point, Dan decided he wanted to be a friend. Dan has one important problem – he talks too much and too fast. If you try to have a phone conversation, you quickly find out soon that it’s going to be one-sided. So, I listened to him telling me things I never knew before, like how he had spent Grandpa’s inheritance money so unwisely, on starting a business venture selling meth. It ended with himself and his (third) wife in a drug rehab facility, recovering from an overdose that nearly killed them. He was now convinced that he could be a wonderful inspirational speaker at schools, telling his story about how he had almost died and so you should stay away from meth.
Of course, I saw two flaws in his thinking. First, my brother wanted to divert the actual blame for his nearly dying to Grandpa, because it was obviously Grandpa’s fault for giving him so much money in the first place. And second, he wanted to inspire but refused to talk about the One who actually had the answers. So, Dan was unable to confess that he had sinned, and unable to point the way to Jesus, who could forgive sin. In fact, he wouldn’t talk about the things that mattered at all. In fact, he would get really really annoyed if I tried to talk about those things. Mostly, he did tell me about the fantastic properties of oven bags in cooking a Thanksgiving turkey.
There were quite a few kids in our house by that time and Chris was about 14. And, coincidentally, we were pastoring Calvary Chapel Carroll County, which happened to make me a pastor’s wife, which happened to be something I would want to talk about, but not something my fast-talking relative wanted to talk about. And beyond that, Chris was our worship leader. Dan wanted to talk to him, but we had already told Chris about my unbelieving relative, and so he was wary of what Dan might say. And Dan sensed that, and then he blamed me for conditioning Chris to hate him. It would have been difficult for them to be close pals, regardless of what I told him. When you exclude all subjects that matter, all that is left to you is … oven bags.
Eventually, he decided it wasn’t worth it to talk to me because I kept bringing up church and the Bible for some reason. My grandpa could no longer travel so I just called him regularly. And I called my mom, who kept me updated on how many times my brother and sister had gotten married and what Rennie’s last name was now. I mused that it was Mom who “kept the family together,” because she could somehow talk to Dan, who could talk to Rennie, and then she could talk to me, and I could talk to my dad. It was a weird relationship between the five of us, who used to be a whole family.
*****
One year, Dan called out of the blue to tell me that Grandpa had propositioned Rennie, and what should we do about it? I got the facts of the case, how he had talked to Rennie somehow, and he had asked her to go to a hotel room with him.
I told Dan and Rennie about my experience back in California with Grandpa, and how he had sexually assaulted me. And it angered me that he was still doing that kind of thing, into his 80s now. What was wrong with the man!? Rennie told me that she’d had some kind of encounter with him back then, too, and that was the first time I knew anything more than what happened to me. Dan wanted him castrated. The meaning of Dan’s name is “judge,” and he’s always been rather judgey – just not at all merciful.
So I called Grandpa to confront him. I ended up with Grandma on the line and told her everything. She said, “Well, honey, I didn’t know about what happened to you, but now your grandpa has that Old Timer’s disease, and he’s a little crazy. He probably didn’t know what he was doing, and I don’t think he meant anything by it.”
When I finally got him on the line, I had him in tears. Then I asked Rennie, on his behalf, to give him a call so he could apologize. And I gave Rennie and Dan a quick lesson on forgiveness.
But Rennie and Dan decide to hate me because I was on Grandpa’s side.
*****
Years later, I had a letter from someone in my distant past. I’ve written about him before, and I think of him as my “real brother,” Mike. He asked about Dan and Rennie because he remembered them from when he knew me a long time ago. So, we investigated that. Mike even paid to look them up online and find out where they lived now.
After unsuccessfully attempting to reconnect with Dan and Rennie, I unsubscribed from the relationship, or they did. And I have since decided that these were not really my true family. They are merely relatives.
Family is there for you, and cares for you, and you care for them. First and foremost is my husband. Beyond that, I have family within the Body of Christ whom I would trust with my life. My dad is still there and enjoys my visits far more than he used to, and my Uncle Sam is still around.
Mike and his family are there, as well as my kids and their families, and Eric’s in-laws and their families. I even hooked up with my mom’s half-sister Judy at one point, and we don’t talk very often, but I know how I could get a hold of her if I needed to. She’s doing very well, living with her husband of many years, on a ranch in Wyoming.
But I could also name several friends over the years, who have stood with me, who care, who might even come to my funeral someday, if that’s any gauge of a long-term relationship. These are people who are not just my family today, but those with whom I also intend to spend eternity, those whom I will see on the way up to meet Jesus in the clouds in the not-too distant future.
What more could I ask? When Job’s sons and their wives were wiped out during Job’s time of affliction, God was already planning to replace them and to restore all of Job’s wealth and his goods besides. He has replaced my estranged family with a multitude.
God reminds me in His Word, though, that even though some of these not-very-close relatives would rather just walk away and pretend they never knew me, and that I also feel the same way about others, it is not my privilege to harbor unforgiveness in my heart, nor to hate them with some kind of righteous indignation. Yep, like it or not, the Apostle John writes:
“He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.”
I John 2:9
“But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”
I John 2:11
“Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.”
I John 3:5
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
I John 4:20
So, I continue to pray for these people, and I pray for forgiveness whenever I find myself feeling the urge to call down fire from Heaven. It really is not fitting. Someday, all will be put to rights. But this is the age of Grace.
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