All week the kidlets here have been telling me that they are sick, too sick to go to school.  I might have taken pity on them and kept them home from school, but they tend to feel much better as the day goes on.  By the time adults need quiet and sleep the youth gang riot which is my life these days is on at full manic throttle.  At alarm clock's call the next morning, the poor child would be re-stricken with the same symptoms as the morning before, but worse, so much worse.

And I'd gently nudge the child up and out the door to school, with quiet reminders of the need to work through adversity. 

(Please don't ask the children about those gentle nudges and quiet reminders--they are likely to remember them as shoves and heartless bullying.)

Today everyone bounced out of bed and got out the door with no aches, pains, or hacking coughs.  Today, Friday!  and this one day to labor through before the weekend's break. 

I hurt.  My head aches, my throat is scratchy.  I'm pretty sure I've got a fever of an igneous nature, and I'm drowning in internal goo.    I'm sick, too sick to go to work.  Can't I stay home?

My best friend Bonnie and I finally got together tonight, months since our last night out.  We've kept in touch by phone, of course, and spent more than an hour talking today after we set up arrangements for tonight's dinner out.

We went to our favorite place and ate dinner, and hung around to talk for a long time afterwards catching up with each other's lives and the lives of our extended families.  Bonnie and I have known each other since I drove her daughter to kindergarten along with my son Mack and another boy.  Those three are adults now, and their friendship didn't last past elementary school, but Bonnie and I have the luxury of keeping friends for a long time, long enough to know each other's husbands, children, parents, siblings, and other layers of families.

Tonight Bonnie told about a dream she had.  That's normal conversation for a dinner out with a friend, but this wasn't a normal dream.  Her dream was really more about my life than hers.

Strange to think that she's handling that part of my life for me these days.

Today the world turns insecure for my brother's children.

The social worker who has been trying to synthesize functional structure to support the crucial but inadequate emotions is declaring their mother unable, unfit, to take care of them.  The mother and her children will hate this, will fight this, and I suppose will hate the social worker and perhaps hate me, too.

I'm ambivelent.  I expect the children will bury their feelings as they have for their entire lives.  The world will see their fury and fear in ways it may not recognize it--in arguments among themselves, in silence, and in some new ways too.  Truancy, drunkeness, sexual activity and eating disorders are still new enough to shock;  there are a few more that may be coming.  I hate to see them upset more than they have been.

But on the other hand, their mother is so impaired by mental and physical problems that the children haven't really had a mother for a long time.  Today I took Tilly to the third eye doctor to see her.  Tilly has double vision that adds a heavy load to normal daily activities and the first two doctors haven't known exactly what to do and so have passed her along to a more knowlegeable colleague.

The doctor I took her to today looked defeated as he told her that there is nothing he can do to help her.  She should wear glasses, he said, to protect the one eye which sees well.  If that one should be damaged, she will be functionally blind, unable to drive, unable probably to work.

All it took to prevent this was to patch her eye for some time when she was young, and then to make sure she wore her glasses.  She was a young child then and took the patch off and "lost" her glasses.  Her mother did not repatch, did not find the glasses and insist that she wear them.

I was shocked to hear Dr. R. admit defeat today.  He is Jean's doctor too, and has been seeing her since she was 3.  She wore the patch and we hated it.  She wore glasses, too and the world treated my daredevil daughter as if she were clumsy and weak.  The world, of course was wrong.  The girl was a whirlwind.  The girl still is and while her weak eye will never be as strong as the other one, she hasn't needed glasses enough for the doctor to prescribe them since she was around 10.

Tilly is fighting the idea of glasses now, glasses that won't get rid of the double vision and will, as she says, "only make the double vision clearer".  Her Aunt isn't saying, never mind, don't bother.

I'm saying, who will be unable to see if the strong eye is damaged?  You need to take care of your eyes; you have a lot to look at in life.  And I'm taking her to get the glasses, to pick out some frames that show what a whirlwind daredevil droll Tilly is.  And while she lives with me, we will know just where they are--at least when her aunt can see her beautiful face.

A commissioner of something-or-other will be asked today to remove my nieces' and nephew's placement with their mother and to give control of their lives to the county social services department.  Five years of support and supervision have preceeded this request in this county and it's the second county they've lived in.  Getting out of that other county seemed like a very good idea at the time, since the social services there were making unhappy noises in her ear.

The children love their mother and are very protective of her, often true I think when a parent is not competent to be one.  They are trying to preserve the lives they had at that home--their schools, friendships, familiar places.  I could recite the times they were taken away from their mother before and where they ended up and for how many months, and for how many years.  The county has taken its sweet time to act on their behalf, but I understand to tell a parent, "Your child is no longer yours to keep.  Someone else will tell you when you may see her" shouldn't be said unless it really truly is the only way to let them have a non-traumatic childhood.  The county should have said it years ago, however.  The three have had rotten childhoods and they are marked by it.

I long to take them into my home and give them a normal up-and-down childhood.  I know that life for my own children has not been the stuff of fairy tales.

Actually, I guess it has.  Fairy tale life is not simple and smooth.  There are problems, tragedies, and deliverance.  There are trolls and  temptations, wolves and woodgatherers, kind folk and cruel.  That's true of life here too.

What I really hope for the children is the glow left at the end of the tale, the "...and they lived happily ever after."   But in the meantime, they absorb this stress and only the little one shows any signs of the fraying that is taking place inside her.

And me?  I've people sleeping on couches, people showering at five in the morning (and me, a couple of times, at three a.m. when the water flows hot and powerful and not too cold to be able to stand.).  Parker's grades are cemented to the D and F level, while his more at-risk cousins achieve A's and A+'s with only three C's among them.  Mr. Simple is resentful.  I won't go into details about that, but he is diabolically good at being resentful.  Mack has Asperger's to offer some explanation of why he's refusing to surrender the second largest room in the house, but if the children come here permanently, there is no way to house them unless Mack takes the smallest room and three girls share his room.

Jean is coming home for Spring Break today.  I'll pick her up two hours away in Oshkosh.  I am praying that when I come back and drive up the driveway a second story will have sprouted from the first and there will be room and beds for all.  It could happen you know.  In Fairy Tale living, it happens all the time.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This day is a much bigger deal in the U.S. than it is in Ireland, or in Scotland which is really the Old SnakeChaser's native land.  Here it is the excuse to party hard and the Irish American Archbishop of Milwaukee Timothy Dolan has excused Catholics in this area from abstaining from meat today so that they can enjoy themselves and so that the parishes which host St. Patrick's Day dinners and parties can make their profits.

In looking around for information about St. Patrick I found this blessing which he offered for the town of Munster.  He is said to have prayed it on the hills of Tipperary and I think it's lovely.

A blessing on the Munster people --
Men, youths, and women;
A blessing on the land
That yields them fruit.

A blessing on every treasure
That shall be produced on their plains,
Without any one being in want of help,
God's blessing be on Munster.

A blessing on their peaks,
On their bare flagstones,
A blessing on their glens,
A blessing on their ridges.

Like the sand of the sea under ships,
Be the number in their hearths;
On slopes, on plains,
On mountains, on hills, a blessing.