49-Final Move

We moved once more, this time definitely for Daughter.

I’d already witnessed her be the focus of a hate attack as she waited for the school bus the year before, just a week before the classes were out for the summer. I’d spent the next hour’s drive fighting with myself about what I wanted to do/instinctively believed was the right thing to do versus my inbred disinclination to make trouble. When the client I’d gone to see agreed with my instincts, I made sure to get back on the road early enough to see Daughter’s principal and, despite his non sequitur ramblings about raising his own six kids, pulled her out of school, immediately and permanently. A summer of writing letters, making phone calls, and being in people’s faces got her safely into a different, non-impacted academic environment—and expanded my jargonistic vocabulary.

It took a healthy commute to get her there and home that next semester, but she seemed to fit in better and appeared a little happier. Looks can be deceiving, of course, but I sincerely believed I’d finally done something right by her. I’m sticking to that story… it was a good story… but alas it wasn’t the whole story. Daughter’s psyche hadn’t healed quite as lickety-split as expected (by whom, I couldn’t help wondering), so she was once again not working up to her potential. I knew that courtesy of a notice from the powers-that-be, written in passive prose so as to avoid responsibility (“incidents of cancer, some fatal, have occurred”), but threat was thinly veiled: she had one more semester to shape up, or she’d lose her special-privilege out-of-district placement.

I’d ghosted enough books for PhDs and MFCCs by then—back in the nineties, eighty percent of my projects were pop-psych titles—to know that meant the paperwork to kick her back was already in the works. So I told the universe we needed to move into her school district and on my very next day’s walk (I was still rebuilding my strength after the non-heart-attack), I noticed a paper stapled into a circle lying at the bottom of a light pole. A For Rent notice. It must have escaped its staples. There were no other signs on either side of the street.

Thank you, universe.

I called the number, walked through the house, signed the agreement, and told my family we were moving to a single-family house at the very far edge of the correct school district. The rent was only a little more than we were paying, just about what our next increase would have taken us to.

*sigh* My perfect-mother friend disapproved. But then, she’d disapproved when I’d pulled Baby out of school in the first place. My child needed to learn to get along with people better. She was the problem, not the victim. Fortunately, enough people agreed with me to keep that particular guilt trip at bay.

Sidebar, Your Honor? I didn’t say anything to my friend or anyone else, for that matter, but now that we have the language and society is beginning to recognize that all folk are non-created equal and that some of the low-melanin, favored-religion variety take exception to and have conformity expectations of their obvious inferiors, I’m just going to put this out there in plain English.

Ninety-eight point seven-six-two percent of the Jews I know have strong personalities. With the exception of a few Adult Children of Holocaust Survivors, we tend to be loud, intense if not outright forceful, and opinionated. It’s hardly a secret nor surprise that so many comedians and performers are Jewish or Black or, more and more these days, LGBTQ. Those non-allowed in have a tendency to stomp out their/our own path.

So while my daughter may well have struggled to square being severely gifted with having brain-chemistry and physically challenged parents of mix-and-matched genders… she simultaneously had to sort out society’s prevailing carrot-stick mindset… and balance that with a vivacious personality, which I for one hope to hell she never loses.

Did that make her tough to live with? Yeah, sometimes, just as was her father, sometimes. But I wouldn’t change either of them for a Genie’s magic fortune. In a society determined to paint the world apartment beige, they were/are wondrous splashes of brilliant color and energy.

And in the immortal words of Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

So we moved, leaving behind the landlord who just had to insult me one last time but made the mistake of doing it in front of Tom for the first time. Any and all misgivings my husband had about packing up and going instantly dissolved, like sugar sprinkles in hot oatmeal. I’d love to reprint how he took the man apart that afternoon but, damn, his words are as gone as my fourth-grade French.

They made me feel good, though.

Which was getting rare those days. Tom and I had a habit of consummating every apartment, hotel room, and road dive at whichever 4:30 came first, but between my heart scare and subsequent fatigue and his reality stress over being the Number One Bandleader behind the Orange Curtain, we didn’t get around to that tradition in the new place for several weeks, and even then it was halfhearted.

We were subtly moving in different directions, growing apart as couples do, yet still fiercely connected as universe-mated duos are. After some wrangling, we abandoned the master bedroom for the quieter middle room, just big enough for our king waterbed and two skinny nightstands, the easier for him to sleep during the day. I took the big front area as my office, something I’d never had before. Daughter set up in the back master bedroom, farthest from the street and thus supposedly safer from intruders, burglars, and coyotes walking the main thoroughfare in the dark of night, searching for feral cats, fruit rats, and dogs foolishly left outside by their owners. Sorry to say, the prairie wolves ate well.

With a single home stage left and a brick-enclosed community stage right, our place was one of two split-personality houses, a cosmic non-coincidence, I suppose. The address was in one city, the school district in another. No kids on the block to play with at all, but Daughter’s academic placement was nailed down, which meant she could fly or screw up from there on as she saw fit.

Nothing really came down that easy, of course, but then life isn’t supposed to be easy, is it? What would be the point if it was? Extrapolating from every conservative-skewed history book I’ve ever read, those who seek happy, comfortable lives are first fodder for every new dragon, conqueror, despot, and natural disaster that comes along.

Oh—thinketh thou revised history is a new thing? Haha--history is written by the victors, always has been, always will be. That’s why today’s explosion of self-published titles is so essential, even though they seldom generate the kind of ROI their authors desire. As the world gets technologically more complex, truth gets concomitantly more skewed, and reality gets ever more segregated and contentious.

If we the people do not record our personal authenticity, our individual timestamp of the truth we’re living at this particular moment in the passing turbulence, then all future generations will ever know is what those in power deem appropriate to conserve their power base.

Yes, I’m a ghostwriter and yes, I do help people write their books, but no, the above is not a pitch. It’s a fact. Back in the 1950s, my Social Studies textbook claimed a military study had determined Negros did not have capacity for deep intelligence because their craniums were the wrong shape.

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.” Thomas Stearns (TS) Eliot

When I stopped giving my formative years and mother issues conscious credence and focused 1,002 percent on supporting my family, I realized my life needed and in fact had a specific purpose: to facilitate other people’s success. I liked it. It felt good. In the process, I got that college education I couldn’t bring myself to achieve within the confines of formal academia. I learned bits of commerce and human nature and traditional vs. alternative medicine by ghosting business, psychology, and health-and-fitness books. I learned to stand back and recognize the unwritten intentions and hidden meanings in memoirs and dissertation-to-trade rewrites. I dipped a toe, then half-a-foot, and finally waded up-to-my-knees into spirituality works and, at the same time, covert government patriotic crimes. A hellova juxtaposition. I quoted an outrageous fee for a novel rewrite, then had to actually figure out how to do it when the check arrived in the mail. I was on a roll, baby!

Mentally. Career-wise. Physically, it cost a non-tax-deductible fortune-and-a-half to keep me going. My mother, whether paying off guilt or terrified I was, indeed, going to succumb to the sometimes-fatal nature of the horrible disease she’d previously denied, insisted on paying for some of the non-American Medical Association (AMA) remedies that kept me functioning. A remarkably uncomfortable situation, but I couldn’t afford to stop or slow down. Tom’s career and Daughter’s basic pre-and-teenage necessities cattle prodded me out of bed every morning.

On the other side of that coin, I had a hellova good time! OMG, what I learned from every book, from working with every author, from being part of the writing community. I grew into leadership roles. I tried my hand at agenting (haha! Talk about a disaster!) and began sharing what I was learning from said agent’s back office. I gained confidence in my abilities; I wrote another edition of This Business of Books; I stopped breathing…

Okay, not for long, just a few eternal seconds, don’t panic. I did enough of that for us all.

I was sitting in a rocking chair having a three-way argument with Tom and Child when suddenly my lungs said, “Nah, we’re done” and ceased their autonomic inhale-exhale routine. Simply walked off the job. Rude. So rude. Then they just as suddenly started again, and I gasped for air, which, in my mind, seemed reasonable.

“What the hell just happened?!” Tom demanded. “What’s the matter with you now?!”

I knew enough by then to realize his fury masked his fear, so I cracked a joke to make it go away—what’s the point of having a narcissistic mother if’n you can’t usurp some of her more effective techniques? —and carried on, consciously ignoring my panic, not-all-that-subconsciously flailing with alarm. What if my lungs hadn’t decided to resurrect? I wouldn’t have been able to pull a “stay conscious, stay conscious, stay conscious” rabbit out of that hat!

Regaining my composure in mere min… hou… days, I wrote to every neurologist in the area asking for help, some kind of help, any kind of help. Two dozen letters out, two responses in, not a bad percentage in the pre-pre-pre-Affordable Care Act, during which I had no insurance and less money. One was a UCI expert who wanted to send me for an MRI and a full workup, the other an MS organization that offered to pay for it all, since it was an initial visit. The final diagnosis? I could stop second-guessing and lying to myself: I definitively had chronic secondary multiple sclerosis. And moderately severe Reynaud’s Disease. Oh, and that multi-hour horror four years earlier? That’d been a severe aortic spasm. I should see a cardiologist, but no one was going to pay for that.

Since I eschewed drugs at that point—if there was a side-effect to be had, I’d have it—I declined the kindly doctor’s MS prescription, which he admitted was probably wise. On the other hand, he’d never heard of using cayenne-pepper capsules to combat Reynaud’s, but since his wife also had both conditions, he was going to try it with her.

“It’s a bad combination,” he repeated more than once—and bless his heart, laughed when I asked which one to give up. But before he could answer, his resident piped up.

“If you don’t stop working, you’ll never get on Social Security Disability.”

Stop working?

Stop… working?

Stop working??

In what universe was that an option?

Oh, I suppose if I woulda just disengaged from keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table, I’d coulda found the time and energy to focus inwardly, reformulate my psyche, and manifest an entirely new Earthly existence in which I didn’t need a cane to walk or clients to keep us afloat. I coulda connected with my higher, spiritual self and recalibrated my conscious, subconscious, and molecular electro-mechanics to emit only positive waves so as to receive only positive returns from the universe.

What the hell, I was already racing the clock to stay out of a wheelchair—why didn’t I just ramp up that contest to include covering next month’s rent and utilities?

Because I was a lazy, reality resistant piece of shit, that’s why. Duh.

So instead I took Sis’s offer of discounted Noni juice direct from the bottler, agreeing to occasional reports on whether/how it affected me in exchange. To Sis, Noni had no flavor. To my landlady, it tasted like parmesan cheese. My taste buds kicked back “sewage sludge.” But I drank it, gurk glass in one hand, water chaser in the other, every day, because I was diligent and hopeful… and out of choices.

Six months later, I had enough stamina to help Sis move to New Mexico. Bear stayed home. Daughter came with me. Memory’s fuzzy, but I think we had a blast. On the open road, driving a 10-wheel truck over the mountains.

Yes!