I’m reflecting today…reflecting on a life that sometimes seems like it belonged to someone else. I look around at my beautiful children, all five…perfect, amazing, sometimes high maintenance but always worth the effort I put forth in being their mother. These new times, having settled into a household full of just Sparrows, seems like the way it’s always been…but it’s not.
Daniel is being released from prison today. I can’t believe it’s been over six years since I have seen him. Every once in awhile I’ll have a dream about him…usually he’s still a child (or at least he looks like he did when he was just eleven). In the last one I had, he was crying to me about how he had to do what he did, kind of acknowledging what he had done but still not taking responsibility for it, and since he looked like a child in the dream – I believed him. I know he’s not a child anymore, and for the longest time I felt such resentment for the way things turned out. You know how he was identified as the suspect? That damn tattoo he inked on his neck…did you hear me? ON HIS NECK. Guess what it says…it says Beverly. Hmmmm…I guess that’s what you call irony. You tattoo the name of the woman who couldn’t – wouldn’t – didn’t – take care of you as a child, onto your neck of all places, and that’s the mark that is be used to incriminate you in a crime? Yes, I’d say that’s definitely ironic.
Rex is also in jail now. I haven’t really talked about this to many people…but I’m very frustrated. I heard that Beverly cried when she found out…she cried. I ask you, does she even have that right? Furthermore, I was told that she went on some kind of dramatic rampage, hollering about how Tony and I are just so money hungry (???) and that somehow this is our fault. Huh? I’m sorry, what was that? Our fault? Let me get this straight…you smoke crack, weed, and throw back a few Budweiser while a precious life is growing inside of you, you neglect the physical, emotional, and educational needs of your children, your oldest child ends up trading in what could be of his own life to take care of ALL the other lives YOU brought into the world, and you then take none of the responsibility when Rex becomes a developmentally delayed, schizophrenic, meth head? Again I say…hmmmm.
Well…to Rex, to Daniel, and most certainly to Beverly…We did the very best we could with what we were given. We imagined that the result of our blood, sweat and tears would be a bunch (and yes, I mean a bunch) of amazing, self-sufficient, and self respecting adults. Certainly we thought that a clean home, regular (and very delicious I might add) meals, people who cared about your homework, proms, and sporting events, parent figures who actually went to work and then spent their checks on you (and not the crack house down the street)…certainly we thought we were making a difference.
In the beginning, it very much matters…I mean the choices made by our parents. In the end, however, it will be our own choices that determine our lives. We’ve made ours. Would we make the same ones now, knowing what we know now at thirty-eight (as opposed to twenty-two)? I don’t know. I suppose that we wouldn’t be the same people if our lives were to be re-written. Our children may not be the same either, had they not experienced this sort of sacrificing for the greater good. Shade wouldn’t be the amazing woman she’s become, Star wouldn’t be the young lady she’s on course to be, and the groundwork wouldn’t have been laid for the great men I really hope Fayzonn and Antone will become.
So, again I say, a lot of reflecting going on in this head of mine (and obviously some venting). I really appreciate my Father in heaven for bringing us through the storm. I also very much appreciate the prayers and support of all those that love us. Please join me in keeping all of Beverly’s (my) kids lifted up to God…they need it.
He is SO funny! He has his own, silly way of asking me to make him some coffee, and he thinks it’s cute (OK, I admit, I easily fall prey to his unique charm). “Cup a joe?” he will ask, a slight smile on his lips and a very childlike spark in his big, brown eyes. As a matter of fact, I’ve only heard the word “coffee” come out of him a few times…usually he just throws the word “joe” around as if he were the one who invented it.
