It was about 4:30 or 4:45 on a Tuesday morning.  Irish Woman and I were sound asleep when my phone rang.  I didn’t get to it in time, so it flipped over to voicemail just as my hand hit it.  Clearing my head and vision, I saw that my ex had called.  “What could she possibly want at this hour?” was the only thought in my head as I hit the redial button.  After a few rings, it picked up, but it wasn’t my ex on the line.

“Hello?” said a deep male voice.

“Yes?  This is my ex-wife’s phone, and she called me.  Who is this?”  I answered.

“Sir, I’m XXXX.  I’m an EMT with the Zoneton fire department, and I just took this phone from my patient.”

I was immediately wide awake.

“What’s going on?”  I asked.  In the background, I recognized the voice of my ex yelling and arguing with someone.  Irish Woman noticed the change in the tone of my voice, and sat up, giving me a questioning look.

“Sir, it appears that your wife and the children have been hurt in a fire.  She asked us to call you and tell you what is going on.”

“My God.  Where are the children?  How are they?”

“They just left here in another ambulance.  They’re on their way to the burn unit at Kosair.  We are just getting rolling with their mother.  She’s going to University.”

In the background, I heard my ex yelling even louder, demanding that the children be brought to University Hospital to be with her.

I thanked the gentleman and ended the call, promising to be at Kosair Children’s Hospital as soon as I could.  I explained what was going on to Irish Woman, who was already getting dressed.  She’d heard me use the words “children” and “My God”, and was already two steps ahead of me.  On our way out, I grabbed two stuffed animals for the kids, a Twinkle doll that Girlie Bear loved to sleep with and a Beanie Baby that Little Bear had named “Daniel Striped Tiger”.

I honestly can’t remember much about the drive to the hospital.  As we got to the emergency department at the children’s hospital downtown, there was already someone waiting to escort us back to the kids.  They were in a treatment room that was as close to chaos as you can have and still see people doing their job.  Girlie Bear was being taken care of by two nurses, while it took two nurses just to hold Little Bear down.   She was pretty much in shock, and hardly flinched as they worked on her, while he was thrashing from the pain and fear.  I motioned Irish Woman over to Girlie Bear, knowing that she’d be the best at soothing her.  I headed over to the head of the bed that Little Bear was lying on, and tried to help hold him steady and calm him down.

As I talked to my son and tried to calm him, I glanced down at the foot of the bed.  Nurses were soaking gauze in cold saline, then applying it to the burned soles of his feet.  As I watched, one of them gently peeled back an old set of gauze, taking with it patches of soot and skin.  Each application of cold gauze brought Little Bear a small moment of peace, but only for a moment before he cried out from the pain.

Irish Woman and I swapped places several times.  The kids were still being worked on, but were clutching those stuffed animals that I brought and the teddy bears that the hospital chaplain had brought down with her*.  As hard as the shrieks from Little Bear were to get through, the silence and far off expression on Girlie Bear’s face were worse.

After about an hour, my ex’s mother came in.  She hadn’t been over to the other hospital to check on her daughter, but wanted to see what was going on with the kids.  I guess you can say that the point in our relationship where we went from “I leave you alone, you leave me alone” to outright hostility was the moment when, as I came out into the hall to let her know how things were going, she demanded that I check the kids out of the children’s hospital and send them to University to be with their mother, and also demanded that the children be sent home with her once they were discharged.  I am truly proud of myself in that I didn’t even raise my voice as I replied that the kids were staying exactly where they were, that we would discuss what would happen after they were discharged once I had some idea how long they would be in the hospital, and that since she didn’t have anything better to do for the kids than to harass me, then maybe she should find her way over to University and take care of her daughter.  I later found out that she had taken the opportunity of Irish Woman slipping out to make a couple of phone calls to try to pressure Irish Woman into getting me to do as she wanted.

Eventually, what could be done for the kids in the emergency room had been done, and they were transferred up to the burn ward.  By then, the kids were extremely medicated.  Girlie Bear went to sleep on the way up, and didn’t wake up fully for three days.  Little Bear surprised us by getting hyper.  He was stoned, and wasn’t making a heck of a lot of sense when he tried to talk to us, but he was bouncing off the bed rails.  We settled into our room, where we would spend the next few weeks trying to entertain the kids between dressing changes and debridements.

Both children had second and third degree burns on the entire soles of both feet, with more damage between their toes.  I had one doctor remark that it was a good thing that we allowed them to run around barefoot so much, as the callouses had provided at least a little protection for the softer skin underneath.  In addition to that, Little Bear had a bad second degree burn on his arm, and both kids had small dime sized burns on their faces and shoulders.

What had happened was that one of the wall sockets in my ex’s living room had shorted out during the night, and the fire had burned its way up inside the wall to the attic space of her apartment building and spread laterally from there.  Basically, the building burned from the roof down.  My ex lived on the top  floor of the building, and it was one of those where the stairs and landing are on the outside of the building.  This complex had metal mesh stairs and landings encased in plastic, and to get to ground level, you had to walk down about 50 feet of landing to then go down six flights of steps.

Someone saw the fire from the street and immediately started shouting and beating on doors.  My ex heard someone pounding at the door, realized that the house was on fire,  grabbed the kids, and ran.  The small burns on the childrens’ heads and shoulders came from pieces of burning ceiling falling onto them as they made their way out.  By the time my ex got out of her apartment and out onto the landing, the plastic that the metal landing and stairs were covered in was on fire, and as she ran across it, it burned her feet.  Her legs came out from under her, and she dropped both kids onto the hot metal and plastic.  This caused the burns on the bottoms of their feet.  Her fall burned not only her feet, but also the length of both legs up to the small of her back and on her arms.  The burn on Little Bear’s arm probably happened when he was trying to get down the stairs to safety and rubbed up against the railing.

Luckily, they were the only people hurt in the fire.  The fire marshal later found that the cause of the fire was someone putting improper fixtures on aluminum wiring.  I didn’t know this at the time, but a lot of the buildings built in the 1970’s or so have aluminum wiring due to the difference in cost, and in this particular instance whoever had refurbished the building hadn’t used the proper, but more expensive, light fixtures and power outlets that are necessary with aluminum.  The fire marshal, along with the fire chief and the principal of the kids’ school, came by that afternoon to check on them, and I have rarely seen anyone as angry as that fire marshal was.  He didn’t give me any details then, but I later read his report, and found that the same complex had had an electrical fire a year or so before, but no-one had corrected the issue.

That night, once Irish Woman had gone home and the kids were in a deep, opiate-induced sleep, I fell apart.  I’d kept it together for 18 hours, and once the lights were out and everyone else was either unconscious or gone, it was safe.  I pretty much rolled up in a ball and cried for quite some time.  The silent prayers I’d been saying all day were whispered.  I thanked whoever was listening for the lives of my kids, for the men and women who had saved them, and for the hospital that was only a few minutes away.  I prayed for their recovery and for the strength that both Irish Woman and I would need to help the kids get through this.  I eventually drifted off into what was both a deep sleep of exhaustion, but also one of the lightest sleeps I’ve ever had.  I woke up rested in the morning, but I also woke up several times in the night at the slightest change in their sounds.

We spent the next month in that little room.  Girlie Bear came around to being herself after a few days, and outside of when he was getting worked on by the nurses, Little Bear was his normal, chipper self.  We’d eat, read books, color, watch movies, and wait for the next round of wound cleaning, and new bandages.  Through all this, Irish Woman was my rock.  We weren’t married yet, and truth be told up until that morning I’d have given even odds on us staying together for the long haul.  The way that she was there for my kids and me through that whole ordeal showed me just how special she was and how undeservedly fortunate I was to have her as a friend and love.

We got through it.  After a few weeks, the kids went home to our house, and we continued their care there.  I got pretty good at changing dressings and spreading silvadene onto their burns.  The kids were restricted from walking and sunlight, and had been cooped up in the hospital for weeks.  We did what we could to entertain them, and having our libraries of books and movies available was a godsend.

Eventually, the kids healed.  We had to let them gradually start walking again, but it was another month before they could wear shoes.  Their mother got out of the hospital and stayed with friends until she could get back on her feet.  After a few months, everything was back to normal, or almost so.  The kids both woke up in the night for months, crying and screaming about the fire, and Girlie Bear still has the occasional nightmare.  I guess they’ll always have nocturnal memories bubble up every so often.  Both kids’ burns scarred them pretty badly, but the worst of it is on the bottom of their feet, and they report no long term ill effects there.   Little Bear has a patch on his arm that is the only part of his body that doesn’t turn brown as a nut in the summer, and every so often I’ll notice a couple of the small burns standing out against darker skin.

I look back now and, as I have for 10 years now, realize how lucky we got that morning.  The fire chief was pretty much convinced that, if not for the actions of that random guy on his way to work who saw the fire and ran to help, my children would be dead.  As I drove to the hospital that morning, I was imagining just how bad it was, and I will always be grateful that instead of picking out little coffins for them that week, I picked out several sets of pajamas for them to wear in the hospital.  Instead of two graves to talk to, I have two wonderful children.  Yes, they have lived through some things that no person should, but they’re also vibrant, loving, beautiful young people, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

Irish Woman unboxed her “Merry Christmas to Me” present tonight.  She bought herself a new Epson photo scanner, and was running some old negatives she got from the lady who raised her through it. It’s something she’s wanted to do as long as I’ve known her, but scanner technology just didn’t do it well enough.   It took her a while to figure out how to use it, but then old snapshots of family started coming through.  There were the shots of men fishing, children posed in their Sunday finest, and such.  And then she found this:

That’s her mother as an infant being held by the uncle who raised Irish Woman for the first few years after her mother and father died.  Irish Woman’s mom was born in 1926, so that negative is 86 years old.   This is the only photo that Irish Woman knows of that has her uncle and her mother in it.

To say that Irish Woman is excited is an understatement.  She has a few mementos of her parents and their families, but only a couple of pictures.  Most of the photos she has are well-staged portraits and such, so an intimate snapshot like this is a wonderful find.

We have a big box of negatives in the basement.  A lot of them are from photographs that I took when I was stationed in Europe, with a heavy leavening of shots of the kids when they were little.  Irish Woman has hundreds of her own negatives to scan, and of course she has that envelope of old odd-shaped negatives from almost a century ago to go through and bring her family back to life.  I think I’m going to look forward to this project.

Yesterday, I wrote about how fortunate I am that my loving wife has chosen me out of what on face value would have been better options.

You see, when we met, I was less than two years post divorce, had three children from two marriages, no money, lived in a dump, and had just moved to Louisville.  Heck, I was still doing stuff for my ex-wife’s mother so that she would loan me her lawnmower and I could mow the lawn of my rental.  My life was work, study, and kids.  My social life was pretty much summed up in the word ‘sleep’.

She, on the other hand, was a beautiful career woman, who owned her own home, travelled pretty much on a whim, and had no responsibilities that interfered with all that.  When we met, she allowed my madness into her life, and madness it has been.

Since we met in 2001, she has stood by my side through:

• Losing her job of over a decade, at least partly because we were dating.
• Taking over a “parental consultant” role of three children, with her presence neither wanted nor welcomed by their mothers
• Almost losing Girlie Bear and Little Bear to a fire, then two months of rather gruesome recovery
• Almost constant guerilla warfare between me and the ex’es, with me doing my best to not retaliate because I don’t want to hurt the children.  She has seen me take abuse and insult without hitting back and I know that gets under her skin.
• Found a way to get me to get diagnosis and treatment for a condition that was slowly pushing me into a world of pain and immobility, then supported me through some ugly side effects from that treatment.
• Having first one, then another of my children move into our home on a full-time basis.  One of them was a joy, the other not so much.
• Four years of almost constant bickering and fighting between Junior and me before he graduated high school and left.

A lot of women would have taken one or two of them as an excuse to break up.  Instead, Irish Woman has been the glue that kept our family together, and has been a steadying and calming influence on me when I’m ready to do something stupid.

And yes, I realize that in some very narrow subjects, I’m smarter than the average bear.  In a lot of other subjects, I’m smarter than some, but can’t hold a candle to others.  When it comes to people skills, especially family relationships, I was a complete idiot when Irish Woman met me.  In the intervening years, she’s smoothed over some of the rough spots, gently taught me how to act like a human being, and shown the patience of a saint.  Yes, I’ve come a long way, but I’m still only a steps away from knuckle dragging most days.  I don’t think I will ever be described as a “people person”, but my darling wife is always willing to look past that, and she has a skill for putting me in my place when I cross a line.

So that’s it.  She’s much more than I deserve, and it never fails to amaze me that I got a second date.  I’m sure that’s not a unique story, but it’s mine.

Dear Mother of my Oldest Son,

20 years ago this week, you and I pledged to each other that we would be good partners to each other and good parents to any children we might bring to this world.  We had plans on being married Command Sergeants Major by this point, travel the world, and have a small clutch of children, but like the saying goes, there’s many a slip between cup and lip. 

It took less than two years for us to start failing at our jobs of spouse and parent, and by our sixth anniversary we had thrown our hands up and admitted failure.  Unfortunately our inability to be functioning adults together had a harsh negative impact on our son, some of which I fear will take years to even begin healing.

I’m not saying I miss our marriage, because I don’t, but I regret the way it turned out.  I sincerely wish we had listened to the advice of our friends and family and waited to make sure.  I’m pretty sure that if we hadn’t short circuited the courtship process and gone our separate ways for a year or so, we would have had a remarkably different, and possibly happier, outcome.

I cherish the child we created, even if he makes me absolutely mad sometimes.  I recognize that without the bad circumstances of our marriage, I would never have had the children that were born after we split up.  For their sake, I thank you.

I hope that your new life is successful and fulfilling.  I hope that your new child brings as much happiness into your life as my children bring into mine.  I must admit that I do enjoy a guilty amount of pleasure when I learn of some minor trevail in your life, or read how your professional life is unpleasant when your name or employer occasionally pops up in the news.  I’m sure that you sometimes feel the same when you learn about some complication in my life.

In closing, let me leave you with this:  It’s been 20 years.  I’d be out on parole by now.

Best Regards,

DaddyBear

I’ve been emailing back and forth with an old friend a lot the past couple of days, and she’s been asking some pointed questions about my family. And of course that got me thinking.

You see, I have what most people would consider an unconventional family. When Irish Woman and I described it to our pastor, he called it “biblical”, because noone in the Bible had 2.5 children and a nuclear family.

Some details:

I’m married to the Irish woman, but she’s not my first wife.

I got married to Junior Bear’s mother when I was young and foolish. We stuck it out for a few years, but it didn’t work. I did however, get a great son and a taste for Asian food out of that.

I married Little Bear and Girlie Bear’s mom when I was getting over Junior Bear’s mother. Here’s a hint: Never get married on the rebound.

That being said, I don’t regret marrying either of these two women because they gave me three wonderful children.

Little Bear was in utero when I met his mom, but I’ve raised him as a son since he was born, and he is my son in every way except biology. I never asked about how he was made, and when he found out about the situation, it didn’t change a thing between us.

I don’t differentiate at all between the kids as to who comes from whom, or who’s related to who in which way. We’re all family, they’re all my sons and daughter, and they’re all brothers and sisters. For the most part, the kids don’t make any distinctions either way.

Of course, the ex-wives love their children. But the Irish Woman loves the whole brood.

I am the oldest of 5 brothers and sisters. I’m only in contact with one of my brothers at the moment.

My mother gave me an ultimatum over the first wife, either she goes or the rest of the family goes. I stuck with my wife and child, for good or bad.

When my mother died, I got back in touch with my brothers and sisters, but made it very clear that I wasn’t interested in a continuing role in the family drama. Unfortunately, my two sisters and one of my brothers chose for some reason to not accept that. So, I keep my distance, but I’m not hiding. It’s not hard to get in touch with me if you want to, and the rules for being a part of my life are pretty clear: play nice, or take your ball and go home.

Moving beyond all of that, I have a really large extended family made up of people who have touched my life throughout the years.

My oldest friend is as close to me as my brother, and she keeps me honest by dancing around and pointing out hypocracy or muddled thinking.

I have brothers and sisters around the world from my time in the military, and although we don’t talk all that often sometimes, they’re always in my thoughts and prayers.

My kids, wife, and I have been adopted by several other families as one of their own, and we have a great time with them at every step.

There’s the Hoosiers, of course. Hoosier Mom and Dad adopted the Irish Woman when she was a teenager, and have always been there for her. I met them and their family at the yearly Hoosier Roundup, and Little Bear and Girlie Bear were calling them Grandma and Grandpa by the end of the first day. The rest of the Hoosiers are the big, noisy, loving family that I remember from my family in North Dakota when I was very young, and they just threw us into the mix with the rest of the kids and their kids. Everyone is Aunt that or Uncle this.

We also have another set of adopted grandparents that the kids call Mammaw and Papaw. They are the parents of Little Bear and Girlie Bear’s godmother, and they consider us as much family as we consider them.

So, the point of this rambling is:

1. No relationship, including blood, is worth your sanity. If they can’t treat you right, they don’t deserve the privelege of being a part of your life.
2. Genetics doesn’t make a family. I love Little Bear no matter who his biological father is. I’m his dad. Hoosier Mom and Dad have loved and cared for Irish Woman for decades, and didn’t bat an eye when we asked Hoosier Dad to walk her down the aisle.

So, enough with the emotional stuff. I’m going back to being snarky for a while.