My Three Sons

Ted Slawski

 

I was eight when My Three Sons first appeared on TV. I watched it a few times, but I was more of a Combat! kind of kid. By the time I was eighteen, I’d seen it enough times to say out loud, many times, “Never. Not me, man.�?

I was convinced I’d have no kids. Good plan, I thought. The world is overpopulated, kids take up your whole life, I’d be a lousy father . . . (At eighteen I didn’t have the all-time best relationship with my father, which certainly colored my view of the world of parenting.)

Ever hear the joke, “How do you make God laugh?�?(Answer: Make a plan.) Before I was nineteen, I was in love with the woman who is still my wife more than thirty years later. I knew then it was true love and time has proven me right. But . . . she came fully equipped with a son. A package deal; all or nothing. Do I give up the love of my life? “Daddy�?didn’t sound too bad.

I actually liked the little rug rat, and I slipped by the first milestone in my now-compromised plan. In fact, at our wedding, when little Jody got restless, my wife-to-be-in-five-minutes and I held him between us during the ­ceremony.

Twenty Six Years An Unfolding Romance

Kris Hamm Ross

 

“Now, who is it that’s getting married?�?my husband whispered to me as we settled into our pew after being led down the church aisle by a solemn-faced young usher.

We’d had this discussion at least three times. Once when I discovered the calligraphied envelope buried under a pile of discarded grocery flyers after he’d reached the mailbox first. Another when he knocked the invitation off its magnet on the refrigerator door—where I had mounted it in plain view. And a few days earlier when I reminded him we couldn’t go to the opening of an action flick because we were going to the wedding of a teaching colleague of mine.

Despite all this, I wasn’t concerned he’d forgotten the names embossed on the invitation. After twenty-six years of marriage, I’ve learned that the mere mention of the word “wedding�?seems to trigger a memory lapse in my husband.

The Postcard

Rocky Bleier with David Eberhart

 

The ambush came out of nowhere and everywhere. My platoon members and I were strung out and moving through the bush near Hiep Douc in the Que San Valley of South Vietnam. It was August 20, 1969, and, as always, it was hot and wet.

All at once, the distinctive angry staccato of the enemies�?AK-47 assault rifles filled the air. It was mixed with a different sound, that of a heavier machine gun. The incoming rounds slapped and tore through the foliage. Adding to the din were the shouts of the platoon sergeant to return fire. Company C of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade was in trouble.

Suddenly, it felt as if someone had smacked me—hard—with a baseball bat on the left thigh. I had been hit by one of the incoming rounds! I tried to scramble out of harm’s way, but there was no escape from the withering fire. Then I heard the ear-splitting “ruuump!�?of a grenade explosion, and the baseball bat smashed down hard again, this time pounding onto my right leg and foot.

My memory after that is of crawling—for what seemed like forever. I later calculated that over the course of six hours, I had dragged myself across two miles of ground. I did a lot of thinking and remembering in that time.

At one point during my slow and painful journey, it occurred to me that I’d had the peculiar fortune to have been “drafted�?twice. In January 1968, I was a late-round draft pick for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and in November of that year, the U.S. Army drafted me. In my weakened condition, I found this double-draft thing infinitely amusing.

But the joke soon faded, and my mind once again tried to grasp the reason that I was in Vietnam at all. The political reasons for the U.S. being there were easy to understand. The difficult part for a soldier like me to comprehend was my role in this conflict. I had been over all this in my mind many times before, and I always came back to an incident that had happened early on in my tour.

We had come across a village—not even a village, really, but just a couple of hooches inland. There was a family there—kids, an old man and an old lady. I saw that they didn’t have anything—except for an old tin can. They had filled the tin can with water and put it on an open fire to boil. When I looked inside the can, I saw a buffalo hoof. That pathetic soup was their sustenance. I decided right then that if I could help these people take a step forward, then my time in the country would be worthwhile.

As it happened, my opportunity to follow through was cut short. My wounds got me evacuated to Tokyo, where the docs told me I had nearly lost my right foot and that I would never play football again. They informed me I was getting discharged with 40 percent disability.

This was not good news. Football was my whole life and dream—a dream that had started in Appleton, Wisconsin, at Xavier High School and matured at Notre Dame, where I had been voted the captain of the Fighting Irish in 1967. There wasn’t anything else in my life I wanted to do. Football was something I identified with and that defined me.

Allow and Prosperity Follows

Eva Gregory

 

I knew the problem was bigger than me, so it followed that the solution was too. It was huge. Not in complexity, but in understanding.

My life partner, Robin, and I ran a software company in California, and it was leaking money like the proverbial sieve. For more than five years, we’d been searching for backing to help us launch the fantastic software program we’d patented—but to no avail. We were laying off staff, not paying ourselves in order to retain the crew, and morale was not just low, but nonexistent. Creditors were after us personally, as well as for the business. Our stress level was incredibly high.

I’d recently stumbled upon a universal principle called the Law of Attraction. Although I’d been studying metaphysics for years, as I found it extremely compelling, I only understood it intellectually. I really did not understand how to apply it to my life until I discovered the Abraham-Hicks website (www.Abraham-Hicks.com). I had a major aha moment. It was as though the light bulb came on, the fireworks went off, and I finally really got it!

Basically, the Law of Attraction states that whatever you are focused on you will get more of, whether wanted or not. But what I realized is that it is the emotion—the emotional charge you have on whatever you’re focused on—that will magnetize to you more of the same. You can imagine where my focus had set up residence over the last five years: “We don’t have enough funds.�?“We can’t make the payroll.�?“We will lose the business.�?I had been focusing on exactly what I did not want more of in my life!

The engine of my thoughts was driven repeatedly by what was lacking in my life, and it was highly charged with negative emotion. I was carrying the emotional fuel that was magnetizing even more of what I did not want into my existence. And I had taken it to the ultimate level. Everyone within the company picked up on that vibration, and it grew to gargantuan proportions.

Once I grasped the principle, I felt I had nothing to lose by introducing the concept to the rest of the company. In order to change the vibe of the company by shifting our emotions, I created a company-wide game with a huge spreadsheet called the Prosperity Account, based on The Prosperity Game, a process I’d learned about through Abraham-Hicks Publications. We played this as a team.

The game went like this. On Day One, $10,000 was deposited into the account, and everyone in the company was asked to post to the spreadsheet how the funds would get spent. Each day the account was increased by an additional $1,000, so $11,000 was deposited on Day Two, $12,000 on Day Three, and so forth. After a bit, I was surprised to see how generous people were being. Since there was no fear of the funds dwindling, department members were making purchases for other departments besides their own. The money in our imaginary Prosperity Account was flowing, and we were actually having some fun for the first time in a long while. The goal of the game was to get our focus on something that felt better, something better than we’d been feeling for a very long time.

It worked. Overall, the company energy shifted, and many of us began to look forward to coming to work again.

What I’ve come to learn is that the Universe doesn’t know if what we are focused on is real or imaginary. It only picks up on the essence of where we are focusing our energy and thoughts, and assumes it’s real. So, as far as the Universe was concerned, prosperity was our reality. The Prosperity Account exercise showed me that no matter what I spent my money on within a given day, there would always be more in the account the next day. Therefore, I was able to stop thinking of lack and living in lack, as there was always an abundance of monetary flow. The exercise taught me to stretch my wealth mentality—a valuable lesson that must be learned in order to allow prosperity to follow.

And follow it I did. Within nine months of launching the Prosperity Account exercise, we were approached to sell the company—lock, stock, and barrel. We went from living from no paycheck to no paycheck (as Robin and I were not always collecting one for ourselves) to successfully selling the business for a hefty sum of money. Why? Because we were in a good place mentally, and we were able to see the opportunity for what it was and act on it!

Learning about the Law of Attraction and actually experiencing how it works was the most transformational turning point in my life. I learned that the difference between feeling hopeful and feeling fearful is the difference between success and failure. Fearfulness was not a good feeling. By using the Prosperity Account, I found a way to grab onto thoughts that made me feel better, which produced the key monumental shift. If one has to choose between feeling bad and feeling good, what is the logical choice? Seems a simple choice, though not necessarily easy, depending on your belief systems and where you’ve been focused over time. And yet, it can be both simple and easy. I just had to let go of my old way of doing things and embrace a new way.

Out of the Blue and into My Heart

Charisse J. Broderick King

 

She walked out of the Jetway, pushing a double stroller carrying small, tow-headed and groggy identical twin girls, with their older sister, brother and father trailing behind. Except for the blonde hair, she looked every inch my mother—more so than either my sister or I ever have or ever will I suspect. We had written letters, exchanged pictures and a few phone calls, but just like when you read all the books and attend all the classes in preparation for having a baby, no amount of groundwork could have prepared any of us for what this newest arrival would mean to our family, least of all me.

I was sixteen when I learned I had an older sister. My mom had been involved with a married man in her mid-twenties when she found herself pregnant. Being in no position to raise a child on her own, she gave the baby girl up for adoption. A few years later, she met and married my dad and had three more children —me, my sister and brother. She told my dad about the baby before they were married, but opted not to tell us when we were young.

When I first learned of my half-sister’s existence, I hated her. In my mind, she had ruined my perfect family and usurped my esteemed role as oldest child. I knew my mother’s decisions both to give up the baby and finally to tell us about her had been exceedingly painful, but I felt no compassion, only anger. Instead of thinking my mom had marveled at all the newness and excitement of being pregnant with me, I believed she grieved over the child she had given away with each of my kicks. I felt the special connection my mom and I should share because of my birth order had been severed by a person with whom I could never possibly share any kind of bond. It was a good thing that we would probably never meet. What could I, would I, possibly say?

Six years passed. I had graduated from college, gotten a job and was living a more or less normal post-college life. Somewhat out of the blue one early fall day, my mom asked if it would be okay if she opened the adoption files that had been locked by the courts for over twenty years. She didn’t want to search herself, but she didn’t want to prevent anyone from searching for her. Fortunately, I had matured enough in those years to take this news much more in stride than I had the initial information, and I agreed to her opening the documents. Still, I was tentative.

Just before Mother’s Day in 1992, my mom got a call from the Bureau of Vital Statistics that they had a match to her information, and her biological child might contact her. The day after Mother’s Day, a letter arrived. It had been just over six months since she had opened the records. My sister’s search had been even shorter. She had only filed her papers at the end of April and was informed two weeks later that they had a match. A scurry of exchanges via mail and phone followed that first letter (this was before e-mail) as we learned more about my sister, her adoptive family, and her husband and children, who consisted at the time of one daughter and son. She sent each of us our own letter, introducing herself. How I wish I had kept mine! But the fear I was feeling over what welcoming this person into our lives might mean—not to mention my own fastidiousness, a trait that I would later find I share with her—did not allow me to. I figured the novelty of the situation would soon wear thin, and once the major questions were answered as to how everything transpired, we would all go back to life as we knew it. Well, maybe we would exchange Christmas cards.

It came as a huge relief to my mother that my sister had not ended up in foster care and that she had grown up healthy and happy. We learned that she had been adopted at three months by a couple who had a biological son eleven years older than she. They had moved from our city to a small town in the Midwest when she was fairly young, and that is where she grew up. She got married right out of college and had started a family soon thereafter.

It came as a huge shock to me that although my mother did not name her, her first name, Jolee, is almost the same as my middle name, Jolie. Moreover, she chose my birthday as her wedding date, and it is in April, not June or anything as predictable as that. We both like to cross-stitch, a hobby not practiced by any of the other members of our families of origin. We share the same love of the color purple and have a flair for decorating. No longer able to ignore the miracles of similarity, my heart was softened, and I finally met my sister.

Originally, Jolee had planned to travel with her family to meet us soon after first making contact, but then discovered she was pregnant . . . with twins. So it wasn’t until the summer of 1994 that they finally were able to make the trip. The connection between all of us was amazing—magical even. We had gotten to know each other somewhat through the letters and phone calls, but when we finally saw each other in person, it was like reconnecting with that friend that you don’t see for years, but when you do, it’s like no time has passed.

They came for the fourth of July. It seemed like no small coincidence that the fireworks display that my family had always gone to when we were growing up—but hadn’t been scheduled for years before and hasn’t happened since—was on that year. We had a blast watching them, eating fried chicken and ice cream, running through the sprinkler and taking scads of pictures. It was a family reunion for a family really meeting for the first time.

In the years since meeting the sister I thought I didn’t want, Jolee and I have grown close enough for me to ask her to be one of only three bridesmaids in my wedding. We have shared war stories of marriage and childrearing over phone calls, in old-fashioned letters and now mostly via e-mail. Occasionally, the fact that we weren’t raised in the same household or place is evident in our exchanges, but more often, I continue to discover our similarities. Just recently, I found out that we have the same favorite flowers—pink roses with periwinkle wildflowers.

The word “sister�?is rife with meaning. She is someone with whom we share biology and/or life experience; to whom we tell our secrets and with whom (and sometimes about whom) we gossip; for whom we will go to the ends of the Earth. Growing up, I felt lucky to have one sister to share these experiences with. I didn’t think I was missing anything. But when Jolee walked off that plane, I let her walk into my heart, and my life is all the richer for it.

The $100,000 Stray Cat
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Loving Our Cats

ViAnn Meyer

 

One orphan kitty with golden eyes—it’s hard to believe all he has inspired.

I’ve always loved cats. But until nine years ago, my pet cats suffered a high mortality rate. I decided that my next cat was going to live indoors only. Besides, I love wild birds, and this way I could be sure my cat wouldn’t hunt birds or little woodland creatures.

But then came Oliver. My sister works at a veterinarian’s office. One day she called up and pleaded with me to come see a six-month-old kitten that had been abandoned there. They were having trouble finding him a home. The other staff found him ordinary. They only kept him because he was a willing blood donor. It broke my sister’s heart to see the little kitten offer his paw for the needle and then purr while his blood was being withdrawn.

I went to the office and within thirty seconds had fallen in love. The kitten had short but soft black fur with a white undercoat, a round, pudgy face and luminous golden eyes. He was dignified but affectionate. I instantly thought of the name Oliver, after the Charles Dickens orphan. Home we went—together.

But Oliver didn’t want to be an indoors-only cat. He cried at the door, paced around the house, and tried to run outside whenever we opened a door. After much family discussion, we decided to build an outdoor cat run, an enclosed area where Oliver could safely spend time during the day. With the help of my dad, a retired carpenter, we built a thirty-by-fifteen-foot structure that had chicken-wire fencing on its sides and top.

Inside the cat run was a long strip of grass, food, water, litter pan, toys, scratching posts, a planter with catnip, and plenty of perches and high shelves. Oliver adored it. He loved lying in the grass, basking in the sun, chasing bugs and watching birds fly by.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Oh, no. The cat run overlooked our vacant, one-acre lot. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I decided, if we could grow a wildlife garden there to attract more creatures for Oliver to watch? So I read books and magazines, visited nurseries and went on garden tours to educate myself. I was a little nervous about tackling such an ambitious project—I’m rather shy, really—but, I reasoned, no one would ever see the garden but us.

I recruited my dad to help. He quickly became so enthusiastic that he began adding his own ideas. His contagious spirit spread to my other family members, and before I knew it, we were all out there clearing the field, preparing the soil, marking out paths and starting to plant. We put in trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, bulbs—thousands of plants over a two-year period. Dad built arbors, trellises, pergolas, benches, a pond with waterfalls and a bridge. We started collecting all sorts of garden décor—statues, stepping stones, fountains, planters, wind chimes, flags, birdhouses and wind vanes—all with cat designs. A friend even made me wooden signs saying “Meow Meadows,�?“Cat Country�?and “Kitty Grazing Area.�?Everything was purr-fect!

And even that wasn’t the end of it. A friend recommended our garden for Spokane’s big annual garden tour. So on a hot August Sunday afternoon, I had five thousand people tour our garden. People went nuts over it! They didn’t respond as much to the planting scheme as to the heartfelt emotion that went into it all. For weeks afterward, I was in the newspaper and being interviewed on TV. People called constantly.

Since that day, the Meyer Cat Garden is no longer our “little family secret.�?Over 10,000 people have visited it—everyone from nursing home residents to a tour group from a national garden convention. During my now well-practiced speech, I emphasize the importance of caring for your pets properly so they don’t harm wildlife.

And wildlife we’ve got. As the garden has grown, it’s attracted birds, frogs, squirrels, chipmunks, even raccoons, skunks and deer. I’ve grown, too. I’m now a master gardener and president of our local garden club, and I’m comfortable with both writing and public speaking. And our whole family has grown: Working on such a tremendous project has drawn us all closer together.

And what about Oliver? He watches it all contentedly through his cat run—his window to the world. Our family joke is that if we added up the cost of all the thousands of plants, cat decorations and hours of labor that went into the Meyer Cat Garden, we have easily spent over $100,000.

That’s why we call Oliver our $100,000 stray cat.

But you know what? He was a bargain.

Role Reversal
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teens Talk Tough Times

Adi Amar

 

It was a Friday night, and I had just returned from climbing one of the red rocks of Sedona. The night was chilly, the moon was high and I was looking forward to crawling into my warm bed. My faculty adviser, Bunny, approached me as I walked through the arches to my dorm room. She took me to her home, where she told me that my mother had been in a terrible car crash and had been taken to the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital in critical condition.

When I got to the hospital, my grandmother pulled me aside and said whatever I did, I mustn’t cry in front of my mother.

A nurse unlocked the door that led down a wide hallway with machines all around. A strong smell of medicine brought a nauseous feeling to my already turning stomach. My mother’s room was right next to the nurses�?station. As I turned into the room, I saw her lying on her side, with her tiny back to me and a fluffed pillow between her bandaged legs. She struggled to turn around but couldn’t. I slowly crept to the other side of the bed and said “hi�?in a calm voice, stifling my urge to cry out.

The cadaverous condition of her body stunned me. Her swollen face looked like it had been inflated and kicked around like a soccer ball, her eyes had huge dark bruised rings around them, and she had tubes down her throat and in her arms.

Gently holding my mother’s cold swollen hands, I tried to keep my composure. She kept looking at me and rolling her eyes into the back of her head as she pounded her hand against the bed. She was trying to tell me how much pain she was in. I turned my face away from her, trying to hide the tears that were rolling down my face. Eventually I had to leave her for a moment because I couldn’t hold my anguish in any longer. That was when it struck me that I really might lose my mother.

I kept her company all day long; in time the doctors took the respirator out of her throat for a short while. She was able to whisper a few words, but I didn’t know what to say in return. I felt like screaming but knew I mustn’t. I went home and cried myself to sleep.

From that night on, my life completely changed. Up to that point, I’d had the luxury of just being a kid, having to deal with only the exaggerated melodramas of teenage life. My concept of crisis was now forever altered. As my mother struggled first to stay alive and then to relearn to walk, my sense of priorities changed drastically. My mother needed me. The trials and tribulations of my daily life at school, which had seemed so important before, now appeared insignificant. My mother and I had faced death together, and life took on new meaning for both of us.

After a week of clinging to life in intensive care, my mother’s condition improved enough to be taken off the respirator and moved to a regular hospital room. She was finally out of danger but, because her legs had been crushed, there was doubt that she would be able to walk again. I was just grateful that she was alive. I visited my mother in the hospital as often as I could for the next two months. Finally, a sort of hospital suite was set up in our family room, and to my relief and joy, she was allowed to come home.

My mother’s return home was a blessing for us all, but it meant some unaccustomed responsibilities for me. She had a visiting nurse, but much of the time I took care of her. I would feed her, bathe her, and when she was eventually able to use a toilet, would help her to the bathroom. It struck me that I was pretty much playing the role of mother to my own mother. It wasn’t always much fun, but it felt good to be there when my mother really needed me. The difficult part for me was trying to always be upbeat, and to keep my mother’s spirits up when she became frustrated with the pain and her inability to do simple things for herself. I always had a smile on my face when, really, I was suppressing tears in my heart.

My mother’s reliance on me changed our relationship. In the past, we had more than our share of the strains of mother-daughter relationships. The accident threw us into a relationship of interdependence. To get my mother back, I had to help her regain her strength and ability to resume an independent life. She had to learn to accept my help as well as the fact that I was no longer a child. We have become the closest of friends. We genuinely listen to one another, and truly enjoy each other’s company.

It has been over two years since my mother’s crash. Although it was devastating to see my mother go through the physical pain and emotions that she still continues to experience, I have grown more in that time than in all the years before. Being a mother figure to my own mother taught me a lot about parenthood: the worries, the protectiveness and, most of all, the sweetness of unconditional devotion and love.

The Littlest Girl Scout
By Erica Orloff
     I admit it. I'm not cut out to be a soccer mom.
     I'm not class mom material, either.
     I don't bake homemade chocolate chip cookies.  I don't even boil water.  In fact, when my daughter, Alexa, was in kindergarten, as part of a "Why I Love My Mommy" Mother's Day project, her teacher asked her to name her "favorite dish" that Mom cooks.
     "I don't have one," she said.
     "Oh sweetheart, there must be something your mother cooks that you love.  A special dinner? Your favorite dessert?"
     "My mommy doesn't cook."
     "She must make something," her increasingly desperate teacher insisted.  "Jell-O?"
     After lengthy consideration, my daughter listed "cereal."
     So it was with much trepidation that I recently learned Alexa wanted to be a Brownie.
     I am a mom who is great at making up stories, singing off-key songs at bedtime and remembering the names of every Pokemon.  But with three kids, a dog, a rabbit, a parrot and a veritable aviary of finches, life in our household is disorganized at best.  Dinner is a haphazard affair, clothes always need ironing and shirts missing buttons are given safety pins in their stead.  I flunked home economics in high school.  Clearly, I did not have the makings of a Brownie-badge-earning mom.
     "Are you sure?" I asked, trying to mask my dread.  Her delighted "yes" sealed my fate.
     I made it through the camping trip, even through crafts - though our potholders were decidedly ragged-looking.  Then came the year's highlight: the cookie sale.  Mentally, I counted my immediate family.  I figured they were good for about ten boxes.  I'd buy a few as well.  That brought Alexa to a total of fifteen boxes or so - not too shabby.
     Her dad picked her up after the cookie sale meeting.  Horrified, I watched as they struggled through the door with six CASES of cookies.  Cases!
     After coming to, I managed to sputter, "What's all this?"
     "Her cookies," my husband answered.  "Each girl is assigned six cases to sell."
     "But what if we can't sell all these?"
     "We bring them back," he said.  "No big deal."
     "Oh no, Mommy!" Alexa cried out.  "We have to sell them all.  We just have to!  The troop will make fun of me if I don't. One of the other Brownies told me that last year, not one girl brought back any cookies."
     Apparently, we were going to be hitting up Grandma for a lot more than the four boxes I had mentally sold to her.
     After ten days of ferocious selling, we had managed to sell a case and a half.  Cookies were stacked in my home office from floor to ceiling - or at least that's how I remember it.  I dreamed at night of Thin Mints chasing me down dark alleys.
     After four more days of selling, we still had four cases of cookies.
     Then came one of those days that happen to moms like me - moms whose kids never have matching socks and whose kids' toothbrushes end up being chewed by the dog or falling into the toilet.
     On that particular day, the dog jumped in the lake after a duck.  The duck escaped, but my dog resembled the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  One dog bath, one muddy mom and thirteen towels later, the dog was clean.  But my two-year-old son had been suspiciously quiet during the whole ordeal.  In fact, all the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end.  Even more than kitchen pot-banging, TV blaring and loud bickering, all moms dread "the silence."
     You know . . . that silence.
     "Alexa," I said, emerging from the bathroom, mud clinging to my hair, "where's your brother?"
     "I dunno."
     I went tearing through the house.  Was he coloring on my bedroom walls again?  No.
     I raced to the kitchen.  Spilling cereal on the floor?  No.
     He must be in his room.  Was he climbing on top of his dresser pretending to be Superman again?  Not there.
     "Nicholas!" I called out.  Then, fearing my computer keyboard was being covered in apple juice, I ran to my office.
     There sat Nicholas.
     Surrounded by sixty-one opened boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
     In fact, he had the cellophane for the next pack in his teeth, attempting to bust open another box.  Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Buddies and Shortbread Dreams, or whatever the heck they're called, were splayed from one end of the room to the other.  Cookies were crushed beneath his chubby little feet, and crumbs covered his rosy cheeks.
     "Cookies!" he squealed.
     As I wrote out a check for over $250 dollars worth of Girl Scout cookies, I came to the realization that I am most definitely not a Brownie mom.
     But my son?  He's the hero of Troop 408.