I am famous for picking things up with a passion and dropping them just as quickly.  The carcasses of my various hobbies and interests line the halls of my memory; crewel embroidery, needlepoint, smocking, rose gardening, landscape painting, jewelry, furniture refinishing, calligraphy….just as the oil portraits of ancestors hang on the halls of English manor houses.

When I began this blog one year ago I thought it would be like any other blog.  My sisters, one or two of my children and handful of very close friends might check in from time to time, but it would otherwise be an obscure URL on the increasingly crowded world wide web.  What did I know?

I’ve “met” new friends who are beyond dear to me for their loyalty and support.  Those sisters and children and friends are more faithful readers than I expected them to be.  And in writing about the murder of a high school classmate in 1975, I learned I wasn’t the only one who tossed and turned for 34 years over a life that ended too soon.  This blog is a source of catharsis, of community and of hope.  I am reminded that everything is possible, still.

I’ve been busy of late; providing image consulting for a political candidate, writing content for other web sites and enjoying the company of my first-born child, my only daughter who moved home after a year and a half on the west coast.  Now at 23, Natalie is an extraordinary young woman who I enjoy more than I thought any mother could enjoy any child.  We laugh a connected and knowing laugh that is difficult to stop and I wonder sometimes how I created this splendid human being.

I overheard Natalie tell a friend on the phone today that we’ve been doing everything together and she’s having a great time of it.  Imagine.  A young woman boasting that she enjoys time with her mother.  How lucky we are.  Natalie reminded me we had a rough patch several years ago when she was a teenager, but I can  honestly say I didn’t see it.  I knew she wanted total independence back then, far more independence than she could handle or would be good for her, and in ignoring her anger about that, I saw it as nothing unusual.

So my apologies for neglecting my blogging lately.  I hope you understand.  Maureengreencny.com is not just another hobby I picked up and put down.  Unlike the jewelry supplies and the acrylic paint which sit on shelving in the basement, my computer is always close by.  I’ll do better to stay in touch.

From the folder titled “the grass is always greener” comes this recent revelation.  Maybe it’s not such a curse to be the oldest in the family, no matter how many studies confirm the first child absorbs all the unrealistic expectations of the parents.  I’ve spent my entire life feeling disadvantaged by my birth order when its really the baby who deserves the greater sympathy.

Sure, I got the new clothes first, but I never thought it worth the price.  I was all by myself in leading the way for Karen and Susan.  I had to go to school first, had to take piano lessons first, had to step forward and politely greet my parent’s friends first, had to speak for all three of us in fact in any formal circumstance since I learned how to speak before my sisters did and was therefore the expert, and I had the first and earliest curfew in the history of curfews; 10:00 pm as an 18 year old.  By the time Susan was 18 my parents were more interested in getting sleep than wondering where she was. But how would I know?  I was stuck being the first of the kids to have to go away to college.  Poor me.

Maureen, Karen and the Baby

Now that I’m a parent I see both sides.  Natalie had the first and best of everything, but she had that first expectation thing placed upon her too.  We thought she could get into Harvard and we worked the system, pushing the grades, hiring tutors, visiting campuses.  She didn’t get into Harvard and she’s none the worse for it, so Christian has a different life.  Wherever he wants to go that “makes him happy” is good enough for us.  Score one for the baby.

On the other hand, a dear friend of mine has three boys in their teens and early 20s.  Their father addresses the older two by name but the youngest who isn’t younger by much doesn’t get to have a name, at least not in the company of his father.  Dad changes the inflection of his voice, almost like he’s talking to a girl and says “Hi Buddy”.  It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re considered the mascot of the family, one small step above the dog.

When Natalie was in high school she used her wiles to squeeze every available penny from the family budget.  Even some pennies that weren’t available.  Christian?  Poor kid.  The well is dry and if he wants something new, he first has to sell something old.   All that practice and discipline gives him an entrepreneurial bent rare for a kid his age and his friends and friend’s parents tell him so.  The  family doesn’t seem to appreciate this very much.  Everyone chuckles at him like he’s still in diapers and just keeps being adorable.

Even when the children were real little and people inquired if I had boys or girls, I said I had a girl, two boys and a baby.  Our infant production was ending at four so I couldn’t bring myself to assign any permanent gender for the last one.  Christian was not considered anything besides a baby for years.

Charlie, Harry, Natalie, the Baby, Mom

Was it being treated like a baby that had the antithetical outcome of producing perhaps the most mature?  Or was it all those years of exposure to the interests and actions of the older siblings?  The first three had hours upon hours of child-centered music in the car; Raffi or Sharon, Lois and Bram.  Just as Christian was getting old enough to enjoy this stuff too, the dial turned to Top 20 hits.  Natalie, Harry and Charlie wouldn’t be caught dead listening to music for babies anymore so  I had the choice of having anarchy thrust upon me by the older three, or the lone toddler with no rights rocking in his car seat and belting out at the top of his lungs the rap lyrics of raunchy love songs.  The only reason I now admit to the option I chose is I believe the statute of limitations on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor have passed.

Back to my beloved sister Susan, who absorbed the more relaxed parenting style to grow into a funny, personable and easy going 50 year old; a 50 year old who is still described by Karen and me as such a “great kid”.  Karen is 51.  I am 52.

Perhaps I was wrong all my life to assume the oldest carries the birth order baggage.  Maybe the baby of the family bears a special burden too.

We all hope to make a mark on this world and I can think of no greater contribution to society as a whole than to influence a single child.  I was surprised to learn over the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend that I did this in a small way without realizing it.

Among our closest friends are the Navarres; Marc and Valerie, and their three boys Emric, 20,  Nicholas, 17, and Charles, 11.  Marc and Valerie grew up in France and came to the U.S. to get graduate degrees in business.  I met them in the 1980s when we were all starting careers in Syracuse.

Emric attends Charlie's 2nd birthday in Syracuse, 1991

Blessed with seven children between us, unlucky in marriage, and with several moves back and forth to France for the Navarres, Valerie and the boys are now in Pittsburgh while I remain in Syracuse with three children in college or on their own, and one child still in High School.  I am the Catholic Godmother to Nicholas; Valerie and Marc are Christian’s Godparents.  You can’t make many promises in life that include the word “forever” but its the correct description of the enduring bond of these two families.

Through the years, when the Navarres were called back to France for Marc’s job they feared their boys would lose their bilingual abilities, so we developed an informal “trade” of sorts.  I took their boys for a couple of weeks in Syracuse in the summertime and they took mine, one at a time to France.

Two Amigos. Harry Green and Emric Navarre, around 1992

Each of us believes we got the better end of the deal.  I had to work each weekday at WTVH so the best I could offer was TV in my sun room, plenty of processed American kid food and an atmosphere of informality with children running around everywhere, sometimes with their clothes on.  With my four and their eldest two who were not old; perhaps 4 and 6 at the start of this annual arrangement, I felt like I had 15 kids which I may as well have had, since all six children were under the age of 9.  I was perpetually exhausted.  It was the happiest time of my life.

It wasn’t just hanging around the house that made this time so special; it was the familiarity of another close family among us, a different set of rules and many outings to beaches and barbecues and friend’s houses with still more children and more variety.   It would become apparent years later that my home in the University area of Syracuse was a refuge for the entire family as Marc’s corporate job forced several re-locations through the years and my home was a constant in all our lives.

Valerie instructs my Natalie how to "mother" Nicholas, 1992

Then my children got to go to France and experience Paris, the beaches near Bordeaux, ocean-front villas in Nice.   Museums, history, jet skis, French food, table manners.  Did I say we got the way better end of the deal?

For several years after the Navarres settled back in the States “for good”, they hopped in the car and made the drive to Syracuse from New Jersey and then Pittsburgh to join our family for our uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving. They immersed themselves in this cultural event and I admired they went through the trouble when they could have just taken the time off to relax in their own home.  Now it is a tradition preceded by “where?” instead of “maybe”.   This year “where” meant Pittsburgh for the first time.

It is a scientific reality that other people’s children grow taller and bigger in the same amount of time than our own.  Upon arriving in Pittsburgh on Thursday I was greeted by two young men I scarcely recognized after one year; Emric and Nicholas.  Those beautiful little boy faces were still in there, tucked behind facial hair and a seriousness of purpose that comes with maturity.  It’s like I tell Christian “you used to be cute” which means you were once a little boy who was pretty and sweet enough to be a girl but then your voice changed and you turned alpha and coarse language crept into the daily vernacular even though you know it offends me.  It goes along with the time to be handsome and lean, to drive cars and flirt with girls.

Emric will graduate from American University in Washington in May.  One of 48 mathematics majors in his class, he joined the  ROTC on campus and will report to the naval flight academy in Pensacola, Florida in the summer.  Emric has had a lifelong fascination with flight.  I asked if he’d like to be an airline pilot once his days flying fighter jets are over.  He scrunched up his face and said no, after that that he’ll apply to NASA.

I was as proud as a non-aunt could be to hear this.  I remember when he was a toddler and his sites were set on every dirty thing he could put in his mouth.  Now his sites are set on being an astronaut.

Emric reminded me of something I had forgotten.  It was a visit to Paris in the winter of 1996 when I sent Natalie at the age of 11 to spend a week with the Navarres in their home during school break.  Before the trip to retrieve Natalie I asked Valerie what I could bring her little boys as gifts.

“Videos” she said.  The boys were losing their English and American movies would condition their ears.  I brought the brand new “Apollo 13″ starring Tom Hanks.  It was a hit.  I learned just last week how much of a hit it was.  Emric said he watched it over and over, wore it out practically, and decided right there and then at the age of 8 he would be an astronaut like Tom Hanks.

OK, so it’s not the kind of influence a teacher can provide over the course of a whole year in the classroom, or the confidence that comes from the Coach who believes in your athletic abilities when the rest of the team does not.  It’s not the kindly grandparents who greet every quirk with enthusiasm and acceptance that says “I love you no matter what you do or are”.  It was just a Hollywood movie selected by a mom of young boys for the other young boys in her life she loves too.  But I felt important when Emric told me my movie mattered.

Goodness, had I not brought Apollo 13 who knows what would have become of Emric?  He might have dropped out of school and spent his days on the mean streets of Paris panhandling money for crepes from a street vendor.  My simple gesture may have made the difference between success and a soup kitchen for him.  You just never know.

Never underestimate your reach on a young child.  You needn’t pull one out of a burning car to have a lasting impact.  You can do something as insignificant as handing over a thoughtful little gift, a gift that can chart the course of a life.

Remember the name Emric Navarre.  Now that NASA discovered a large supply of water on the moon we might all take a trip one day, and Emric may be the one who gets us there.

Other than brides-to-be who used to invade the old Filene’s Basement the one day every year designer wedding gowns went on deep discount, I can’t recall any demographic group more specific than what I witnessed in Dewitt at midnight last night.

My three sons are gamers.  Two of them spend most of their discretionary money and free time in front of a screen with a controller in their hand and violence before their eyes.  The third is devoted to golf but dapples in video games as well. Once I got used to the idea they weren’t going to read Shakespeare or volunteer at the soup kitchen, I accepted that video games are their hobby and they could probably do worse.

To begin with, if they’re playing video games they’re not driving drunk or speeding with new licenses.  They’re not getting anyone pregnant.  They’re not dealing or buying drugs at the corner, they’re not breaking into cars.  They’re also not creating poetry or spending nights and weekends at the library, but for a glass-half-full kind of girl like I, they might as well be astronauts as do any of that other stuff.

My 16 year old boasts there is no one in school more tapped into the next big video game and where you can obtain it first as he.  I’m not sure this is exactly a compliment, but I run with it.  I tell him its great he’s first at something.  He requested that I drive him to Game Stop in Dewitt last night for the midnight release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I know, I know.  It pushes the boundaries of good taste just like the first Call of Duty and all the others in the series and every other violent video game which is the point of video games.   They’re bloody and disturbing and exactly what boys demand; as ridiculous as Hollywood Slasher Films, another genre produced for the lucrative teen market.

Young people love this stuff.  They haven’t lived long enough to know the effects of real life violence and real life terrorism and real life warfare and real life death.  To a teenager and 20 something who hasn’t enlisted in the military for real, this stuff is pure fantasy, as close to reality as flying pigs and kitchen cabinets that spill gold coins.  It’s outside the imagination but not so far you can’t get it back in.  Video games are the 21st century Frankenstein and King Kong and The Exorcist.  Every generation is born to shock.

Christian and I arrived at the parking lot in Marshall’s Plaza at 11:30 pm.   Mother of the Year didn’t want to do this on a school night but my earlier articles about the youngest making demands that are cute and don’t do any harm proved true once again.  The only place I’d go at midnight on a school night for my oldest child would have been an SAT prep course .  Here I was contributing to the delinquency of a minor and I did it for a reason.  Christian usually has more cash than I do.  If I stay on his good side with favors like this I can hit him up for a loan when I need it.

By 11:50 there were more than 100 old boys and young men lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the midnight release.    I’ve never been anywhere where there wasn’t a female within sight.  I did see two girls drop off their boyfriends to wait in line but the girls waited in the car in the parking lot as I did.  The lineup was pure male.

One by one they arrived to take their place in the line that stretched the length of six stores.  Some came with buddies, most came alone.  It’s different than what girls do at that age.  They come in packs wearing the same clothes and hair style and they huddle in circles to kill the time and the confidence of other huddles of girls.  The boys were chill; patient, well-mannered, occasionally starting quiet conversation about gaming with the guy behind them.

When the doors opened at midnight the queue stood at attention and faced the direction of the store.  It was peaceful and orderly.  The first customers charged out of the store with the box high above their head as if they were taking a victory lap at the Olympics.  Everyone chuckled, even I, sitting in the car trying to stay awake so late.  These peaceful pilgrims seemed content to wait in the dark and cold for a game of extreme violence.

Christian got in about ten minutes later and thanked me profusely for taking the time to get him there when I could have been comfortable in my bed.  Unaffected by bloody warfare on the screen, he does sense the reality of good fortune that he was child number 4 and not child number 1 who would have been stuck in a midnight class for the SATs.

Parenting is hard work made much easier with numbers and some consistency. That way children can predict what is expected of them and they learn to disobey at their peril.

Of course different ages demand different techniques and I admit once my teenage boys grew to be as tall as I my options were limited, but for the early years I believe you can’t do better than counting to three as long as you count it right.

Perhaps your parents tried this.  Mine did.  When they wanted me to do something, or to stop doing something, they started counting.  Three was the end of the line and was often followed by spanking.   Sometimes it took awhile to get to three.  There were often second, third and fourth chances that sounded like “two… two and a half…. two and three quarters….. two and seven eighths….”  By the time the fractions were down to tenths, I knew the authority figure was more focused on splitting whole numbers into microscopic slivers than in  dealing with me and I was off the hook.  I could continue my terrorizing ways.

My aunt Marion was one who turned splitting numbers into an art form.  This is because she didn’t really want to discipline my sisters and me.  When she as a single, childless woman was called upon to babysit we knew we could get away with murder and mayhem right up until bedtime when we gladly hit the sheets knowing Marion would sit at the piano in the living room and play until we were asleep.  She even took requests of our favorite classical songs.  It’s how I learned the classics, falling asleep to the resonant sound of the Baldwin. Somehow Marion knew it didn’t matter if she ever reached the number three because the piano music would accomplish for her what numbers did  not.

By the time I became a parent and gave birth to four children in the span of three years and ten months, I had no time to spare to find discipline that worked.  I also had no time to review second grade math and learn fractions all over again.  Three simple numbers would have to fit the bill.

I learned the secret to using only three numbers was to make the number three memorable and I don’t mean with ice cream and cake.   Three had ugly consequences.

If, by the count of three the misbehavior had not stopped, I lunged from my chair like a Hollywood slasher.  Not wanting to end the drama by hitting, I grabbed the top of their head with one hand, their chin with the other and I pressed, pressed so hard they couldn’t yell or talk back.  Their jaw was locked.  And that wasn’t all.   Within three inches of their face I calmly and authoritatively stated “when I tell you the oatmeal belongs on your plate and not in your brother’s hair, I mean it.  Say sorry Mommy”.

They squirmed and fumed but they always saw the futility of resisting and they squeezed something that sounded like an apology through the spaces between their teeth.   Once I released their skull to snap back into the shape of a normal head I held them in a hug and told them I loved them no matter what they did.

I didn’t have to do this very often because the beauty of having four children is that for every single test of my authority there were three siblings who witnessed it.  In that way, it was like all four of them bore the punishment of one.  By the time little Christian came along he got discipline by osmosis.  I’m not sure I ever had to put his head in the Mom-vice.  He seemed to get it right from birth.  Either that or it’s true what they say about the youngest and I just didn’t care.  Everything he did, right or wrong seemed so cute.

What still surprises me today is how effective it was.  No matter the occasion, no matter how much sugar they ingested or how exhausted and in need of a nap they were, as long as I wasn’t driving, counting to three turned an immediate switch on the bad behavior.  When I was driving the kids knew this wouldn’t work and then I did what every responsible parent does when kids are acting up in the back seat;  I screamed my head off and told them I would pull over and dump them at the curb.

But when I could reach them, all who witnessed it asked how the heck I did it. The answer was consistency.  It’s not enough to count, you’ve got to act.  Even if you are exhausted and you have another infant asleep on your lap or you are buried in cement, you must get up and vault off the sofa like a maniac.

If you get to three with no result and you begin your “memorable” consequence, it won’t be good enough to stop when they say “OK!  OK!  I heard you!  I’ll stop! “  If you get to three, they get the consequence.  No exceptions.  The secret of this method of discipline is teaching the kids to never let you reach three.

Do this with consistency and you won’t have to do it for long.  I promise.  In a short time you too will give an order and when the order is ignored, you’ll give them the evil eye and “One…..two…..”

And the very next sound you hear will be your family and friends saying “how on earth did you get them to do that?”

The New York Times today reported on shouting being the new spanking for parents.  Educated and enlightened parents who would never consider spanking their children instead admit to screaming at them when things get out of hand.

We all have a default setting when we lose it over the kids and many of us resort to spanking which is the word we use to erase our guilt over hitting people one-quarter our size.  A parent who spanks a co-worker for misbehaving gets charged with assault.  No such consideration is afforded a little kid.  Oddly, there is no evidence that spanking actually works.  It does not diminish bad behavior in the future.  Indeed, study after study shows kids who get spanked act more aggressively toward others, to which I say this is a surprise?

I was raised by spankers, and on some fundamental level I sensed it was ineffective all the way back to when I was little.  I grit my teeth like I was getting a vaccine at the doctor’s office and the brief, unpleasant episode was over quickly.  My biggest challenge was in keeping track of how my Mom and my Dad liked to administer the dose of “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”.  Both of them were hand slappers, but Mom wanted the hand presented palm down and Dad wanted it palm up.

On rare occasions Dad put us over his knee for a slap on the bottom, but there was so much formality in being ushered into the living room for this that the whack was anti-climatic.  It was also difficult to predict which was a hand slapping crime and which was a bottom slapping crime, which lead me to believe, even way back then in the 1960s that the drama had more to do with Dad’s mood after a day at the office more than anything my sisters and I did that was wrong.

Funny, but I cannot remember a single transgression that warranted any of the dozens of slaps I received growing up.  As we got a little older, my sisters and I used to laugh at the predictability of it all, the tone of our parent’s voice and the split second hand up/hand down decision.  Punishment was always preceded by the stern command “Hold out your hand!!!”   And that’s all I paid attention to.   The crime was inconsequential to whether I put my hand up or down.

The most devastating punishment my dad ever gave me never involved physical contact.  It didn’t have to.  In my first week at Chandler Junior High in Worcester I made a cool new friend named Catherine who suggested we ride our bikes to Bradley’s after school one day.  Bradley’s was like K Mart, it had everything.  It even had make-up and to a 13-year old make-up was the next frontier; exciting and still forbidden at my age.

Catherine and I studied all the possibilities with all the colors in plastic packaging on the racks until suddenly the nature of the trip changed.  To my horror,  Catherine started gathering up make-up and dumping it into my purse.  I was frozen. I couldn’t tell her to stop or she’d tell all the kids in this new school in this new school year that I was a total nerd.  I just stood there and let it happen.  To my relief, Catherine started placing some items in her own jacket pocket.  At least I wasn’t going to be the only one going to jail if we got caught, which we did.

It was completely awful.  Mom was summoned and instead of slapping my hand in the security office, she just sat in a chair and cried.  Dad came home from work and I waited, no, I hoped to hear “hold out your hand’ so I could take the little bee sting and get on with my night only this time no such familiar command came forth.  After dinner Dad told me to sit in my chair at the kitchen table, and instead of sitting in his chair beside me, he walked across the table to take Susan’s chair where he just sat and looked at me.

I was all defiant and bold.  I sat there, sighing and staring right back, so put out by this total waste of time.   I had television to watch.  What was taking so long?  After what felt like three hours in that kitchen, I asked how long I was going to be stuck there and he calmly told me to be quiet.  He didn’t yell, he didn’t even seem angry. He didn’t raise his hand.  He seemed possessed and it knocked me off balance.  I knew then I was cooked. Where was his temper?  Where was his hand the size of a tennis racquet?  Eventually I realized he was too disappointed in me to do anything but sit there with a surgical gaze that cut me in half like a scalpel.  The tears began streaming down my face.

I never forgot the punishment nor the conduct which provoked it.  It wasn’t enough that I allowed the stealing to be applied on me.  I should have stopped it. In the future, no amount of ridicule I received from school mates for doing the right thing could ever be worse than the feeling I let down my Dad.  Rather than demoralize or humiliate me with physical contact, that long, long night at the kitchen table that probably stretched to 20 minutes, strengthened me.  I was resolved to do whatever it took to never have to sit in the presence of a disappointed father again.

Hit or yell at another adult, and you’re viewed as a crazy person.  Hit or yell at your child and you’re viewed as a parent.   When a child loses control the last thing they need is a parent who loses control too and then starts hitting in the name of making it better.  It doesn’t teach a child self-discipline; it teaches them when nothing else works, you hit the person smaller than you and its OK because it’s only spanking and the smaller person deserved it.

Remain calm, composed and in command, and you’ll bring the temperature of a room down to something that works.  Your kids might even remember what it is they did wrong and should not repeat in the future.

I found a method of discipline with my own four children which proved stunningly effective.  Everyone who witnessed it could not believe it.  I’ll write about it next time.

The Colorado family hoping to find fame by convincing a daytime television audience their six year old son had climbed aboard a balloon and sailed away found much more than sympathy.  They found ridicule and shame and upcoming criminal charges for duping the authorities and the public .

I was alerted to the unfolding drama by a phone call from my friend, the ABC correspondent David Muir who asked if I was aware a little kid was stuck in a home made balloon at 7,000 feet and authorities were trying to figure out how to rescue him.  David was assigned the story and we discussed how neither of us had ever heard of such a predicament in all our years of reporting.

Watching the coverage brought back fanciful memories of childhood when I wondered if a bunch of my helium-filled birthday balloons could ever be enough to lift me out of my backyard, only the thrill turned to discomfort every time I thought of drifting too high to jump.  That must have been what the little boy was thinking.  He had passed his opportunity to jump to safety before the balloon headed toward the sun.  We wondered if he could survive.

The feature film “Where the Wild Things Are” stars a naughty boy who sails aboard a ship in the sky, Peter Pan takes pajama-clad children through the skies over London and Dorothy rides a tornado from bleak and dusty Kansas over the rainbow to Oz.  Literature overflows with stories of children perilously flying off to fantasy lands where fancy clashes with the realities of emerging adulthood.

The imaginary passenger in the mylar space ship balloon over Colorado last week was really Richard Henne, the self-promoting patriarch of the family in the news.  He and his wife met in acting school; it’s no wonder authorities fell for their story.  Henne even supplied some crocodile tears.  Who couldn’t just love a guy who cries for his little boy? You ought to give a guy like that his own TV show someday. The audience would love him.

It turns out everyone in the family had a part in the ruse but it proved too much for little Falcon who threw up twice in national TV interviews when asked why he was hiding in the attic.  In an earlier interview on CNN Falcon kept the food down but spilled the beans by stating he was hiding in the attic “for the show”.  Which proves how awful the Hennes are as parents.  If you need to lie to get your own TV show, for goodness sake don’t implicate little children.  They’re terrible at keeping secrets.

The Sheriff’s department in Colorado is consulting with the FBI in assembling the charges to be brought against the Hennes.  For now,  Richard Henne’s 15 minutes of fame are just getting underway with an open casting call for all the supporting players.  It’s a new Reality TV show in which the leading man hires a bunch of lawyers to help keep him out of prison.

How do you go on when your mother tried to kill you?  The Stacey Castor story is so bizarre, so incredible, I don’t think Lifetime Television would consider it’s story line.  Surely there are no self-help books on this one.  How many people would need to buy it?

When David Castor of Syracuse died of suicide by antifreeze poisoning in 2005, authorities never stopped thinking about Castor’s wife.  The drinking glass on the night stand held the fingerprints of only one person; Stacey Castor.

For two years prosecutors worked to build a case of murder and in 2007 their efforts led them to another crime.  They exhumed the body of Stacey Castor’s first husband David Wallace who died of a suspected heart attack in 2000.  A subsequent autopsy revealed he died of antifreeze poisoning too.

With the truth bearing down on Stacey, the mother of two warned her daughters, 20-year old Ashley and 15- year old Bree, that the police were opening old wounds and causing trouble for all of them.  The girls believed their mother was a victim and did not deserve this stress after all the tragedy in her life.

On the eve of Ashley’s 21st birthday, Stacey offered to give her daughter a first celebratory cocktail.   She mixed two vodka drinks and the pair sat down to enjoy the evening.   Ashley recalls her mom encouraging her to finish every last drop of the drink.

That night, Bree inquired about her sister and her mom said Ashley was resting in her room and would sleep until morning.  Ashley’s boyfriend telephoned her, but Stacey said the girl was sleeping and should not be disturbed.  He asked Stacey to look for an item left behind in Ashley’s bedroom and Stacey returned to the phone to say she looked and couldn’t find it.  The boyfriend was calling from just outside the house and never saw the light go on in Ashley’s room.

The following morning, Bree entered her sister’s room and found Ashley dazed and incoherent at the foot of the bed.  Bree went to get her mother and when she returned a few minutes later, she saw a typewritten suicide note on the bed that was not there a moment earlier.  In it, Ashley confessed to killing both her father and her stepfather, however the note bore no fingerprint from Ashley.  Only Stacey and Bree, who had picked it up to read it left fingerprints on the paper.  Ashley was  rushed to the hospital and recovered from her poisonous cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs and her mother was arrested.

Stacey Castor was convicted last week of murdering her second husband and attempting to murder her daughter.  Prosecutors in an adjacent county are now building a case of murder against Castor for her first husband’s death.  Castor is 4o and will likely never live outside prison again, and yet it is the life sentence of the daughter that I can’t shake.

What will it take for Ashley to repair her wounds?   She told prosecutors she considered her relationship with her mother to be close, which makes it even worse.  Had they been competitive or estranged from one another, Ashley would have had a little distance to protect her.  This attack came from deep inside the heart.

I think of all the life events where Ashley will want a mother.   New jobs, a bridal shower,  a wedding, pregnancies and parenting advice.    Holidays, birthdays, Mother’s Day.  All the moments through all the years where we place a phone call home or we come together and toast to the happy occasion.

Will Ashley ever have a drink when she doesn’t remember her mother’s special recipe?  Will she ever have a cocktail again at all?

The courtoom photograph of a sobbing Ashley shows the finality of what her mother tried to do.  Did  Ashley harbor any doubt about the truth until that moment when a body of informed adults confirmed it?  We cannot know.  Hopefully Ashley will receive counseling and friends to carry her to the other side of this nightmare, where the woman who brought her into this world also attempted to take her out.

My friends call me an odd duck and that is a compliment.  My father was an odd duck, so any similarity to him gives me pride.  I don’t know why he was such a character or where the trait came from.  I never knew my paternal grandparents who were dead before I was born.   In some ways my dad seemed hatched from no one or no where in particular.

When my sisters and I were ages one, two and three, my parents bought a former farm on a run-down parcel of land in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Just four miles from Main Street our six acres of heaven included oak trees large enough to support tree houses and large swaths of hilly lawn surrounding a 1910 clapboard home.

My mother realized pretty quickly that four acres of lawn were too much for an at-home mom to handle alone so she told my dad she needed help.   Rather than take the normal action of cutting the grass too, or even hiring a lawn crew, Dad had a better idea.  He bought a sheep.

Dusty was to be an outdoor roomba, the vacuum cleaner you turn on and forget, except Dusty didn’t know he was supposed to eat the grass evenly.  Some of it he pulled out from the roots and killed, other grass didn’t interest him at all and it grew to a foot in length.  Eventually Dusty became too large for my Mom to handle so Dad had another idea.  We took him to the butcher and ate him.

Growing up we also learned to love the dump.  No one I knew was as lucky as we to be able to bring as much home from the dump as we brought to it.  Dad packed us into the station wagon with the wooden trailer filled with junk and when we arrived at that stinky mountain of treasures he set us lose to collect the junk of others.  In bringing home dirty and unwanted toys, dad reasoned we wouldn’t demand  new ones.  And he was right.  Those dump runs felt a little like Christmas every time.  It was only after several conversations about rats and disease with other parents that dad thought it best to keep us home.

But I do have one more dump story and it involved an adventure when we were teenagers.  We were driving my sister Karen to a sleep-over, with a stop at the dump on the way.   My dad removed all the paper bags of trash and heaved them as far as he could down the steep cliff of garbage beside the car.  Suddenly my sister cried out that her “overnight bag” was one of those brown paper bags.  Dad had tossed her best stuff over the edge.

No problem.  Dad found an old hose in the debris, tied it around Karen’s waist, and sent her rappelling down the cliff of garbage.  Dad knew the danger of avalanche and wouldn’t let her scamper down without that dirty hose.

We created quite a spectacle that early summer evening,  a small crowd gathering to witness the girl amidst the trash, dad shouting instructions, my mom asking Dad how he could have been so careless, and Susan and I demanding to know why we didn’t get to climb down there too.  Karen did find her things and we went on our way and my lingering impression was not that my dad was dumb for throwing out the bag, but that he was smart for knowing that a hose can save your life if you ever get caught up in an avalanche of garbage.

Which leads me to a similar story involving risk and ropes.  I was about 12-years old, awkward and not particularly confident back then, until Dad gave me the opportunity to do something he was unable to do.  In those days the only thing I could do that he couldn’t was to hula hoop and it didn’t seem like a skill he valued for himself anyway, so this indeed was special.

Dad needed me to carry a brand new gold-leaf weathervane to the peak of the barn roof and place it into a hole he had drilled from inside.  He feared the aging structure would not support his weight, so the job fell to skinny me.  He tied a thick scratchy ship rope around my waist and sent me up an extension ladder to the roof, where he had managed to rest another extension ladder on the roof itself.  The end of that ladder was hooked around the peak of the roof, so I had to climb up the ladders, and hold that weathervane high enough that the 10-carat gold didn’t scrape off onto the shingles.

The Barn

Dad had the risks all figured out.  If I lost my balance at the peak of the roof, I wouldn’t fall down the other side because dad had a firm grip on the rope.  And he told me if I tumbled off the roof on his side, he’d simply catch me on the way down.  As my children say, “yeah right”.

I could go on and on with stories about my dad.   As a little girl I didn’t see him as quirky.  I saw him as cool.   Adults seemed to too, but I attribute that more to his Harvard Law School degree than the nutty stuff he did at home.

In some ways I have very traditional values.   But I really love swimming against the tide, finding my own way and not doing what everyone else is doing.   I find myself questioning if Dad would have thought this is a good idea, and if the answer is yes, it’s good and odd enough for me.

Some of my best parenting took place in the car.  I had four children strapped into their seats and when they weren’t listening to Raffi  on CD, they were listening to me.   There was a bonus in the ride as I was listening to them too.

Even though I had my children in rapid succession, the conversations with the oldest child were usually lost on the youngest.  Little Christian often sat in the back of the SUV.  His constant rocking back and forth meant that none of the other kids would sit next to him, so Christian was the cute and happy one alone in the “way back” as we used to describe the third seat.

We were all together in the car one summer on an excursion to Provincetown, Massachusetts from our vacation home on Cape Cod.  If you’ve never been to Provincetown you should be clear about this:  It is simultaneously gay friendly and family friendly, if your family is open to gay couples of all description making their affections known in public.

After a day spent walking around in this unique environment, the subject of who “gets” gay came up on the ride home.  My oldest child posed the question and was therefore ready for the answer,  the middle two boys less so, and Christian wouldn’t have a clue about what we were saying.

I told the kids that statistics vary on the prevalence of homosexuality.  Some scientists believe it’s one in ten, but others have suggested it’s one in four who is gay.  Immediately, the kids scanned the car to calculate their odds.
Natalie was first to declare emphatically “I’m not gay”.  The next oldest jumped in “I’m not gay.  At least I don’t think I’m gay”.  Charlie mimicked what the others said as he saw no advantage to having an independent mind at a time like this.  So that left Christian, too young and too slow on the uptake to realize he should have spoken up sooner.

All eyes  turned to Christian who suddenly had the attention of everyone in the car, which judging from the broad smile on his face, must have been a good thing.   Simultaneously the older three declared “Now Christian, he’s definitely gay”.

We all laughed, including Christian who said he had no recollection of the story when I told him about it recently.  As a 15 year old Christian now has an appreciation of that moment.  But what I love even more is the word “gay” is no more an insult to my children today than it was when they first learned about the concept as really little kids.  I was aware at the time not many parents would be so nonchalant about this emotionally charged topic.  I’m happy to have been the exception.

I still don’t know which, if any of my children will be the statistical fourth person to be gay.  But I do know that amusing little lesson in the car that summer day many years ago had the intended effect.  In addition to gay meaning homosexual, in our family gay still means happy too.