Mid-Life Crisis Trip Log--Entry 92: Deadlines and not-so-deadbeat dads

[Robert & Laura]

Deadlines and not-so-deadbeat dads

Sun, Mar 30, 2008
Whew! A nice normal week for a change. Well, as normal as any week can
be when the weather is vacillating between hail, rain, snow and
sunshine (sometimes all in the same hour!).

Today we're noticing that there's only 64 more days before we move
back to the Seattle area, and so far our progress on making that
happen is (approximately) 0.000% (yipes!). So we're going to call up
some moving companies and see what it costs to move a bunch of boxes
from Salem to Seattle (and be "we" of course, we mean "Laura," because
Robert would insist that it should be cheap because both names start
with "S" and you're not moving that far along in the alphabet).

Also, we plan to get some boxes and start the painful process of
sticking our stuff into boxes (which is not nearly as appealing as it
once was).

LAURA'S KEEPING UP (BARELY)
This week, deadlines for the two projects she's working on collide on
Wednesday at noon. Usually she tries to schedule client handoffs one
at a time (the whack-a-mole method of project management), but both
clients need a deliverable at the same time.

She spends Monday and Tuesday working alternately on another revision
of the Parks department's customer service training (for which the
objectives seem to change with every new email from them), and the
first draft report for a local community development organization's
assessment.

And on Thursday she teaches Part 3 of a Train-the-Trainer class for
the community college in the morning and the MERIT class with Robert
in the evening.

In spare moments, she rehearses with the flute player she will
autoharp and sing with this Sunday at church, does the laundry, and
surfs the net for information about moving companies, many of whom
seem to be rip-off artists. Oh, joy.

GOINGS ON AT THE HOMELESS SHELTER
Been quite the flow of people through the Salem Interfaith Hospitality
Network lately. The two families we talked about two weeks ago moved
out shortly thereafter (both into their own apartments, yay!) and we
had one pregnant woman and her "husband" move in shortly thereafter.

We're the only family shelter in Salem that considers a pregnant woman
as having kids (and it's kind of ironic, because the Roman Catholic
shelter doesn't). Problems start developing pretty quickly, though, as
became apparent when the "husband" (who seemed like a nice guy, but
kind of quiet) disappears over the weekend and Mom isn't too bothered
by it.

As Robert is driving her back from the church, he gets bits and pieces
of her story. Seems she IS married, but her real husband is in prison
for assaulting her ("Although I didn't turn him in, I would NEVER do
that. It was this other 'friend' who ratted him out to the cops. I
didn't even open the door for the cops, they had to shout at me
through the closed door!").

The felon, however, is a different person that the father of her
babies (she's pregnant with twins). Of course, she broke up with the
father, who's now dating somebody else. Oh, and she has other kids,
but for some strange reason, the state has taken them all away from
her. Go figure.

It pretty quickly becomes apparent to all of us that this Mom is none
too tightly wrapped. What's surprising is that we don't get more of
them. Part of this is because our Family Case Manager is getting
smarter about screening them out, but there also doesn't seem to be as
many of them around as you'd think. Maybe you need a certain amount of
sanity to get into REAL trouble and end up homeless.

Anyway, we are still committed to working with her (in spite of her
insistence that the last church we stayed at was haunted and she had
seen a demon in the window, "although I'm Catholic and I don't believe
in those things, but there was an EVIL PRESENCE in that church and I'm
not ever going back!").

But then she breaks one of our rules. We don't have many rules, but
one of them is that you have to spend the night at the church (unless
you've made prior arrangements). Well, she wanders off to meet the
babies' Dad and never comes back. This makes the church volunteers a
bit frantic, as you might imagine.

She eventually calls us to say she's gone off with the babies' Dad,
but can she still have the $300 in assistance we'd promised her? (Um,
no.)

This week is spring break, which means all the kids are hanging around
the Day Center being bored (and some of the parents periodically come
into the office and announce that THEY are bored, too). Fortunately,
we take in a Mom & Dad with three sons, so the other kids have
somebody to play with, although at times there are a few too many kids
racing through the house playing tag.

BIG D UPDATE
First, we better start with a warning. If you say something near
Robert along the lines of "Black men don't look after their families,"
you will get a dope slap and then he'll sit you down and tell you
about Big D. He'll tell you that Big D went to work at a steel mill in
Salem to support his family--and half the kids weren't even his.

He'll tell you about what Big D said when he came back after his first
night of work: "Rob, there was steel everywhere. There was steel over
HERE that needed to be over THERE and steel over THERE that needed to
be over HERE. Everywhere you looked, there was steel that was in the
WRONG place!

"And the workers--there ain't a one of them has all his fingers and
limbs. This guy limps. That guy is missing his index finger. That
other guy has a big scar on his face. Either they are hiring the
handicapped or this is one dangerous place to work!

"But I'll do it. For my family, I'll do it." Long pause. "But I don't
know how I'm gonna make it six months. I really don't."

Well, eight months later, Robert runs into Big D outside the Day
Center and finds out that not only has Big D lasted longer than eight
months, he is now the Head of the Parts Department (meaning, he's no
longer slinging steel) AND he got two raises in the last two months.

And his family is still together, and his son L'il D (who towers over
his father, hence the nomenclature) is running track and is on cell-
phone suspension for coming home with a sub-par report card. (Robert
and Big D had one message for L'il D during the entire time his family
was at the Day Center: "You do NOT want to end up slinging steel like
your Dad. Stay in school!")

We get our share of wack jobs and people too lazy to look for work and
people happy to surf the social services networks. But we also get our
Big D's--guys who just refuse to give up and work harder than any ten
people to keep their families together, housed, clothed, and fed.

It really makes up for all the others.

=======
That's it for this week. Join us next week as we continue to stuff
crap into boxes and complain about it.

Robert & Laura
Mid-Life Crisis Trip