Sara

Sara and the Insults

Maybe most skilled writers avoid conundrums that get to the Byzantine level. This one doe not. So buckle up and hope we don’t get all bollixed up in unnecessary details. No guarantee!

Brenda started it all by insulting me as I twiddled my thumbs waiting for my wife to get her shot in the eye to prevent expansion of her wet degeneration of the macula. She, Brenda not my wife, is the optician in the ophthalmologist office who sold and fitted my last two pair of eyeglasses. She is good at her job, businesslike and no nonsense in dealing with patients and, to top it off, VERY skilled at the insult that carries the message, “I care for and respect you in spite of my words”. We have traded some life details as we talked about my sons, her teenage step-daughter and her “guy” and her first “guy” and so on. We get on well. You don’t need to know this but you get it anyway. Her frame is large and her height would allow one, were she male, to think of a guard or tackle on a D2 or even D1 FCS team. Feminine enough, however, to make one think her partner in life would be delighted to roll around on their bed together.

She describes herself as high-maintenance. She must color her hair and has her fingernails hand-painted. At one time, my suggestion that it might have been good to have raised a daughter like her brought her to say, “No, you wouldn’t have been happy with me growing up.” That’s about all I know about her.

On the latest visit she was training a new staff member. My first words were “That isn’t going to fly.” figuring this was a replacement and Brenda was leaving. Not so. This is to be her helper and vacation cover. So I calmed down and took a seat within talking distance of the new hire. In response to questions, she let me know she was born in Missouri Valley, Iowa but grew up in Onawa.

Asked what her daddy did, she shook her head, got a funny look on her face and, in a matter-of-fact-you-asked-so-I’ll-tell-you tone, said she’d been taken from her mother at age three, spent time in foster homes and had been adopted out at age five. It took almost no questioning for her to tell me the reason her mother lost custody. “My two sisters and I were arrested. I was three, my one sister was four and the little one we carried in a backpack. We stole a gallon of milk from a 7 Eleven store and got caught. The cops were called and the upshot was were taken from mom. At that age I’d learned how to make mac and cheese from my sister and we were out of milk at home. Mom was on meth.” There was a long pause in the conversation as tears appeared in my eyes.

She told me she’d been in a number of foster homes and was adopted at age five by a chemistry teacher and his wife. My impression is that she did rather well in high school as she had a high level talent for track where she did well in distance events. So well, she got a free ride to Iowa State University and graduated with degree in Business Management. It is also my impression that she has experienced pretty severe peaks and valleys as an adult. She has four children, one of whom was adopted by another couple after the birth. The child was born at a time when she just could not handle another burden. She is in communication with her children and the are doing pretty well. She communicates with her siblings only when she calls them. They are not doing well as they have addictions to “stuff”.

She is thankful to her adopted family but still feels cheated out of having a loving family. “It’s just not the same.”

From talking with other kids who were adopted, that may well be true, as a pretty high portion of them feel they were used, if not abused. It is also true that children often idealize absent parents. To Sara it birth-family love is a mysterious, unachievable thing that she’d like to have but will never get. That is sad.

Based on her story that she’d recently been fired from another vision store and the fact that she was in training as a technician at the ophthalmologist we patronized, my guess is that her career didn’t go quite the way she would have liked as a college graduate with a business administration degree. If the opportunity presents itself, I’ll ask about that the next time.