Jessicarrot

I was up late last night because I’ve been putting off processing the rest of my strawberries. I made 9 batches of jam the first day and lost steam. But after almost a week it was time to get the last 2 gallons of strawberries processed and I didn’t manage to do it during daylight. So as I was cleaning the kitchen and boiling strawberries I listened to NPR and they kept repeating the breaking news out of Austria where a man apparently had held his daughter prisoner in his cellar for 24 years and fathered 7 children by her. I can’t imagine anything more monsterous. The fact that this man deceived his neighbors, possibly even his wife into believing he was a normal, 73 year old grandfather caring for three of his daughter’s children is just horrifying. The idea that monsters are masquerading around as normal people in society is very unsettling to say the least. It makes me wonder how a human being decends so far. How many lies and justifications have to be rehersed until the dark ugliness takes over?

Elisabeth told police her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 and he locked her up in a room in the cellar on August 28, 1984. (Sky news)

As early as 1978, Fritzl started plotting a basement cellar.

“Amstetten authorities authorised the building of a cellar in 1978, city spokesman Hermann Gruber told the Austria Press Agency.

Mr Gruber said inspectors examined the project in 1983 – the year before Elisabeth went missing – and did not notice anything suspicious,”(BBC news)

I can’t even begin to imagine, nor do I want to imagine the extent of emotional damage this evil has inflicted on everyone involved.

Austrian officials, while insisting that similar crimes had occurred in other countries, said they were struggling to make sense of the events.

“He was man of stature,” Franz Polzer, the chief of the criminal investigations unit for the Province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference, holding up a photograph of Fritzl, a heavyset, gray-haired man.

“He led a double life,” Polzer continued, “with one family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children, with his daughter…

“…The police said his wife, Rosemarie, 68, had no inkling of his secret life, believing that their daughter had fled the family for a cult and was unable to take care of her children. Fritzl forced Elisabeth to give up three of the children as babies, and he and his wife raised them. A seventh child died soon after being born.

By most accounts, the three children who grew up in the Fritzls’ care were well-adjusted, each learning to play a musical instrument.” (The news tribune.com)

Except that it probably isn’t possible now for these well adjusted children to be sheltered from the facts of how they came to exist. And how does a person even begin to process that? What do you do when you find out your husband is a monster? Did Mrs. Fritzl really not know? Actually this is one story I really don’t want to learn more about.

I finished canning my strawberry jam and turned on Stephen Colbert. Seeing a grown man put on a blue sequin tube-top pant-unitard somewhat restored my faith in humanity. There is definately ugliness, evil, perversion but at the same time there are people who make us laugh, heros, amazing parents, friends and children. The good people of this world outnumber the bad. The monsters are out there, but they are always looking over their shoulders because they know, eventually they will be discovered. And I take comfort knowing they will answer for what they have done, in this life or the next.

Asher: “I don’t like this cake mom. It tastes like…macaroni and cheese and old fish.”

On this day 35 years ago Bridger Jay Smith came into the world! What a cute little baby he was at 1 year old! I really wanted to scan in some pictures of the fun ways we have celebrated BJay’s birthday in the past. But my scanner doesn’t work with my computer unfortunately. One is a picture of “pin the tale on BJay” that we played at Tim and Piper’s house (when it was the white house on McReynolds and the twins look about 4). Then there is the birthday in Costa Mesa where we had all our friends throw water balloons at BJay standing up against the garage wall. The group violence totally terrorized little baby Danielle Bonilla and she cried for weeks when she’d see us or go near our house. Oops. And then there is the hilarious picture of BJay’s VW van completely filled to the roof with crumpled newspapers. We were trying to remember if that was a birthday prank, or just a prank. I’m thinking it must have been a graduation prank now. Anyway our good friends the Fannins and Worths had a little assistance from Decker on that one. It wasn’t really funny the morning we discovered it and I was already late for work. BJay smashed some of the papers down and we drove off with a van full of trash to my job at the Planetarium. My boss wasn’t amused. But its hilarious now to think that anyone would go to so much trouble for a laugh… Oh to have time to do something like that now! Watch yourselves Fannins. I’m still trying to think of a way to prank you back, and when I do its going to be goood.

Here’s B 5 years ago at the beach sinking into the sand.

Here’s B doing what he’s always done best, playing with the kids and being a great daddy.

And here is a photo Hila took of B being a good husband vacuuming, and doing a very sexy job of it.

When I think about it I know I always loved you BJay. Before I knew I loved you something in my soul would stir when I saw you. Before it was even possible to know you I loved the impression that you left with the people around you. I loved the person you were before we even met. I always knew I’d marry someone like you. I never would have guessed I’d get the real thing. Happy Birthday B! Its been a beautiful, happy life with you so far.

I was looking through some piles of papers looking for an itemized bill from the an optometrist visit last year and I found this notebook that Kraven left at our house two years ago in Lynchburg. Finding things like that feels like opening a portal to the next world. I searched the pages hoping to find some thoughts Kraven might have had. I had to laugh when the only page with writing on it were words of frustration. “I wish mye mom was nis” I know she must have been frustrated when she wrote that because the red colored pencil marks are deeply embedded in the page. Had she known I was looking for her true thoughts of her mother when she wrote in that notebook I know she would have been able to fill the pages with all the things she loved about her life, her family, her friends. And maybe she did journal. But all I have is a notebook I should have returned years ago. A tiny little snapshot of a momentary frustration. That brings me to a thought that I’ve heard expressed many times over which seems very insensitive. I’m an emotional writer. I only write when something strikes me. When I wrote about Kraven’s death, I was obviously emotional and I never clarified some things. First of all Kraven did not drown. When I first heard the awful news, that is what I heard. But not long after it became apparent that something else caused Kraven’s premature death. People have said (indirectly) “Why didn’t they watch her in the bathtub.” Which is absurd if you think for one second about how you bathe your children. I don’t watch my 6 year old in the tub. I check on him, and that is exactly what Paige did when she found Kraven unconcious. If a parent were to sit in the bathroom with a child who is nearly 10 years old bathing–people would say there was something wrong with that. I know that adults know better than to say something like that to anyone connected to Kraven’s family, but they apparantly don’t know better than to say stuff like that in front of their kids. And kids are honest, they just say what they hear. And guess what? Children at school repeat it and Kraven’s cousins and sisters hear it. So to answer the question that people are asking in their own homes, to friends, within earshot of their children. Nobody told Kraven’s parents that thier daughter was going to die that day. If they had known, they would have taken an axe to the bathtub that very morning. They would have put her somewhere safe, had all the bathtubs in the kingdom destroyed. They would have done everything humanly possible to protect their child. Just like you would, or I would. I think its hard to process a child dying like that with no explanation. And I think it scares us as parents to think that we can’t protect our children from dying. Not having control over their lives is a hard thing to get a grip on. If we can blame something, someone for what happened then we feel less vulnerable because we wouldn’t make that mistake. But tragedies are tragedies because we have no control over the overpowering force. It was just her time to go. All the futile “what ifs”, if they were played out I believe would come to the same conclusion. Not what we wanted, but what was supposed to happen.

(These last ones I got with blue on the inside)

Anti-glare coating, scratch resistent coating–the works $12.95/pair.

$43.00 total including shipping.

Don’t you wish you wore glasses?

http://zennioptical.com

I’m not getting paid for this. If the glasses are crap when I get them I’ll let you know.

I’ve had a few things I’ve been thinking about blogging. I just can’t get it together though. I was talking to Paige this morning and I asked her if she thinks people act different around her. (Dumb question, I know) And it got me thinking about why we do act weird around people who have experienced something profoundly tragic like Paige has. I think its because they are literally a different person. I know I think of myself as several different people. (Not quite multiple personalities) I think I’m a different person now that I have children than I was before I had children. I was a different person before I was married too. People can relate to those things, or they can’t. One of my best friends basically stopped talking to me when I got married because my life was different, I was different in a way she didn’t understand. It seemed appropriate though, somehow. And our friendship resumed when she got married. This is totally different of course, Paige needs people and friendships and communication. Its one of those things… I wish I knew how to be more helpful…but then again I don’t ever want to know how she feels. Today my solution was cookies.

Which brings me to another troubling thing–food crisis . I have just stockpiled flour, sugar, and rice. One thing that has always freaked me out is the thought of not having food to feed my children. Its really scary to me. When I started noticing food prices going up I was concerned. But at least we can still afford to feed our family. I read some horrid book for an anthropology class about this couple who lived in Bangladesh “studying” this poor community. Being observers only, they decided they wouldn’t interfere and literally watched a family starve to death. That has always made me angry. It seems criminal to see a mother not able to feed her baby anything but grass. Its not even human. But in a way–with all of the annoying emphasis on global warming, that is kind of what we are doing as members of the West (Lets just keep handing Al Gore awards for his brilliant work, k?).

“Some ministers from poor countries, for example, are growing impatient with the way the West is addressing global warming by subsidizing and encouraging conversion of corn, sugar cane and other food products into substitutes for oil. The shift is helping to drive up prices, they say.”

It kind of reminds me of China’s Great Leap Forward. Except that instead of attempting to modernize our economy we’re trying to control global climate. And when “political decisions/beliefs take precedence over commonsense” the apparent result is starvation and economic disaster… I hope I’m being overly dramatic here.

Yesterday I went to the cardiologist. I’ve been putting off that appointment since January. Partly because of different illnesses that have been going through the family, but mostly because I just didn’t want to find out if I had another health issue. The Dr. was a really nice guy–and it was funny to me that his english accent made me feel confident in his abilities. Anyway, he had me do a stress test on the treadmill to rule out Long Q-T syndrom, even though I have never had any symptoms of it. Apparantly my heart just has a slightly longer interval between the q and the t electrical signals on my EKG. So I did the treadmill thing (really wished I’d been exercising more regularly). But as it turns out, there is nothing wrong with my heart!! Horray for that! When the Dr. was explaining the reason he wanted me to do the stress test he asked if there had been any sudden, unexplained deaths in my family. ?? How did he know? Anyway, long q-t syndrome runs in families and he said that if I had it, he would want all my children tested. Such a relief not to have to worry about that.

1. Food! Holy smokes I’ve never seen so much food flow into one household before in my life. Apparantly, there are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who hang back and are afraid to “bother” the mourning family and the kind who show up with arms full of food, paper goods, flowers and lots of hugs.

2. I am the kind of person who hangs back. Until now.

3. It takes a special kind of person to dress and and prepare the dead.

4. A mother never runs out of tears.

5. Its bittersweet to be reunited with so many people we haven’t seen in a long time.

6. When someone asks if there is something they can do and there is–let them. It makes everyone feel better.

7. Children are very insightful.

8. Family is so important. Friends are too.

9. A “perfect brightness of hope” is what makes us able to smile in tragic times like this.

Dear Kraven,

There are so many things I wish today. I wish I could have been humble enough to learn all the hard, sad lessons I’ve learned in the past few days while you were alive. Family relationships are important. Every single one. I know you knew that. You learned it from your mother. Now that everyone is stricken and reverent I see how families need each member, no matter how tiny to absorb our hurts and emptiness. We are tied eternally to each other. I keep thinking of when I found out I had cancer and you were so concerned. You took on more worry than a child your age should have. You took on more than any other child did. You were such a deeply empathetic soul. I wish I would have been more empathetic toward you while you were alive. That is what makes my heart sick. I wish I would have invited you to spend the night at my house as you requested several times. I wish I would have, but I didn’t and that has made me think hard about how I need to open up my heart to the children in our family. I will love and cherish them. I don’t think that Hila understands how you are gone from us right now. I have always loved the way you made room for her and made her part of the group even though she is much younger. She loves and looked up to you so much. We miss you, sweet girl.

Eternally your Aunt,

Jessica

I think I should explain the poem “I” that I posted because it turns out it was a really bad coupling with the news of my niece’s death. I didn’t plan it that way and I wasn’t in a dark mood when I wrote it. BJay has been talking about how Satan’s greatest tool against us is to convince us he doesn’t exist. Of all the lies, that is the most damaging. How can you protect yourself if you don’t even believe your enemy is real? If he isn’t real than the lies and temptations he feeds us daily are part of US, and we believe we are the evil ones. That can lead to all kinds of self-doubt and hopelessness. BJay gave a really good talk on the subject I wish I had a copy of, but a lot of it was off the cuff. So, in case you were wondering, that is what that was all about.