Month: November 2021

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

This is the hardest blog I’ve ever had to write. It’s the hardest one I’ve ever had to think about.

I live in the heart of downtown Waukesha, Wisconsin. My business, AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop, is here too – we live in a live-where-you-work condo.

Last Sunday was the city’s holiday Christmas parade. I was hoping to take my 8-year old granddaughter, Maya Mae, to it, but then Michael fell ill, as I wrote about last week. He’s home now, but I didn’t want to leave him on his own for any length of time. I didn’t know if my son and his wife decided to take Maya.

It was shortly after the parade started when I took some garbage out. I was expecting to hear the sound of the marching bands and maybe some cheering and laughter. Instead, I heard screams. And then sirens. Lots of sirens. So many sirens, and they weren’t traveling away. They were all around me.

One of my neighbors drove in and stopped next to me and rolled down her window. “Someone drove into the Christmas parade!” she cried. “I have a police scanner app on my phone! It’s horrible!”

It was. It was beyond horrible.

My first thought was of my son, my daughter-in-law. My granddaughter. I called my son and when he answered, I shouted into the phone, “Are you home? Are you safe?”

“We’re fine. Why?”

They’d gone grocery shopping. It was too cold and windy for the parade.

Then I called my middle son, in case he stopped to watch the parade on his way home from work. I called my youngest daughter, in case she and her best friend at college decided to go see the parade. I even dialed my oldest daughter before I remembered she lives in Louisiana now, and there was no way she’d be at the parade.

I think I went on auto-pilot. A shivering, shuddering sobbing auto-pilot.

As of today, six people have died from this rampage. One is an 8-year old boy. Over 60 people are in our area hospitals. One is the 12-year old brother of that 8-year old boy. The driver was caught. He wasn’t on a political attack. He wasn’t making a statement of any sort. He was running from a “domestic disturbance”. He drove through the first set of barricades at the beginning of the parade and, when he found himself on the parade route, apparently decided this was a good way to express his anger. Observers and police said his actions appeared intentional.

I have an imagination. I’m a writer, I’ve put my mind and my thoughts into all sorts of minds and bodies and souls and situations. But I can’t imagine being so angry, possibly at one person, that I would attack an entire parade of strangers. Strangers that included children, marching in a parade, watching a parade, laughing and waiting to be tossed candy.

I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine feeling that way.

I watched on Tuesday as the driver appeared for the first time in court, for his bail to be set. The judge placed the bail at five million dollars.

The prosecutor told the court and the judge that a sixth death was added, and it was the 8-year old boy. The driver, who kept his head down throughout the proceeding, only looking up once at the judge, began to sob.

And God help me, I didn’t care. When the prosecutor said that he could be given a life sentence for each of the deaths, at least 6 now, at least 6 consecutive life sentences, who knows how many by the time this goes to court, I heard myself think, Good! Don’t ever let him see the light of day again! Is there a way we can put the death penalty into effect for just one person? And then I amended, No, no death penalty. Let him suffer in prison for the rest of his life. Let. Him. Suffer.

This was me, thinking that. This was me. I’ve been almost as shook by my own thoughts and feelings as I’ve been over this whole horrible impossible tragedy.

I’ve written about some pretty difficult and terrible things. Always, I’ve forced myself into the “bad guy’s” head, to make him or her human, to find out the why of their existence, and to feel for them. To feel some compassion. I’ve always succeeded in doing so.

During the Dahmer summer and afterwards, I listened to interviews with his grandmother and others who knew his background. Jeffrey Dahmer was a monster. But I felt compassion for him anyway.

Just last week, when Kyle Rittenhouse collapsed in court after he was told he’d walk away a free man, I teared up. I believe the verdict was dead wrong – he deserved punishment. But when he collapsed in court, I saw a then-17, now 18-year old boy who was in an impossible situation. I felt compassion.

But in a moment that froze me so hard, I still get the chills, I wanted Darrell Brooks dead. Or locked away and suffering forever.

That’s so not me. But this is an unbelievable, unfathomable situation.

Trying to come up with a moment of happiness has been so difficult this week. But on Tuesday, when I talked to my granddaughter, my Grandbaby Maya Mae, we discussed how schools have been closed this week, due to what happened at the parade, and how she wished she was in school. I assumed she was just missing the fun.

She looked at me, and her always huge eyes were even huger. They were wide and shiny, and they were filled with the compassion I so wished I could feel.

“Grandma Kathie,” she said, her pronunciation of my role and name no longer the Gamma Kaffee she said and I treasured for so long, “I just want to know that my friends are okay.”

In her eyes, in her compassion, I recognized my own. I just want to know that my little city is okay. I just want to reach out to everyone who has been hurt, and we’ve all been hurt, so I want to reach out to everybody. I want to do everything I can to help.

And in Maya Mae, there is another compassionate generation coming along.

I don’t feel any compassion for Darrell Brooks. Yet. Maybe I will, by the time this is all done. But that’s okay. My heart is in the right place, even if it’s very broken right now.

That’s the best I can do this week, everyone. I want you all to be okay.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

If you remember, almost two months ago, this blog post was about finding my fifth grade English teacher, Mrs. Fatticci. I’d been trying to find her for years, because she was the very first person who told me I was a writer. You can read this blog post again if you look on 9/30/21.

And my Moment this week? I didn’t just find her. I talked to her.

You would think, these days, that it’s easy to pretty much find anyone. But when the person you’re trying to find is someone you met in the fifth grade, and it was 1971, and she was a teacher, you only know her first name as “Mrs.” You really need first and last names to find someone, and “Mrs.” just wasn’t going to work. After my first book came out in 2011, and as more books came out and my success grew, I found myself just wanting to say thank you to her. But that lack of a first name confounded me. I even contacted the school, explained who I was, explained who she was, and was told, “We’re sorry, but we don’t have any record of her.”

How could they not have any record of the woman who essentially set me firmly on my path and said, “Hello, you wonderful girl! This is you. This is where you go. This is where you belong.”

Whenever Mrs. Fatticci talked to me, she called me, “you wonderful girl.”

I am 61 years old now. I was 11 years old then. But I can still hear her voice from the back of the classroom as she said, “Oh my god, Kathie. You’re a writer!” I don’t know how a voice can feel like a warm, perfect-fitting coat, but hers did. I was only eleven, but I suddenly felt my life, my self, make sense.

And I wanted to say thank you. Because she saw me. And she thought I was wonderful.

I don’t remember exactly why, on September 22, 2021, I decided to try again. I decided to search on Facebook just using her last name and see what came up, if there was anyone with that name anywhere near Esko, Minnesota. Someone did; a man who lived in Hibbing, about an hour north. I decided to send him a private message. I explained who I was, and who I was looking for, and why. Within an hour, he answered me.

“That’s my mom!”

He contacted her for me, then he called me and said, “She remembers you!” He said she would be giving me a call.

And then I didn’t hear anything. It became November, and I wondered what happened. I wondered if she didn’t really want to talk to me, a student from so long ago, one out of how many bajillion other kids, a quiet girl who spent time mostly by herself, and someone who moved away at the end of that year. Eventually, I shrugged it off, happy that at least I was able to express my gratitude through her son.

Then came November 9^th. Out of nowhere, I received a friend request on Facebook from another Fatticci. I accepted, and then sent a message, asking if she was related to “Mrs.” Fatticci – I still didn’t know her first name. And this young woman answered, “Yes! She’s my mom! And I’m talking to her right now!” It turned out Mrs. Fatticci had to get a new phone and – we all know this story – was having trouble figuring out how to use it. She finally did and found my phone number and asked her daughter to check with me and make sure it was correct. It was. She was going to call me, hopefully that weekend. Mrs. Fatticci was going to call me!

But that weekend, Michael went into the hospital and our world turned upside down. That’s what my blog was about last week. All thoughts of Mrs. Fatticci, my fifth grade year, a phone call, and for that matter, all thoughts of who I was and who I am, disappeared as everything focused down on Michael.

He came home from the hospital on Friday. And on Saturday, my phone suddenly rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Hello! Is this Kathie?”

“Yes…”

“Hello, you wonderful girl! This is Jan Fatticci!”

And just like that, I was eleven again. Though simultaneously, my teacher had a first name. Jan.

She called me in the middle of chaos. She called me at a time when I was doubting myself and my ability to handle what was happening all around me. And she called me wonderful.

And so we talked. We both have experienced breast cancer. She still teaches, though in a daycare center now with two-year olds, and even though she’s 75, she says she will always teach. So will I.

When I mentioned her greeting, “Hello, you wonderful girl,” she said that she felt at the time that I needed uplifting. That I needed to know that there were people who believed in me, and that I should believe in myself.

I was silent for just a minute. “You came at just the right time then,” I said. “And you came at just the right time now.”

She’s ordering my books. And I am learning to think of her as Jan. My gosh, she’s only fourteen years older than I am! That takes a twist of the head to process.

But I can hear her voice. Then. And now.

Hello, you wonderful girl!

Oh my god, Kathie. You’re a writer!

She came at just the right time.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

 

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Well, if you follow me on Facebook, you know that this has been the week from hell. I’m sure many are wondering if I will indeed be able to find a moment of happiness.

Yep.

So my husband Michael has been fighting a foot infection. He saw his doctor a week ago today and was put on a new set of antibiotics because the doctor wasn’t happy with his progress. On Saturday, his foot began to really hurt. On Sunday, he had to come home from work because he couldn’t stand to stand. I took him in to Urgent Care, who sent him to the ER. ER took an X-ray, said the bone wasn’t infected, but he needed to be admitted for IV antibiotics. Then they said, “Wait! He might have a blood clot!” and so they did an ultrasound. No blood clot. He was admitted and IV antibiotics started. Monday, the hospital called in an infectious diseases specialist. He said, “Let’s have an MRI, just to make sure there’s no bone infection.” On Tuesday, Michael’s doctor showed up; she hadn’t even been told he was in the hospital. She looked at the MRI and said, “We need to open this up and clean it out.” Later that day, she called him and said, “I’ve talked with the infectious diseases doctor. You need to be prepared to lose your little toe. There’s likely a bone infection.”

From Sunday to Tuesday, I never saw his doctor. She was supposed to call me. She didn’t.

On Wednesday, after we were given three different times for his surgery, they finally came to get him. The nurse told Michael, “I saw your surgery orders, which you will have to sign. They have the wrong foot listed. Make sure you have them change it.”

Uh-huh.

I walked beside the rolling bed as far as I was allowed. Then I watched him leave, clutching his glasses so he’d be able to read and hopefully fix these orders. I was left all alone in the hallway.

I can tell you I have never ever felt so alone in my life. Never.

I turned and went into the family waiting room. The volunteer there showed me the glowing board that listed everyone who was having surgery. The colors of their individual row changed with each step – waiting for surgery, surgery begins, surgery ends, patient is in recovery. I explained that my computer was in Michael’s room, and I was going to be up there to wait. She took down my cell number and said she would call me as Michael progressed.

She never called.

45 minutes later, a nurse poked her head into Michael’s room, where I’d dissolved into tears. “Oh!” she said. “He’s not here!”

“Um, no,” I said. “He’s in surgery. I think. No one has told me.”

“Oh!” she said brightly. “I can find out for you!”

She never came back.

At noon, an hour and a half after I was left alone in the hallway and Michael disappeared into the bowels of the hospital, I decided I was going to find my way back to the family waiting room and check that stupid glowing board. It was not a human, but maybe it would tell me. I wound around and down and finally found it. “Oh!” the volunteer said. “I tried to call you, but I must have written your phone number down wrong!”

I checked. She did. But she also had the room number where I was waiting – and there’s a phone in there.

“The doctor was here to see you,” she said. “She said she would find you in your husband’s room.”

When was this?

“At 11:30.” A half-hour ago. But at least now I knew that Michael was in the recovery room. The board told me.

I went back up to his room and crossed to the nurses’ station. I told the nurse what happened and she said she would page the doctor.

I didn’t hear from the doctor until Thursday morning when she called me.

The nurse said I should go ahead and have some lunch, that it would be a bit before Michael was back because he was experiencing low blood pressure. I was tempted to ask if they got the right toe, but I was so fit to be tied and exhausted by then, I just wandered down to the cafeteria. I think I ate.

Twenty minutes later, I returned to the room. I could see a nurse standing outside his door. And for the first time in I don’t know how long, I broke into a run.

I ran.

Looking over the nurse’s shoulder, I could see another nurse straightening out the bedcovers over a very familiar form. A form I’ve been married to for 22 years. A form I know so well. I reached over the nurse’s shoulder and pushed the door open a little further.

And Michael looked over. He looked right at me. And he smiled.

And there it was. My moment of absolute happiness.

(And so you know, they got the correct toe. Michael is expected to come home tomorrow, make a full recovery, and be back in a shoe and back at work in 3 weeks.)

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

 

 

 

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

I am struggling with how to write about the Moment this week. I have always been honest in the Moments, and at times, I’ve written about things that were uncomfortable for me. This week’s Moment brought about a quiet sense of happiness, but also an absolutely physical feeling of relief as an issue was lifted from my shoulders.

But how to talk about it?

It’s interesting to think about, because this week, in another Moment, I was invited into a high school classroom with kids who want to be writers. I appeared online, via the smartboard in their classroom. One of the kids read Today’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News, the book published in 2018 which included the first year of this blog, when I wrote a Moment every single day. This student emailed me, telling me what the book meant to her, and in the classroom, she said that reading how I worked through my difficult Moments helped her get through hers. Then another student asked, “How did you get through them?”

And I explained how writing the Moments helped me to be more observant in my own world, in the life and air around me, in the events I was living through, in the sharing of my life with the lives of others. My kids. My family. My friends. My students and clients. Strangers on the street.

And now, here I am, wondering how to explain this Moment. Which is difficult.

So it’s well-known that I run my own business, AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop. It’s a studio and a community for writers at all ends of the career spectrum – just starting out with their first word, or writing their umpteenth book. The studio began with my having no knowledge on how to run a business, and it’s grown into an international community, filled with people that I consider a part of my writing family, people that I love.

Though every now and then, very, very rare, there’s an exception.

Over the years, the studio has grown into something that now provides for my family. I work no less than 85 hours a week, and I’ve done this for almost 17 years. Running this business is way more than just my walking into a classroom and teaching. I’ve had to learn so much. And I’ve learned it. I absolutely love what I do, even as I do so much of it.

But then…

So I had this client. He’s been my client for 8 months. At first, I really enjoyed working with him. His book was a challenge, he knew it was a challenge, and he listened and learned and applied what I was teaching him. And then his book went completely off the rails.

Slowly, the book became about justifying the abuse of women. It became about how men were completely innocent in this, and that actually, in his reality, abuse happened because women wanted it and coerced their men into abusing them.

Each week, I found my jaw dropping further. And each week, I tried to show him the error in his logic, in what wasn’t on the page, and that what was on the page wasn’t working.

Then his behavior toward me shifted. He became a bully. He became verbally abusive. And like in the book, where the abuse began to happen because women wanted it and coerced their men into doing it, he began to say that the fault with the book wasn’t what he was putting down on the page, it was with me. Because I am a woman.

And honestly? It took me a while to realize how much this was hurting me. How much this was shrinking me.

Now part of the hurt was flat down-to-earth practicality. The studio provides for my family. This student, who paid to have me work with him, was providing for my family. And so for awhile there, I took it. I took it because I wanted to help, as I want to help all writers. But I also took it because there are always bills to pay.

Our meeting last week was the worst. When I ran downstairs to meet my next client in the classroom, I did so in tears. Michael called after me, “I have never heard you sound so exasperated with a student!”

Exasperated really wasn’t what I was feeling. Or maybe, I was feeling exasperated with myself. Because I was beginning to see what was going on.

Over the weekend, there was a flurry of emails, each one putting me down, pushing me down, further and further. His final email ended with, “Well, let’s just get through it.” As if working with me was a chore, a difficult, difficult chore.

And bear in mind that “getting through it” meant getting through the rest of his already written over 800-page book – and we were only in the 300’s.

I didn’t sleep at all the night after that email. Not a bit. Around five in the morning, I dragged myself to my computer, booted it, and answered his email. I told him that we were no longer going to be working together. And that I would refund the balance of what he’d paid for – which was a year in advance of coaching.

This was not a small amount. It was a bite. And it was a bite into what provides for my family.

But his behavior was also a bite into me. And it’s me that provides for my family.

When I hit send on that email, I cannot even describe the feel of the weight off my shoulders. Off my body. Off my mind. Off ME. I didn’t know how weighted down I was, until I stepped back into myself and threw the weight away.

So it’s a bite. But I will find a way to provide. And I will be whole while I’m doing it.

After I told Michael what I’d done, he said, “I’m proud of you.”

I’m proud of me too.

(And for any students and clients who are reading this, no, I have never ever ever felt that way about any of you. That’s why it was hard to write this. You all need to know how very special you are.)

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.