Kids

Don’t have kids.

Don’t even have OTHER PEOPLE’S kids.

I kid.

Sort of.

I love my (grown) children and my grandchildren. I’d do almost anything for them, and have. We aren’t in each other’s business on a daily basis, in theory, though my girls and I talk about every other day by text or on Facebook.

For the girls, it’s usually them sharing grand-munchkin pictures or videos with me, or them asking, “How do I…?” for recipes and other odds and ends. Every few weeks it’s a meltdown, and occasionally a genuine crisis requiring mom to come to the rescue.

“Genuine” in this context may sometimes be open to interpretation, and sometimes be self-inflicted. But I digress. Ahem.

Last meltdown-crisis was before Christmas and everyone had been muddling along reasonably well. Then a couple of days ago we had another one – from the kids’ half-sister on their dad’s side.

I had a unique relationship with my kids’ dad when he was still alive. We were married for eternity (or it sure seemed that way at the time) and after we weren’t married any more we were civil to one another. I can’t say I liked him, and certainly didn’t love him, but as long as he treated the kids well I tolerated him.

His second wife still refer to each other as our ex-wife-in-law, and the standing family joke is that their daughter is hers and mine, that I’m the baby-daddy for their kid. No, I didn’t have THAT kind of relationship with the ex’s second wife, but their kid looks like she could be one of my kids. I kept her when she was little, when the ex was in the hospital with a heart attack. Both sides of the family taught the kids that this was their little sister, and the steps were family too.

My ex and I were horrible at marriage, but we nailed divorce. My kids always knew they were loved; we never used them as hockey pucks against the other, and they knew if they screwed up they’d have THREE parents kicking their asses.

When I did things with my kids, I included the second wife’s kids. They were family. Christmas time they got gifts from me and from my parents. The ex and his wife had nothing, so without my intervention her kids got nothing. I’d take each of the kids, including hers, on a “just one kid” day – we’d go to the lake, or to the museum, something like that, and just have a day for them alone. It was a thing and they all loved it.

Sorry, got waaaay sidetracked there.

So. Crisis. Now.

Their daughter’s lovely spousal unit decided to start hitting her, then literally threw her out of the house. She had no money and nowhere to go, because reasons.

Enter family group texts and FB texts.

Between us, she’s now got money for food and four days at a motel, and we’re working to get her and her boys back to her mom in Wyoming. (The adult kid’s currently in Utah with two munchkins of her own.)

And yes, I contributed. She’s family.

For a couple of days, though, my phone’s sounded like a video game. My kids have their own text and ringtones – ranging from, “You have a message from the Dark Side” to “Your Daughter is Attempting to reach you” to – well, you get the idea. So between the dings and the added more unique ringtones, I’ve gotten some odd looks at the grocery store, and my own spousal unit was irked. This was going on while he was trying to watch reruns of Perry Mason, after all. (Priorities, ya know?) It wasn’t like it was a message every few minutes. These would overlap. We’re talking HUNDREDS of messages spanning three days now.

The first book from my publishing company has gone live on Amazon now, in both print and eBook. I need to do a tweak for the print version, but overall I’m glad it’s out there. And no, I’m not the author.

It’s called The Prophet, by Anne Fox. It was the book that convinced me to do the publishing thing early, so I didn’t lose this author. The author’s as interesting a character as her book characters, too. More about that another time.

I’m a happy camper to have it finally live. And it’s a legitimately intriguing book. More reverent than I expected, given the author’s personality and usual style, but it works in context. Her upcoming series is a military fiction, series name The Unit. And reverence never comes into the picture for the new series, trust me.