When one can smell the bull...

Have you ever read the sign: Can you spare a buck? God bless you. As I make my way across America to do what is right by generations previous to me, I wonder as I reach out to help my aging parents, who will help me? I am currently a graduate student, a mother, a wife, a daughter, an aunt, a grandmother, and a sister-in-law. After 37 years of practice in child-rearing with 24 1/2 years between oldest and youngest, what do I have to show for it except wrinkles, gray hair, and changing seasons?

I have a whole new world out there that is beyond my scope of expertise! I spent those years not paying back student loans because I was changing diapers. It was then when I first smelled a lot of bull... well you know... because it's a rare human who has never changed a dirty diaper. When you smell the bull... watch your back, because it is then that when you are focused on other priorities, the attacks come in.

Financial attacks often hit first, but betrayal is also lurking in the shadows of friends or family who muster a smile in your presence like Judas with a kiss before Jesus was arrested, tried, and crucified. They ate together. They shared, until one got greedy and greed stabs friends in the abdomen finding the one spot where the other would never expect it. But is the one friend really surprised? No, probably not. Warning signs are often ignored because who wants to lose a friend? Noone should be the answer, but I don't know that it is ever truly that answer in all cases.

Take my brother for instance... really take my brother. I've had about enough of the shenanigans his family has presented. We hadn't talked in a decade and a half because I finally got tired of calling. Sometimes he'd answer, sometimes he wouldn't. The same went for my parents. Frankly, it didn't feel like the effort was worthwhile. AND to top that Sunday off, I was in the midst of raising seven children, yes count them, seven with a step-son for about a year as well for good measure. I was a bit too busy to worry with anything else.

The next thing I know my father is claiming harsh matters against my brother and wife and I am agreeing with him. Especially when my brother not so long ago in the beginning of the middle of the ongoing, now legal, fiasco accosted my husband in a grocery store, pulling him in for a hug making the statement to not believe everything he hears. Ironically, I'm thinking, "How about everything I see or smell?" After all 'when you smell the bull, watch your back.' 'Every time my sister-in-law and brother do something, I now get to pay the price' is something I say in jest, but it's true.

I am forced, albeit willingly, to travel across the country in order to give assistance to my parents who have been thrust into a new adventure beyond their wildest imaginations when they should have been restructuring their retirement. Woefully, my credit cards have become my latest best friends and they too are doomed to betray me later on. Why might be the first question that one would ask if one was interested and the answer comes back once more with an exceedingly hollow echo of the word greed. And as I've already stated above, that invariably leads to betrayal and a vicious cycle that costs someone dearly.

My brother betrayed us all and I'm left swimming upstream of high gasoline prices to get from one side of the country to the next over and over to help my parents. Of course, I can manage life alone, bankruptcy will embrace me with open arms, but we should have a village around us to help when they can, not to sink our boat in the desert of life. That is what family is for in the minds of the ancestors who used to help each other work the family ranch in order for everyone to survive and eat. That trivial pursuit must have skipped a generation. However, all is not without hope because sometimes the best support comes from strangers, near or far. I have 'friends' who live a half earth away and shine like the sun keeping me warm.

They have sent me everything from toilet paper to gluten-free flour which I really don't know how to use. Why comes up again for a simple answer of, 'because I talk to their child.' How wonderfully sad that is when someone from around the world will pay me in toilet paper to wipe up the bull because I talk to them while my own family and friends can't see to form a simple sentence but do flush me without a thought. And so it is in this late-night moment in a motel in the middle of America that I am at a loss as to how to wipe up the messes left behind the behinds of people who once called me sister and friend. But for today: "Now, I lay me down to sleep..." Tomorrow will have more than enough concerns of its own and the journey has a long way to go.