Serendipity

Right from the beginning, Shawn's arrest and then sentencing has been a hard pill for me to swallow. No mother wishes to see a child in prison, but when it happens...what then? For me, it couldn't have come at a worst time.  I was still deep in the grip of my breakdown, still not able to function mentally and emotionally...and I know that I wept a lot during this time.  I couldn't believe that my son, a big, huggable teddy bear that everyone loved, could do something so terrible.  It just didn't fit. Shawn's case was high profile, this was a big deal in a county that is one of the biggest in New York, and as much as I wanted to be there for my son...I couldn't.  I couldn't make myself go to the court hearings, I didn't want to be seen by the public or in the media...as I said, I was having a very hard time coping. A war raged inside of me then too...unending questions, uncertainties, blaming myself, even though I did my best to bring my son  up righ...

My mom on her wedding day That's the day that changed the lives of my brother, sister and I forever.  February 8, 1975.  It's etched into my brain so that I can never forget that our mom was taken from us. It was a Saturday morning, like most others that Winter, where my mom would often get dressed-up in her one-piece snow outfit and take off for a while to enjoy the outdoors on her snow mobile.  That morning, it was mid-morning when she left...asking me to make sure that our dad got his hot lunch when he came in from doing chores at the dairy farm where we lived.   I said I would.   Dad came in for lunch about noon, and we (Dad, my brother, sister and I) all ate and talked about whatever the subject might have been that day.  After a bit, Dad headed back out to return to the barns which were less than a 5-minute walk up the road from our house.   I can't remember what I was doing at the time, maybe cleaning up after the meal and d...