Story Broken Yet Rising (Complete)
- Thread starter Kathy in FL
- Start date
Cedar Lake
Connecticut Yankee
Her sister and her family, lots of Musgrove loose ends that are still begging to be tied up..........?
Chapter 101
I was working on digitizing a Bible that had just come into the CHS when Knox comes into the back room.
“Mina?”
“Oh hey! What are you doing here? I thought there was a land deal to babysit.”
“We closed on it this morning. Um … look … we’ve got a situation.”
My happy at seeing my little brother dimmed. “What kind of situation? Is someone hurt?”
“It isn’t my story to tell. I … this … Mina, you aren’t going to believe it until you hear it for yourself.”
I walk out to find four kids, the oldest wasn’t even 18 yet, and immediately my radar went up. Something about them …
“Are you are our Aunt Mina Musgrove?”
I nearly fell down. Donny, Charis, Carine, and … Mitchell. Yep, Tessa had a whoops as well. Four, not three. The fact that she named the youngest after our brother meant something but I wasn’t ready to analyze it.
And why were they here? They’d run away from home. They wanted … no needed … some answers. Why had they run away? Doug died in a work-related accident. He had a student go crazy because he didn’t get a perfect grade on a paper he had written, came to Doug during his office hours at Vanderbilt University and shot him point blank when Doug tried to tell him if he corrected the citation errors he would revise his grade. Not long afterwards Doug’s father died of a massive heart attack. You know what they said caused it, but he’d had high blood pressure for years, even before my parents passed so it isn’t like it had come like a shot out of the blue like people acted.
Tessa had no choice but to return to work as Doug hadn’t had any life insurance beyond a small policy that barely paid for funeral expenses at the crematorium. That’s when the fighting started. Doug’s mother and sister (yep, still there and living at home and getting into things she had no business being in) wanted his ashes interred in Tampa. Tessa said they could have half the ashes, but they didn’t want just a “piece of him.” Then they wanted her and the kids to move back to Tampa. That was a big fat no because she and the kids had a new church home and the older two were in high school and already dual enrolled at Vanderbilt while finishing up at the private school they all went to and was paid for by her work as a speech therapist there. Doug’s mother
The requests turned into demands and Tessa stopped taking their calls and only allowed the kids to call their grandparents once per week; on Sunday with other people around to hear the conversations. The kids were growing weary of the constant demands and fights as well and started to not want to make those calls, but Tessa insisted. However, when they started saying things like they should come for the entire summer or every long weekend Tessa grew concerned as well. Apparently she and Doug had been through this cycle before, but his father had always moderated the exchanges or mitigated them, and things would shortly thereafter calm back down and they’d go on like before. There was none of that this time and no one to step into that breach. Then there was.
Tessa started seeing a man that had been a friend of Doug’s. He was a widower, no children, not interested in that point of his life in having any at that stage of his life as he was about ten years older than Doug. He was looking for companionship. Tessa and the kids fit his niche and he fit theirs. Yes, Tessa had considered the kids. None of my business but it was part of the narrative they were giving me. They liked the man so it wasn’t anything to do with him why they ran away.
It was the fighting with their grandmother and aunt. Apparently only Donny and Charis barely remember their maternal side of the family. They just thought their parents moved away and distance had created a chasm that was never filled because the war got in the way. They hadn’t been privy to any of the rest of it. They’d never heard their parents discuss it or anything. Then Doug’s sister had done what she seems to be unable to help herself not do and she stirred up trouble and “told them” the entire sordid tale.
They went to their mother and she was so shook up all she could basically tell them was, “It’s complicated.” That’s when they thought of the brilliant idea of finding me and discovering The Truth for themselves. Oy vey.
Obviously the kids got their fair share of the Musgrove family genes. Donny drove … drove … in his dad’s old beater of a car that he’d been given to find me after having no luck getting the information out of their mother and not sure how to look it up on the internet. They knew I had chosen to leave Tampa but the rest of it was foggy. Then Donny thought he’d snuck them name out of Doug’s sister… but I knew her and knew she’d expected them to contact me and get blasted and then be forced to accept they were the only family they had. Just like always her understanding of people wasn’t quite what her ego told her it was. The kids had some crazy idea that they’d find me and corner me and force the truth out of me. Oh brother. They got their father’s genes as well obviously.
Long story short, after sleeping in their car overnight and not having eaten for over 48 hours they broke down and went to the Law Offices because of the name Musgrove. Knox recognized them even after over a decade apart. The youngest boy not only wears Mitchell’s name but is nearly carbon copy of him which is what caught me off guard to begin with. They hadn’t cared so much what the truth was, they’d just wanted it so they could make their own decisions and opinions.
First, I took them to the Dixie Diner which had reopened. We went over the entire story again and then I said, “I’ll tell you the story from my side, but you are calling your mother. Now.”
“After we hear the story,” they tried negotiating. But I’m proof against it. I’ve raised too many kids to get played that easy.
“Nope. This is not negotiable either. Capiche? However, I’ll allow you to do it in one of the law office’s meeting rooms for privacy.”
They forked over the phone number … their phones were all dead … and I made the call just to make sure it got made.
Those stinkers. I nearly burnt their biscuits on Tessa’s behalf. It took me freaking forever to first convince her I wasn’t some joke or legal maneuver perpetuated by her in-laws, and then second to get her calmed down after I made the kids tell her hello even if they were in too big a snit to say anything else yet. I never hated my sister as she’d assumed. I didn’t (and still don’t) understand why things had to end the way they did but I’d never hated her. Been angry? Oh yeah. But hate had never really been part of that internal conversation. It was too damaging to an already damaged situation. And I’d put the anger away years ago as well, refusing to dig up those bones over and over again.
Mitchell had been right all along, you can shut a door but don’t lock it or God might just bust it down if such is in His plan. Just because you think you know, doesn’t mean you do. Sometimes toxic situations need to go away and sometimes God says add “for a time.” You can think the future is probably someway but that doesn’t mean the story really ends the way you expect.
It has taken years, but Tessa and I now talk, about once a month; sometimes more often if something is going on. We aren’t what you would call close, but we aren’t enemies either. It took her a long time to understand that I’d never hated her and would have been open to a casual relationship. We don’t need to be besties or live in each other’s pockets. You don’t really care about someone less just because you learn that your personalities only mesh a certain way.
Derek has been very supportive through it all. It even made it easier for him to deal with his half brother and sister though they don’t always make it easier.
What can I say? Family is what you make of it. You have close immediate family, and friends that are as good as family. Then you have distant family even if the stereotype should make it different. I do regret some things but even with that I keep it in perspective and don’t let it eat me alive. I’ll never know what Tessa and I could have had. I’ll live with what it is now. The kids make up for it. They have a group digital meeting room and someone is always available if one of the others need to talk or want to share or just post pictures or whatever. Even my kids are invited to be a part of that. They get treated like a combination of little siblings and nieces and nephews and I recognize that they need that. The expansion of the family is good for them.
Bottom line is we have all survived. And no, that isn’t a comment on Doug and his father because if it was then I’d have to add in Mitchell and our parents. What I mean is life threw some crappy stuff at us. There was life afterwards and lessons to be learned that has helped us to have a better and deeper relationship with each other than might have otherwise been possible. And while the past is important to understand where you came from, the present – and being present – is even more so because no one is promised the future.
Derek and I renewed our vows and Tessa … and her new husband … were there, just like I had attended their wedding. The entire kit and kaboodle of the family came. The Homeplace was as full as it has ever been and I even made sure to pass along pieces of Mom’s plants that still survived. John, Tessa’s husband, is a real green thumb and now has Tessa enjoying it as a way to relax. It is strange to see if you want to know the truth. She also asked if I had some of the family recipes that she remembered. Maybe one day, when she’s ready or open to it, I’ll even tell her I still have those items our parents boxed up. Maybe I’m a coward but there are still some things that I’m not ready to drag out into the sunshine.
I baked enough bread that week so that everyone could take some back home. It is still just something I do from scratch. Tessa being Tessa commented on it being an alliteration of my life. I wanted to role my eyes but didn’t, at least where no one could see me. Instead I told her, “Probably.” I left it at that. I still love my sister but there are days that it is challenging to remember that. I know I love all the kids. Sometimes you just have to accept someone and rise above the things that try to bring you down. They say it makes you the better person. Meh. I just know that it has all made me a stronger person, and one the Caballeros, Derek, and our children can count on when the yeast (life) doesn’t rise for some reason. But enough of the personification. Time to get back to work. Maybe I’ll just leave this stuff in the filing cabinets after all. I might need to remind myself again. Life is like that.
The End
I was working on digitizing a Bible that had just come into the CHS when Knox comes into the back room.
“Mina?”
“Oh hey! What are you doing here? I thought there was a land deal to babysit.”
“We closed on it this morning. Um … look … we’ve got a situation.”
My happy at seeing my little brother dimmed. “What kind of situation? Is someone hurt?”
“It isn’t my story to tell. I … this … Mina, you aren’t going to believe it until you hear it for yourself.”
I walk out to find four kids, the oldest wasn’t even 18 yet, and immediately my radar went up. Something about them …
“Are you are our Aunt Mina Musgrove?”
I nearly fell down. Donny, Charis, Carine, and … Mitchell. Yep, Tessa had a whoops as well. Four, not three. The fact that she named the youngest after our brother meant something but I wasn’t ready to analyze it.
And why were they here? They’d run away from home. They wanted … no needed … some answers. Why had they run away? Doug died in a work-related accident. He had a student go crazy because he didn’t get a perfect grade on a paper he had written, came to Doug during his office hours at Vanderbilt University and shot him point blank when Doug tried to tell him if he corrected the citation errors he would revise his grade. Not long afterwards Doug’s father died of a massive heart attack. You know what they said caused it, but he’d had high blood pressure for years, even before my parents passed so it isn’t like it had come like a shot out of the blue like people acted.
Tessa had no choice but to return to work as Doug hadn’t had any life insurance beyond a small policy that barely paid for funeral expenses at the crematorium. That’s when the fighting started. Doug’s mother and sister (yep, still there and living at home and getting into things she had no business being in) wanted his ashes interred in Tampa. Tessa said they could have half the ashes, but they didn’t want just a “piece of him.” Then they wanted her and the kids to move back to Tampa. That was a big fat no because she and the kids had a new church home and the older two were in high school and already dual enrolled at Vanderbilt while finishing up at the private school they all went to and was paid for by her work as a speech therapist there. Doug’s mother
The requests turned into demands and Tessa stopped taking their calls and only allowed the kids to call their grandparents once per week; on Sunday with other people around to hear the conversations. The kids were growing weary of the constant demands and fights as well and started to not want to make those calls, but Tessa insisted. However, when they started saying things like they should come for the entire summer or every long weekend Tessa grew concerned as well. Apparently she and Doug had been through this cycle before, but his father had always moderated the exchanges or mitigated them, and things would shortly thereafter calm back down and they’d go on like before. There was none of that this time and no one to step into that breach. Then there was.
Tessa started seeing a man that had been a friend of Doug’s. He was a widower, no children, not interested in that point of his life in having any at that stage of his life as he was about ten years older than Doug. He was looking for companionship. Tessa and the kids fit his niche and he fit theirs. Yes, Tessa had considered the kids. None of my business but it was part of the narrative they were giving me. They liked the man so it wasn’t anything to do with him why they ran away.
It was the fighting with their grandmother and aunt. Apparently only Donny and Charis barely remember their maternal side of the family. They just thought their parents moved away and distance had created a chasm that was never filled because the war got in the way. They hadn’t been privy to any of the rest of it. They’d never heard their parents discuss it or anything. Then Doug’s sister had done what she seems to be unable to help herself not do and she stirred up trouble and “told them” the entire sordid tale.
They went to their mother and she was so shook up all she could basically tell them was, “It’s complicated.” That’s when they thought of the brilliant idea of finding me and discovering The Truth for themselves. Oy vey.
Obviously the kids got their fair share of the Musgrove family genes. Donny drove … drove … in his dad’s old beater of a car that he’d been given to find me after having no luck getting the information out of their mother and not sure how to look it up on the internet. They knew I had chosen to leave Tampa but the rest of it was foggy. Then Donny thought he’d snuck them name out of Doug’s sister… but I knew her and knew she’d expected them to contact me and get blasted and then be forced to accept they were the only family they had. Just like always her understanding of people wasn’t quite what her ego told her it was. The kids had some crazy idea that they’d find me and corner me and force the truth out of me. Oh brother. They got their father’s genes as well obviously.
Long story short, after sleeping in their car overnight and not having eaten for over 48 hours they broke down and went to the Law Offices because of the name Musgrove. Knox recognized them even after over a decade apart. The youngest boy not only wears Mitchell’s name but is nearly carbon copy of him which is what caught me off guard to begin with. They hadn’t cared so much what the truth was, they’d just wanted it so they could make their own decisions and opinions.
First, I took them to the Dixie Diner which had reopened. We went over the entire story again and then I said, “I’ll tell you the story from my side, but you are calling your mother. Now.”
“After we hear the story,” they tried negotiating. But I’m proof against it. I’ve raised too many kids to get played that easy.
“Nope. This is not negotiable either. Capiche? However, I’ll allow you to do it in one of the law office’s meeting rooms for privacy.”
They forked over the phone number … their phones were all dead … and I made the call just to make sure it got made.
Those stinkers. I nearly burnt their biscuits on Tessa’s behalf. It took me freaking forever to first convince her I wasn’t some joke or legal maneuver perpetuated by her in-laws, and then second to get her calmed down after I made the kids tell her hello even if they were in too big a snit to say anything else yet. I never hated my sister as she’d assumed. I didn’t (and still don’t) understand why things had to end the way they did but I’d never hated her. Been angry? Oh yeah. But hate had never really been part of that internal conversation. It was too damaging to an already damaged situation. And I’d put the anger away years ago as well, refusing to dig up those bones over and over again.
Mitchell had been right all along, you can shut a door but don’t lock it or God might just bust it down if such is in His plan. Just because you think you know, doesn’t mean you do. Sometimes toxic situations need to go away and sometimes God says add “for a time.” You can think the future is probably someway but that doesn’t mean the story really ends the way you expect.
It has taken years, but Tessa and I now talk, about once a month; sometimes more often if something is going on. We aren’t what you would call close, but we aren’t enemies either. It took her a long time to understand that I’d never hated her and would have been open to a casual relationship. We don’t need to be besties or live in each other’s pockets. You don’t really care about someone less just because you learn that your personalities only mesh a certain way.
Derek has been very supportive through it all. It even made it easier for him to deal with his half brother and sister though they don’t always make it easier.
What can I say? Family is what you make of it. You have close immediate family, and friends that are as good as family. Then you have distant family even if the stereotype should make it different. I do regret some things but even with that I keep it in perspective and don’t let it eat me alive. I’ll never know what Tessa and I could have had. I’ll live with what it is now. The kids make up for it. They have a group digital meeting room and someone is always available if one of the others need to talk or want to share or just post pictures or whatever. Even my kids are invited to be a part of that. They get treated like a combination of little siblings and nieces and nephews and I recognize that they need that. The expansion of the family is good for them.
Bottom line is we have all survived. And no, that isn’t a comment on Doug and his father because if it was then I’d have to add in Mitchell and our parents. What I mean is life threw some crappy stuff at us. There was life afterwards and lessons to be learned that has helped us to have a better and deeper relationship with each other than might have otherwise been possible. And while the past is important to understand where you came from, the present – and being present – is even more so because no one is promised the future.
Derek and I renewed our vows and Tessa … and her new husband … were there, just like I had attended their wedding. The entire kit and kaboodle of the family came. The Homeplace was as full as it has ever been and I even made sure to pass along pieces of Mom’s plants that still survived. John, Tessa’s husband, is a real green thumb and now has Tessa enjoying it as a way to relax. It is strange to see if you want to know the truth. She also asked if I had some of the family recipes that she remembered. Maybe one day, when she’s ready or open to it, I’ll even tell her I still have those items our parents boxed up. Maybe I’m a coward but there are still some things that I’m not ready to drag out into the sunshine.
I baked enough bread that week so that everyone could take some back home. It is still just something I do from scratch. Tessa being Tessa commented on it being an alliteration of my life. I wanted to role my eyes but didn’t, at least where no one could see me. Instead I told her, “Probably.” I left it at that. I still love my sister but there are days that it is challenging to remember that. I know I love all the kids. Sometimes you just have to accept someone and rise above the things that try to bring you down. They say it makes you the better person. Meh. I just know that it has all made me a stronger person, and one the Caballeros, Derek, and our children can count on when the yeast (life) doesn’t rise for some reason. But enough of the personification. Time to get back to work. Maybe I’ll just leave this stuff in the filing cabinets after all. I might need to remind myself again. Life is like that.
The End
I’m familiar with the area because our primary BOL is in that area. LOL
Last edited:
Jeepcats27
Senior Member
Thank you for a nice wrap-up Kathy!!!!!!
Aren't you close to celebrating your anniversary?
Congratulations !!!!!!!!
Aren't you close to celebrating your anniversary?
Congratulations !!!!!!!!
And how did you remembeer that? Lol. Yes, tomorrow will be 36 years and 40 together.
Thank you so much!
Happy anniversary to you and Rooster a day early.
Be glad you got your BOL when you did. Out of curiosity I was checking land prices near Live Oak, very little less than 10K an acre and some of that was swamp. Several was/were tree farms would have to be careful about who holds timber rights.
Yeah we got ours 21-ish years ago for $1850/acre.
Thank you
Jeepcats27
Senior Member
Kathy, whenever you are on hiatus I always go back and re-read your stories. I forgot which one I saw you mentioning your anniversary written a year or so ago. I've also been re reading Edie for canning recipes for this summer,
Sammy55
Veteran Member
Well, what a wonderful end to this story! It's another great one, Kathy, and you never seem to disappoint us. You have a wonderful talent for writing!!
Happy anniversary to you and your hubs! May your days and years ahead be filled with adventure, happiness and much love!!
Happy anniversary to you and your hubs! May your days and years ahead be filled with adventure, happiness and much love!!
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you and a very Happy Anniversary.
I just got to read the rest, we were gone almost all day.
I just got to read the rest, we were gone almost all day.
feralferret
Veteran Member
Happy Anniversary!
Thank you for the wonderful story.
Thank you for the wonderful story.