The Tornado in Our Lives

Too much was going on — too much too fast. A tornado had swept through our lives not unlike a real Midwestern tornado taking with it our home, our car, my job, my children — even my mother. I had to wonder why all these things had happened at the same time, or if any of them were connected. It was hard to believe I had lost both my daughter and my job and harder yet to believe I had lost them both at the same time. I was pretty sure my girls were being manipulated or threatened, and I had a feeling my supervisor, my union, and even the girls' mother was as well.

And then there was my mother's death thrown into the middle of all this. The fact that it was one more crazy thing that had happened to my family during this time seemed to indicate it might be connected to these other events in some way. But I couldn't see how this could be, and at the time I didn't think there was any connection between anything.

* * *

Soon after Christmas I hired a lawyer. He looked at the County records and called me into his office one day.

"John, I have good news for you and bad news. The good news is I looked through the County records and you haven't done anything wrong.

"What's the bad news?"

"I can't help you."

I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, and I wasn't surprised that he couldn't help me. I had some hunches as to why that was. One of those was that losing Mary was connected to the two years she had spent in out-of-home placement a few years earlier — same characters, same roles, different setting. The other hunch was that the reason no one would tell me anything was because I already knew too much, and in the next part of this story, I tell what it was I knew.