A Soperific Christmas

January 10th, 2010 Family

Christmas 2009

Fans and Friends:

Don’t look so dismayed. The only people holding a hard copy of this letter are the ones who send us money every year. Console yourself with this Soper e-letter, and remember, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Elizabeth (16), also known as Elli, recently landed a 4.0 and a 19-year-old boyfriend. Mom pretends to be cool with this, although she almost passed out when she came downstairs to the family room and spotted them “sharing” a beanbag chair. Ben (15) continues to progress toward his goal of total world domination, starting with the high school debate team. (Specialty: public policy. Who would’ve thought?) His tournaments require Mom and Dad to moonlight as taxi drivers, but they’re relieved he’s finally putting his arguing skills to good use. Andrew (12) managed to weasel his way out of school for the past month with various illnesses. He’s back in the saddle now, and might even be ready to take up his fencing foil again soon. Every middle child deserves a weapon.

Christine (10) is also back to public school and trying to exercise patience with the other 5th grade girls, whose only interest is Hannah Montana. (Thanks to her sister’s obsession with Japanese anime, Christine’s tastes run more sophisticated.) Meanwhile, Matt (8) stays busy creating new incarnations of the paper airplane and plotting various ways to capture Bin Laden. Apparently, the two goals are somehow connected. Sam (6) is thoroughly bored with first grade worksheets, but loves Mr. Vierra, his super-young, super-cool teacher from Hawaii. Along with Matt, Sam daily invents new ways to dent walls and stain carpets, but his chief pursuit is competing with Dad for the most and best snuggling time with Mom.

As for me, life is a whirlwind at the ripe old age of 4. Mom and Dad were starting to get the hang of my various Down syndrome-related challenges, so this year I ramped up the intrigue with a diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD), an autism spectrum disorder. Each week I juggle two preschool programs and several serious occupations on the home front, including advanced toilet flushing and rhythmic cabinet banging. I recently mastered the alphabet, but I refuse to utter a single word—better to maintain my rep as the strong, silent type.

Mom had a big year with two book releases: Gifts 2 (the sequel to her celebrated Down syndrome anthology), and The Year My Son and I Were Born, her memoir about yours truly. Book marketing in the midst of a recession is not for the faint of heart, but Mom came off conqueror and is looking forward to the upcoming release of Year in paperback. She’s sworn to wait a bit before starting her next book, which is good news for Dad, whose back scratching needs have been woefully neglected as of late. And I think we’d all agree that a man who works 12-hour days, tolerates 7 kids, and spins heavy church responsibilities on the side needs his scratchies.

Well, that’s all the news I’m willing to share through corrupt online communication methods. Only the chosen few get to hear the rest of the story. Repent, and you shall be rewarded in 2010.

Thomas Reed Soper

Home

November 27th, 2008 Family, Loss

Any minute now, it will begin: first one car, then another, then another will drive into our cul-de-sac and park in front of the house across the street. As they do on every holiday, the Bishop’s children are coming home.

There are six of them, all adults now, several with children of their own. They clog the street with their SUVs and economy cars, and no doubt clog their mother’s kitchen with welcome laughter and unwelcome fingers picking at the platters of food still under construction. I imagine the scene, and I smile. If I’m lucky, it will be my future.

Our nearest family members live 800 miles away. In some of the years past, my husband’s parents have made the drive from Portland to share the holiday with us; a few times we’ve driven to them. But this year, like last, we’re home for Thanksgiving–the nine of us cozying up on a drizzly day with the smell of roasting turkey driving us mad. The air is rich with content. I am grateful, more than those eight letters can really signify, for the family within these walls. But then I think about my brother, and I am sad.

The call from Church headquarters came a month or so ago. “We have the records of (name),” the quavery-voiced woman said. I could picture her, white-haired and wrinkled, sitting in front of a computer monitor with my brother’s information glowing onscreen. “We would like to send them to his current ward. Do you have a street address or phone number for his place of residence?”

My mouth ran dry. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Is there someone we can contact who might have that information?”

“Not that I know of.” I swallowed hard. “None of us has heard from him for almost two years.”

She paused. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Yes. I was sorry, too, to hear the words spoken aloud. It had been months since I’d had cause to speak of my brother, and my sense of loss amplified anew. After I hung up the phone, I wept and wept.

My brother, my only blood sibling, two-and-a-half years older than I. Throughout our childhood he was my mind-twin, or perhaps, more accurately, my heart-twin, understanding things nobody else understood. He alone could comprehend the unfillable void in my chest that had yawned wide ever since our parents’ divorce. He alone shared my particular parcel of pain in the troubled blended family created by our mother’s remarriage. We didn’t speak our understanding aloud very often. We didn’t need to.

But while my life took an upswing after leaving home, his continued along the slow downward spiral we’d both been following throughout adolescence. His drug use became drug addiction. He was homeless for years, sleeping on friends’ couches and enjoying, at least some of the time, the freedom of uprootedness. He visited me once, ten years ago, when I had three small children in a tiny house. He and his friend, the delightfully odd bearded man named Jelly, arrived in a battered VW van (natch) and stayed for the afternoon, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and filling our washing machine drain with dirt from their incredibly filthy clothing. That was the last time I saw him.

Then came the car accident. Two people died; a strict new DUI law held him accountable. He received two prison sentences, each two to twenty years. After serving his minimum four years, he was released on a writ of habeus corpus due to controversies surrounding the new law and his attorney, who was disbarred soon after his trial. But after eighteen months, the state’s appeal was granted, and he was summoned back to prison to finish his 36 remaining years. Instead of complying, he ran.

I heard the news two Decembers ago. The children and I were decorating gingerbread men for Christmas when my mother called to tell me my brother had disappeared. I stood in the middle of my kitchen, hands dry and itchy with flour, apron smeared with butter, and felt utter rage. How could he do this? I thought. How could he do this to our mother? How could he do this to me? It was a betrayal of everything he’d been given over the course of his thirty-seven years–love, nurturing, compassion, forgiveness, encouragement. It was a betrayal of Home.

My rage is gone now, for the most part. It still flares now and again when I see and hear the effects of his choice on my mother, who grieves a certain yet ambiguous loss. “He could be dead,” she says. “And whenever he does die, I might not ever know.” But I believe that no matter how thickly brewed the pain can taste for all of us who love my brother, his is greater still. Even as my mother and I spoke that December evening, with my children chattering in the background and gobs of frosting hardening on the countertops, I was standing in the midst of everything warm and good, and he was moving farther and farther away from the chance of ever regaining it.

I don’t think of my brother often. I’ve had to close the door on his memory in order to minimize the impact of his choice on myself and my family. But on days like today, the door swings open. I remember holidays past, when he and I would be shuffled from one family gathering to another, trying to bridge the gap of a severed marriage. I remember our psychic closeness, which I’ve never experienced with any other person, not even my closest girlfriends, not even my husband. I wonder where he is right now, and who he’s with, and what he’s doing. And as I look around at my children, praying that one day they will eagerly return, like the Bishop’s children, to the heart of their upbringing, I pray that my brother can still hold and touch and feel a small piece of his own.

Legacy

June 17th, 2007 Family, Marriage

My wedding band is special. It’s gold, of course–yellow gold, about 8 mm wide. No stones–I wasn’t interested starting a marriage in debt. (My roommate’s ring came with monthly payments, which struck me as ridiculous. Reed claims this is one reason why he married me.) I like its plainness, its classy simplicity. But I love my ring for this reason: it was made from the gold of my father’s wedding band.

My parents divorced when I was five; each of them remarried a year or so later. I’m not sure why my mother ended up with her ex-husband’s wedding ring–I imagine my father had no interest in this token of their unhappy union. But she saved it, along with the white gold bands of her wedding set. And when I became engaged, she offered these mementos to me.

Reed was thrilled by the economy of it all (he paid less than $100 to have the precious metal melted down and recast: yellow gold for my ring, white gold for his.) And I was thrilled by the symbolism. I did not want to repeat the disaster that was my parents’ marriage, of course, but I was hopeful that I could take the raw materials of my past and make something new, something good.

Fifteen years have passed. For Reed and I they’ve been difficult years, in some ways. Even though both of us have been committed to marriage since our wedding day, it took us a dozen years to figure out that we really, really wanted to be married to each other (big difference). But we know this now, and life is sweet.

I just called my father to wish him a happy Father’s Day. We don’t speak very often–a few times a year, usually, unless there’s some crisis afoot in the family. Like my marriage relationship, my past relationship with my father has been difficult in some respects. His personal weaknesses have hurt me, at times a great deal. But I love him. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this is that I married someone very much like him.

On this Father’s Day I am grateful for the love of my husband and father. I’m grateful that I have learned to love them without reservation. And I am grateful to wear a constant reminder of them both, shining with soft luster on my ring finger.

Touchstone

May 12th, 2007 Family, Mothering

It was the first warm day of the season. We drove to the neighborhood park and piled eagerly out of the van, lifting our faces to the sky with relief. After months of bumping into dark walls and dark moods, the four of us–Matt, Sam, Thomas, and I–swallowed the light and air in great gulps.

I found the perfect place to roost–a flat section of the play structure that was sunlit without glare. Matt and Sam ran for the slides while Thomas perched next to me on the landing, poking his stubby fingers into the drainage holes. I breathed in and out, in and out, inhaling spring, exhaling winter.

After a few turns down the slides, Matt and Sam were ready to explore. They left me behind and headed for the barely-green field adjacent to the play structure, which stretches nearly as long as a city block. As soon as Matt hit the new grass, he began to run. Sam looked at me to see if I approved, and when I nodded and smiled, he took off in pursuit. I watched them go, almost able to feel the muscle fibers in their legs lengthening with each stride.

I wondered how far they would run before they looked back.

Sam didn’t last long. After twenty paces he glanced over his shoulder, making sure I was still there. As if I might have disappeared when he moved away from me. I waved him on. He ran another twenty paces, then stopped. He looked at Matt far ahead of him, then back at me, deliberating. Then he started running back to me.

Matt made it most of the way to the far side of the field before he noticed. He paused for a moment, calling to Sam to come back, to finish the journey. But when he realized he was the lone traveler he ran again, quickly covering the remaining yards between him and the stone wall which marked the edge of the field. He touched the wall, turned, and began to run back.

I watched them come, two little boys returning to mother. The sight of them bobbing across the field was as delicious as the sun on my cheeks, the breeze lifting my hair.

And I thought about my own mother. How my life is a series of circles that begin and end with her. How, no matter how wide my orbits become, how far my universe expands, I always return to earth, needing to touch stone.

Mein Bruder

December 18th, 2006 Family, Loss

My mom called me this evening to tell me that my brother has disappeared.

On Thursday he got a call from his lawyer telling him that his appeal was denied, so he has to serve his full prison sentence (40 years, of which he’s served four) starting now. On Friday he ran.
How long has it been–seven years, maybe? Eight? A while back, he was in a car accident. Two people–an older married couple–died. My brother, a chronic drug user, was convicted under a brand-new Nevada law that carried mandatory jail time for DUI. A lot of it. And it wasn’t necessary to prove that he was under the influence at the time of the accident–certain blood chemistry levels were all that was needed for the conviction. (He tested positive for marijuana use.)

People have asked me how I feel about strict DUI laws. Yes, I’m all for them, in theory. If my parents had been killed in that car accident, I’d be livid if the other driver, a proven drug user, was let off with a slap on the wrist. But I don’t like the way this particular law was designed. And no, I’m not happy about what happened to my brother. I don’t think he deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life. I don’t think it’s clear that his drug use caused the deaths. And as he has pointed out repeatedly, convicted rapists got out of jail after serving far less time. I think rotting in jail for 4 or 5 years, and being denied the opportunity to ever drive a car again, is enough. I don’t think society is better off with him locked away.

This whole incident is part of a long and convoluted history that I won’t detail here. The bottom line is that my brother was finally beginning to improve himself and his life. He’s been clean and sober (according to the random tests he’s been required to take) and working hard these last eighteen months. I don’t see what good will come of locking him up again. He’s 37 now; if he started serving his remaining time right away, he’d be 73 at the end.

He’s made many stupid choices in the past, and I don’t want to excuse him from reasonable consequences. But it pains me to know how desperate he must feel right now. It makes me feel sick. I feel especially ill on my mother’s behalf. She doesn’t know when or if she’ll ever hear from him again. I’m furious, of course, that my brother is putting her through this. Not to mention the fact that as soon as a warrant is issued for his arrest (which may be as soon as tomorrow), my mother loses the 20K she posted for bail.

But I’m worried that if his escape plan (which he’s surely been concocting over time) doesn’t pan out, he might take his own life.

Mein bruder.