Dear Uncle Mike,
When I was seventeen years old 1 met
this great guy and we got engaged, he bought
me a nice ring and we set the date. The next
month I found out that I was pregnant. Well
as you can imagine I had to make some
decisions, 1 broke up with him and gave the
baby up for adoption, I have always missed
this little girl now twenty-one in April next
year, and I want to know she is safe and
happy, just a little background, I have been
writing the adoption agency since 1981 with
cards and letters and b-day cards and pictures
of her three siblings and me.
How do 1 recapture this lost youth, is there any hope that someday I might
see her or even just hear her voice, just once, not to bore you but my father
was the reason I gave her up, she was a blemish on his perfect record in
town, he was the president of the Knights of Columbus and the good guy at
church ever Sunday, he convinced my mother that I had to go live with my
uncle on the other side of the state and be a great secret in town ever since.
I guess 1 will always hope that she forgives me for giving her up, but I
never really wanted to, just sign me....
Waiting with open arms
From
beach
to boulevard,
a natural choice fo r
w om en's clothing.
C
N
m
o n
D e A q c n
L ic e n s e d M a s s a g e T h e ra p y
P a in & S tress R e lie f O- D e e p T is s u e
S w e d is h O R e la x a tio n
V A L O R E E G IF T , L M T
5 0 3 -4 3 6 -2 4 2 5
Portland (503) 239-4605
Cannon Beach (503)436-1572
P.Q. Box 8 72 » C a n n o n B e ach . O re g o n 97110
W inter S pecials A re H ere !
Make re sin a li,,ns for Thanks»i\iii« & Christinas soon!
Dear Waiting,
In rereading your saga, something Uncle Mike could manage only once,
he found two phrases that qualify as questions: how do you recapture lost
youth, and, is there any hope that you might someday see your daughter or hear
her voice. As for recapturing lost youth, even you must realize this is a dead
horse. Our ‘youth’ is, in large part, a scrapbook of memories carefully cobbled
together into a backstory that helps people who haven’t done much since high
school justify having consumed large portions of food, oxygen, and fossil fuels.
Given the rotten hands that came our way on the uneven poker table of life, it’s
only because of our superhuman efforts to be good people that, instead of going
postal down at the mall, we carved out useful lives sitting around in our
bathrobes feeling misty about roads not traveled and blaming others for our
decision not to travel them.
Uncle Mike hates to sound unsympathetic dear, but this is just such awful
horse pucky. In the beginning is the event. The event, your event, took place
twenty-one years ago. You (not your father, the Knights of Columbus, or an
itinerant band of Shriners), broke up with the young man who had, before
biology might have turned his gesture of love to one of mere honor and decency,
asked you to be his wife. So you’d already set the date, making the matter of
your pregnancy nobody’s business but your own, which phrase most people
would understand to mean the two of you, not you and your father. Not
surprisingly, you make no mention how the baby’s father felt about his child
being put up for adoption. The two of you still keep in touch do you?) And so,
because you decided life would be better if you broke your vow to a man who
loved you and gave up to the kindness of strangers the child that your love had
produced, you donned your maternal widow weeds and, Uncle Mike is willing
to bet, have been bludgeoning the innocent with the near Biblical purity of your
grief ever since.
In a kinder, gentler universe, you’d have something better to do with your
time than track down a twenty-one year old guilt trip. Say this to yourself until
you believe it: everyone involved did the best they could at the time. It’s a real
pity you don’t have other children. But wait! You do! Slowly stop mentioning
this other person to them. Too bad about the no father unit. Men: you just can’t
count on them. You might stop mentioning that to your children too.
RESTAPKAXT
Located in the
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Open Thanksgiving dr Christmas
Dear Uncle Mike,
My five year old son Kevin is just at that age where everything interests
him. His latest interest is pop-tab soft drink openers. I know what you’re
thinking. No, he doesn’t run around the super market popping tabs on cans of
soda I then have to buy. A lady in my mother’s group told me that even the new
tabs that stay connected to the can can be dangerous, that it’s still possible for a
child to cut or badly pinch their fingers. She hasn’t been able to find the article
she read but I was wondering if you might know something about this? I really
get a kick out of your column. You sure aren’t Ann Landers!
Just a Mommy
Dear Just,
No, Uncle Mike sure isn’t. She’s the lady who would have read the
article the other lady is rummaging through her file cabinet for. Uncle Mike
predicts it appeared in Readers Digest. For a moment there, he was tempted to
call someone in authority somewhere, kick buttocks, take names and get at the
truth. Suddenly, he felt very tired and just lit a cigarette instead. In the first
place, madam, if young Kevin is, at five, just now reaching that age where
everything interests him, he could have serious disinterest problems.
Chimpanzees half Kevin’s age are able to wait tables without cutting their little
fingers on the soup spoons. Unless, of course, someone is still cutting their
soup for them. In the hands of those being stupid, many objects are dangerous:
marbles and golf balls placed too far into the improper body orifice, pillows duct
taped too tightly over little brother’s breathing holes, bath water any deeper than
four inches, television sets with the switch turned on, kitties not wearing
muzzles and small boxing gloves. Because of your question, Uncle Mike
opened a soft drink, poured the contents down the drain (with training, any child
can learn to do this), and spent perhaps a minute of concentrated effort trying to
hurt himself. He found that if he left the little tab standing straight up arid
jammed the can ferociously into his eye, or worked the tab slowly loose and
swallowed it, or ran his little finger around inside the hole really, really fast, he
could in fact inflict some damage. No chimpanzee has ever been observed doing
any of these things more than once. They can, however, be taught to watch
morning cartoons and drink chemically laced sugar water until they lose interest
in most everything else.
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