Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
“So, Robert, explain this to me like I'm five – like I'm Lil' Robert – did I just hear you scare Tristan Green straight?”
“Like our neighbor Lil' Velma says: basically!”
Capt. and Mrs. Ludlow were talking over the conversation the captain had with three of the Ludlow grandchildren's other grandfather, Mr. Tristan Green, who had just checked in with Mrs. Isabelle Green to New Beginnings Resort to begin treatment for their decades-long alcohol addiction. That made two sets of grandparents to the Ludlow grandchildren getting the help they needed.
“Now, the Lord just has to lead me to know what to say to the Carters, so that Andrew, George, Amanda, and Grayson can actually reconnect with their full set of grandparents like the door will now be open for Eleanor, Edwina, and Lil' Robert.”
Capt. Ludlow was in intensive mental health treatment himself at the Veteran's Lodge, in an inpatient setting because military veterans, surfacing memories of unresolved trauma and then having major episodes around that trauma, could be dangerous to their wives and little ones. Yet already, just past his third week in what presumably was going to be eight, he was able to apply things that he learned to help his fellow grandparents … of course through his own healing but still somewhat rough personality.
Yet there was no roughness in him when he called his oldest granddaughter Eleanor and told her the good news, and heard her relieved crying – she was just 11, and the loss of her parents and the practical loss of her mother's parents had devastated her. But to know her Ludlow grandfather loved and cared enough to reach out to the Green grandparents – that he was repeating the process of bringing the grandchildren together by bringing all of the surviving family together around them – that had tapped into a deep part of her that could now start to heal.
Capt. Ludlow had heard her sobbing from joy, and knew instantly that the healing had been transferred – and that he had already passed the milestone he had gone into intensive therapy to get.
“I know now that my love for the Lord and my grandchildren, and my ability to think and operate in a manner that is in line with both, is now deep enough to provide the margin of safety I need as they begin to go into their adolescent years,” he said to his therapist, Major K.D. Mueller. “I now know I have the healing and capacity so that a repeat of the horrible violence I have experienced and even done as a soldier – that will never happen in my home, now. If I did not curse out Tristan Green, and if I cut that deposit check for him and Isabelle to start to heal without even worrying about it, then there is nothing else than any of my grandchildren ever will do or say that can now get me provoked enough to flip out deadly.”
“Let me tell you a big secret, Capt. Ludlow. I knew from the time you arrived that you never would – the fact that you made the choice you did to be here meant you were already deep enough. What we are doing here is getting you centered in your healing for yourself – for you, Captain.”
Back on the cul-de-sac, Mr. Thomas Stepforth's eyes were somewhat teary as he watched his little grandchildren celebrating with Eleanor and the other Ludlow grandchildren, dancing and singing on the big front yard the rest of the cul-de-sac had turned into.
“I feel like I've actually just met Capt. Robert Edward Ludlow Sr.,” he said to Mrs. Velma Stepforth in the hearing of his older grandchildren Tom Jr. (16), Vanna (18-less-five-days), and Melvin (21),” and he is indeed someone I want to work with. The way he was raised, leaving people who displease you to die if they are no use is what you do. His uncles are literal murderers. He is past that, because New Beginnings is expensive, and I know that he doesn't have it like that. It was not easy for him to pay the deposit over there for two other people.
“But he did that for the same reason I would, if the situation was reversed. Those kids' other grandparents are not worth the dregs of the bottles they have been drinking out of – except for their sheer human value, with eternal souls, and with people who love them. R.E. Ludlow sees all that now – I can tell because of what is happening in front of us.”
“Pop-Pop is healing too,” Melvin said to Vanna and Tom later, “because you know Pop-Pop and white men used to not mix, at all – he used to laugh about knowing what one of them might need and withholding it because of what was going on when he was the little ones' age and no white person would help his dad.”
“But see when you really start learning about the love of God, all this foolishness goes away,” Vanna said. “Life is already hard enough without taking the bad stuff down generations – we gotta start fresh somewhere.”
“Well, we are fresh,” Tom said. “It's good to see the grandparents getting it together, too.”
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