Life Story

Dear Friend,

This is a short version of my life story, very similar to how I told it to the group. This is just in case you don’t know it or can’t remember it. Most of what I’ve written are main events in my life. When we told our life stories to the group we only had twenty minutes to a half hour. Daniel still wanted there to be time for questions.

On August 7, 1985, after thirty-six hours of labor (she reminds me of this often) I was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Kristine and Stephen Fleck. Two years after that, my brother Gerrit was born. A couple years after that, my sister Jaiman was born.

Gerrit and I were best friends growing up. He and I did everything together. We played in our backyard, collected Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures together, and reenacted our favorite scenes from our favorite Disney movies. Peter Pan is one I remember us reenacting a lot.

A little over three years after his birth, Gerrit died in a playground accident that I witnessed. It happened right in our backyard. I still remember everything. Mom was the only one home, taking care of Jaiman, as she had just been born that past November. It was the first time in my life that I got angry with God. While Mom tried to revive Gerrit, I ran outside to the backyard and screamed up at God, asking why he had taken my little brother away from me.

So it was just Jaiman and me for awhile. When I was nine, though, we adopted two kids from Bulgaria, Giorgi and Petya. They were both seven when we adopted them. Mom and Dad were only going to do one at a time, but those plans changed a little when they visited the orphanage in Sofia. At the orphanage, Giorgi and Petya were brought out to meet their parents. Petya ran up to my mom and jumped into her lap, but she was taken away by the supervisor of the orphanage. Apparently there was supposed to be another set of parents coming to the orphanage, the set coming to see Petya, but they hadn’t shown up. Mom was so traumatized, as was Petya, by the whole ordeal she decided to adopt both her and Giorgi.

This, however, is not the end of the additions to my family. I can still remember the conversation we had during supper one day in January. Mom leaned forward and told us she had an announcement. She was pregnant with my sister Talya. I was ten when she told me this, because this was before we moved to Wisconsin.

Both of my parents are from Wisconsin. The only reason we were in Detroit was so Dad could go to grad school. Right after I turned eleven, though, we moved to Friesland, Wisconsin, which is very different compared to Detroit, Michigan. We moved to the family farm, of which my siblings and I are the fifth generation. Very different from Detroit, but I didn’t mind. I liked the country far more than the city.

On August 27, 1999 (I can still remember the day), it was the second day of eighth grade. I had just turned fourteen a couple weeks before. Dad woke me up early and told me he was leaving for a weekend conference. This all made sense. He was a PhD psychologist and had been to conferences before. He had been to one in Pittsburg when the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, I remember this. He woke me up to get my siblings ready to get on the bus and go to school. Mom was working midnights in the ER at that time and wouldn’t be home in time to take us to school herself.

So I woke up and started getting everyone else up. When I went downstairs I found two folded pieces of paper on the table. One of them said “To Kristine.” The other said “To Kailen, Giorgi, Petya, Jaiman, Talya.” They were from Dad. I picked up the one that was to me. In it was a detailed description of why he felt the family wasn’t working, why he was leaving, and why he was going to divorce Mom. This was the first time in my life where I thought I was yet still awake. I locked myself in the bathroom and broke down, telling myself this couldn’t be happening.

After I composed myself, I planned to get everyone on the bus and go to school. I would be the only person who knew about the whole thing. The foil of this plan was when I called Mom at work and told her to come home. We ended up staying home from school that day.

Mom tried to make the marriage work. Even after we found out Dad had been having an affair she tried to make it work. Eventually, though, it was all over. We began finding out all sorts of things from his family we had not known before, primarily about his history with anger management problems. Throughout my childhood he had been very physically, verbally, and psychologically abusive to all of us. Being around him was sometimes like walking on eggshells, because he would at any moment snap, and then something would get broken and someone would get hurt.

High school was not a great time in my life, especially with my parents’ divorce. I was already a rather weird kid, but I began acting out a lot at school. I was so angry and I wanted people to know I was angry. Therefore, I got teased and bullied a lot. I don’t have many fond memories of high school.

My freshman year of college, a lot of things began happening with Dad. He had been in and out of six different mental institutions, kicked out of two of them for reckless behavior, went through shock therapy and all that because he was finally diagnosed with bipolar manic depression. The last time I saw him was August 1 during the summer of my freshman year of college. It was one of the scariest things I’ve seen. He was very, very skinny and not at all responsive. He and Mom didn’t even look like people who had once been married.

The whole plan was that Mom would work while Dad went to grad school. After Dad got his PhD, he would work and Mom would go to grad school. Mom paid for all fifteen years of his schooling at Wayne State University, and it was after they were completely debt free that Dad up, left, and had the affair and then the divorce. Now he was getting his license to practice psychology taken away because of his recent behavior. He was also in and out of jail a couple times during all of this.

I stayed in correspondence with Dad for awhile after returning to school. I thought I would be the only Christian influence in his life. Here’s where his manipulation came in. I thought he was getting better, making progress in some kind of rehabilitation. I’d read this in a letter I just got from him, but then find out from Mom on the phone that she was going to court and seeing someone completely different. He would be rude and obnoxious in court, yet when he wrote to me he’d be someone else. I eventually wrote him a letter telling him I could no longer be in contact with him. I was not willing to remain in contact with someone who was going to lie to me.

It was in large part because of these things why I was such an angry person when I started college at Northwester. Why Northwestern? I had been doing theatre since I was in sixth grade. My youth pastor and his wife are alums of Northwestern and they wanted me to check out the theatre program there. I fell in love with the campus before I even got out of the van, and this was in January. When I started school that next fall, I was very angry and confused because of all that had happened and was still happening in my life. I became very reclusive.

My advisor, Jeff Taylor, noticed this about me. I owe much of who I am today to Jeff’s willingness to take me under his wing and mentor me through a lot my pain. Jeff’s example spurred something inside of me that didn’t want to live with this pain, but instead take action towards healing. Theatre became not only a safe place for me to ask questions, make mistakes, and learn, but also a place where I could find people who were either going through similar pain or people who were willing to help me through my pain.

It hasn’t been easy, and it’s certainly not over. Recently, Dad has come back into the picture. He had remarried a couple years ago, but his wife died recently of a heart attack. When Mom’s brother (who has never gotten along with Mom) found out about this, he cancelled all his plans for the day, called Dad and scheduled lunch with him, then plotted with Dad things they could do to get back at her. My uncle then brought Dad back to Friesland for a visit, which inevitably brought Dad back into our lives despite our requests for him to stay out. This happened recently, and is still going one. Mom now has to go to court again for a bunch of things, and my uncle shows up in court standing next to Dad.

As a way to help keep this story from being grim, I want to let you know that I and my family are actually doing quite well. Mom is dating a really, really great guy named Rick. She started dating him when I was a sophomore in college and we love him to death. He’s a really great guy. Giorgi and Petya graduated from high school this past year, and Jaiman graduated early. Giorgi is going to tech school for automotive maintenance, which I know he’s going to eat up like it’s dessert. Petya is a CNA (certified nursing assistant) and is trying to get a job right now. Jaiman is going to University of Wisconsin-River Falls for something in agriculture, I can’t remember. She wanted to go for psychology and law, but we’ve recently discovered that she’s most in her element when she’s milking cows. She loves it. Talya is in seventh grade and is as sharp as a whip.

We’re a very oddball family. No one really understands how we’re able to live our lives the way we do. We’ve tried living the way other people live, you know “normal,” but it just doesn’t work. We love and support each other, and whether we were truly there for each other during the divorce or not (I sometimes think each of us were so shocked, we dealt with it in our own separate ways) we’re there for each other now. We’re so much better off now, and we continue to try and live our lives keeping that in mind.

Blessings.
Kailen