The Tree of My Son's Discontent

By Yvonne Rose

In 1983, a husband and wife were in an accident on the beltway. The man subsequentially died. Eight months later, a biracial child was born to a white mother in a redneck valley that was not prepared to deal with him. Children can be cruel, and growing up was a struggle. Music became his voice to the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669822646

Yvonne Rose

Mrs. Yvonne Rose originally came from Jamaica, West Indies, where she attended Shortwood Teachers College and worked in the school system there before migrating to the USA. She is retired from government service where she worked for the past twenty-two and a half years. She attends the Calvary Cathedral of Praise Church in Brooklyn and takes an active part as an Altar Worker and a teacher in the Children’s Church. She is married to Glenford Rose since 1976. She attended the Community Bible Institute and obtained several degrees in Biblical Studies. She is also an evangelist.

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PROLOGUE

They say that hindsight is 20/20. Never has that been truer than in this current situation with my son. We have barely been civil to each other for more than eleven years, and for the last three years, we have not spoken at all. Since high school, and now I understand since long before that, my relationship with my son has been fraught with challenge, resentment, and anger.

Interestingly enough, it was not until I converted to Islam in my fifties that I gained empathy and understanding for my son. For reasons of my own, in those early years after my conversion, I wore a scarf. Not a hijab, just a loosely draped scarf. I wore it for five years.

Suddenly, I was different. I was treated differently at the MVA, where I would have to often go for business purposes. I was stared at boldly whenever I visited a convenience store and even had some rude comments directed at me. In the bank and at the grocery store, I was noticed for being different. It was not a good feeling. For the first time in life, I experienced prejudice personally. It was a profound awakening for me.

I have long since stopped wearing the scarf, but the lessons I learned during those years taught me to better understand my son. I have tried to look back and experience those moments of being different from the perspective of my son. I now see and feel his pain because he has been different all his life. Unfortunately, he blames me for that.

Some years after his birth, my mother told me what happened in the delivery room when my son was born. Delivery was by emergency C-section. I was totally asleep. When the baby was born, there was an audible moment of silence. The child was obviously black. The doctor looked at my mother, and she said, Yes doctor. I am aware that I have a black grandson.

Nowadays, interracial relationships are very common, and the biracial children that result from those unions are not so unusual. However, in 1984, that was not the case. Thus, my son was different from birth, and that was something he had to live with all his life.

I tried to go back and look at all those early moments when I experienced prejudice on his behalf. In the beginning, the prejudice was directed more at me than him, but as he got older, he alone carried the burden of being different.

CHAPTER ONE

The first time I experienced prejudice on my son’s behalf was at a family reunion in upstate Vermont. One of my cousins referred to my son as the chocolate drop baby. My uncle thought it was funny and started calling him chocolate drop. Soon, everyone, including all the kids, were calling him chocolate drop. They knew this upset and offended me, but they did it anyways. My son was six months old at the time. Needless to say, I never exposed him to that branch of the family again.

There were many smaller occasions when the oddity of a white mother with an obviously black child came to the forefront, but I was able to ignore the looks, the finger pointing, and sometimes even the outright rudeness.

When my son was fourteen months old, a good friend came to visit me from D.C. He was a dear friend of ours. My son’s father, he, and I had passed many an evening together cooking steaks and veggie burgers (even then our friend was a vegetarian). The three of us spent many long hours together talking.

We covered many subjects during our evenings together. I had been reading Siddhartha and learning about the Suni. My husband was deep in the study of hypnosis and had figured out I was susceptible. Our friend was heavily into astrology and had done readings for both my husband and I. He told me I would come into money by inheritance. I laughed hilariously at that, and he had become very annoyed that I did not take his readings seriously. No three friends had ever been closer.

The three of us had met when we had all worked in Washington D.C. Our friend worked in the personnel office for the federal government, and I was the secretary in that same office. He was tasked to write a job description for my husband who worked in the motor pool for the military district of Washington.

One day, driving home on the beltway, we had been hit twice by a tractor trailer. First, the truck rolled up onto the trunk of our small sports car and popped us out like a tiddlywink, and then he broadsided us on the passenger side. Just before the truck impacted, I had eye contact with the truck driver. We both knew at that moment that impact was inevitable. The last thing my husband ever said to me was For God’s sake, put your head down!

I bent over, crossed my arms over my head, and felt the truck hit us. While the car was flying through the air, my husband put one hand on my bottom and another on my shoulder and pushed me out through the already-shattered windshield. I landed on the grassy strip between six lanes of the superhighway, and he was trapped in the car when it landed on its roof and slid down the highway.

My husband lived in a coma for twenty-eight days and then died without ever regaining consciousness. After four or five days of round-the-clock morphine, as well as multiple X-rays, they discovered I was pregnant. I never had a chance to tell my husband that we had finally conceived the baby we had hoped for so long.

After the accident that killed my husband and severely injured me, I moved back home to be with my family while figuring out my path forward.

Our friend had visited me many times over the term of my pregnancy and throughout the period of struggle over the death of my husband. When my son was about six months old, our friend came to visit me with a proposal of marriage. He wanted to take my son and I back to D.C., and we would be a family.

It was interesting to me that my black friend considered my son white. He would look at the child and say he did not understand why the people in this valley gave me such a hard time; the child looked white to him. I realize now, with clarity, that this black or white issue has haunted my son throughout his whole life.

I struggled with the decision about marrying our friend. I knew he was a good man, but the prospect of entering a culture I knew nothing about and at the same time raising a young child frightened me. I chose what was more comfortable for me—I chose to remain in the valley and raise my biracial son in a white, gun-toting, redneck, Republican valley.

I have made many poor decisions in my life, but that is the one I regret the most. I should have married our friend and gone back to the city, and my son would have been raised by a man who had known and loved his father and had respect and love for me as well.

When my son was two, he saw fiddlers on the Mr. Roger’s Show and immediately expressed a desire to do that. Over the next six to eight months, he was determined and persistent about Santa Claus bringing him a violin for Christmas. He received his violin for Christmas just two months before his third birthday. He was delighted.

Finding a teacher willing to take on a violin student so young was not an easy task. I did finally connect with a young man, a music major in college, who was willing to work with him.

That year, I bought a property of my own using insurance money. I purposely bought land up a mountain on a dirt road, thirty-five miles from my mother’s house, where I had been living since before my son was born. The plan was to get away from my mother.

However, my mother had a plan of her own. She wanted me, and thereby her only grandchild, to remain in the valley. She regularly frequented a local farmers’ market and made it a point to befriend a young man with a new meat stall. He was a butcher and came from good solid stock.

By then, my son was wishing every day for a daddy. It was a repetitive theme in our conversations. Why don’t I have a daddy? Why is my daddy in heaven?

The butcher came into our lives, and that was the second biggest mistake of my life. My mother had told him about the money that had come to me as a result of the car accident that killed my husband. He was an aspiring entrepreneur but had no money. He pursued me. He courted my son, even took him fishing. My son was in love with having a daddy at last.

Before my son began school, he came to me one day with a question. Why don’t I have the same last name as my dad? I explained that he had the name of his dead father. My son was upset about that and wanted the same last name as his daddy. We filed paperwork and had a meeting with a judge.

There had been an insurance settlement between myself and the trucking company responsible for the death of my husband. After his children by a previous marriage had gotten their share, and the lawyer had gotten his share, I received a little less than $250,000. I was told that I would be named as fiduciary, and I was supposed to take $75,000 of that money and invest it so that it would be $100,000 by the time my son turned eighteen.

After sending my son from the room, the judge lectured both my partner and I about using the boy’s money to open a business. He was not happy with us. He was also not thrilled with the idea of an adoption without a marriage taking place first. I explained that I was not willing to give up my income which would terminate once I remarried. The judge approved the adoption, but he also imposed the responsibility of fiduciary for my son’s money onto my partner.

At the end of that year, my son’s violin teacher graduated and moved away, and once again, I was looking for a teacher for my son. He was four. I had some names, and I called everyone on the list. No one was willing to take on a four-year-old violin student.

At the time, my son was about halfway through book 1 of the Suzuki method, learning everything by ear. I played the Suzuki tapes constantly. My son was delighted every time he could learn to play a new song from beginning to end. At four, the violin was his favorite toy, and he would carry it everywhere.

One day, we happened to be in a local laundromat, and while I was waiting for quilts to dry, my son was practicing the violin. A woman walking by heard the music and came in to see who was playing. She lived nearby and had just happened to walk by as my son was playing his newest song, a Mozart sonata. Coincidentally, she was a member of the nearby Capital Symphony, and she had been one of