Recipes for Living Randy and Ronda Wishon

By Ronda: I have a free day! I am through teaching for this school year, I have a sitter for Drew and Grant, and I am ready to tell my story! A snapshot of our family at this time is Drew (5 1/2), Grant (3), Randy and me. Randy is in Vatterott College four days a week, and will graduate with an associate's degree in computer technology in July 2001. Additionally he mows lawns and shovels snow.

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, which was the nearest hospital to Liberty, where my parents, Emil and Rilma Muller, were living. My dad was a salesman and my mom was a stayat-home mom. I have an older sister, Roberta (Bert), who was born in December 1963. I was born in August 1966, and my brother Eric in October 1968. We had another family member, my half-brother Ed, who came to live with us when I was seven and he was 14. He had been raised by his maternal grandparents and had no discipline. It must have been a shock to suddenly be subjected to our German dad's strict discipline. I don't know if it is the nature of the middle child to be a "fixer" but I seem always to have been trying to fix situations or people, and I remember trying to be a peacemaker between Ed and Dad and the rest of family.

No one could ask for better parents than I had. They have always been and are loving and supportive, providing us a fun atmosphere. Mom's cancer and Dad's recent heart surgery have made me realize how lucky I am. I get my faith from them. When my dad prayed with us before his surgery, it was a testimony. He was lying in his bed, and we were all holding hands. He didn't ask to live, but he asked for strength for all of us. That made it easier to deal with the fact that we might not have him anymore. He knew that if he didn't make it, he would be better off than we were. That made it clear that a relationship with God isn't based on which church you go to or what building you worship in, but it is between you and God.

I also had the advantage of knowing my Grandma Jamison, who was my role model. She was so good, and her faith was so strong! She was probably the most Christ-like woman I have ever known. Neither she nor my parents deserved to have one like me to deal with. To say the least I was a difficult child-so ornery. I wasn't bad. I didn't do drugs or drive drunk or any of that kind of stuff I was just mouthy and obstinate, determined to do my own thing. When Mom sees me trying to deal with Drew, who always does the opposite of what we tell him, she laughs and says that was just the way I was, and I am getting what I deserve.

We moved back to Osceola when I was about 18 months old. Those who have read Mom's story in the 1998 Recipes for Living book know that her roots go very deep in Clarke County. I started school in Osceola and was half-way through second grade when Dad's work moved us to Marshalltown. We were there for the second half of my second grade and all of third, then we moved back to Osceola, and I graduated from Clarke Community School in 1984.

My peacemaking nature, always trying to fix things and make sure nobody's feelings got hurt, influenced my choice of mate. I met my first husband when I was working at Gus and Tom's, which was the forerunner to Redman's Cafe. He seemed like a loner, and I wanted to turn him into a person more outgoing and friendly.

Rod had been raised a lot differently than I was. My dad was always very respectful of my mother and did not allow any disrespect of her by anyone. I learned that the hard way one day when I was 16. I didn't know that anyone would hear what I called her under my breath, but he did. He lifted me by the back of my neck and, with my feet several inches off the floor, took me to my bedroom and said, "Don't ever say anything like that about your mother again!" That was not the tone of the home in which Rod was raised, which set the mold for who he became.

Rod and I were married on a Saturday and spent Sunday at World's of Fun. On Monday I said, "I’m tired. Let's go out to eat." Rod's response was, "We're married now and we don't have to do that anymore." Right then I began to realize how differently we perceived life. We stayed together for 2 ½ years, and during that time the emotional, mental, and verbal abuse was devastating to my self-esteem. He was so jealous that I couldn't ride to church with my friend Annette and her family because her husband was in the car. I couldn't wear shorts to mow the lawn because somebody might look at me. There came a day when my car was broken down and my boss, Mel Miller, gave me a ride home from work. Rod came out of the garage with a gun and said, "If I ever again see you in a car with another man, I'll kill both of you."

At that point I decided to leave. There had been many times when I had wanted to leave, but one reason I stayed was that I didn't want my grandmother to be disappointed in me. The above incident happened in October of 1987, after Grandma had died in September. So on the night of this threat, when Rod left to go to a meeting, I took a few clothes and left. I wanted to be out of there before he came back, because he had warned me that if I ever left he would kill me. By then I had decided I was better off dead than to go on with the life I was leading. I moved back home with my parents.

By that time I thought I was the ugliest, stupidest, most worthless piece of flesh on Earth because that is what Rod told me; and I had to discover for myself that wasn't true before I could move on. Slowly I managed to rebuild my life and now, all these years later, I don't look back on that marriage with regret. The lessons I learned will be with me for the rest of my life. Randy also had a failed first marriage and our similar experiences have made our marriage stronger. We have learned what not to do in order to have it work.

Another advantage of my ill-treatment is that I can tell the students I teach in middle school that they deserve to be treated well. I see a lot of former students allowing themselves to be dealt with disrespectfully by their boy-or girl-friends. I have learned the painful way that you can't love someone else until you truly love yourself. You have to find happiness in yourself before you can find it with someone else. So many young people today seem to lack respect for themselves, and that is why they allow other people to treat them badly. I know. I've been there.

I was working at Bethphage Workshop when I left Rod, and decided then that I wanted to get a college education. For the first year, I attended SWCC (Southwestern Community College) by taking night classes and working at Bethphage during the day. Probably one of my primary motivations for taking that job was that it gave me another opportunity to take care of people. I thought I could help them. It is a sheltered workshop, which provides a place to teach work skills to mentally challenged adults. There is also a group home where they are assisted in independent living. At that time about 16 of the workers came from the group home, but some lived with their families throughout the area. There was probably 20 employees altogether. They made crafts to be sold, and contracted with some of the local factories. Examples of their work were doing lynch pins for Miller Products and wiring harnesses for Dekko.

It so happened that Randy Wishon was the person who delivered the parts from Dekko, and we met because I was the one who received them.

At this point, Randy picks up his story: My parents are Larry and Glenda Wishon. I have one sister, Joni, who is two years younger than me. I was born in 1961, she in 1963. She now lives in Long Beach, California. Our family lived in Cainsville, Missouri, and Dad drove a truck for a concrete company in Bethany. They asked if he wanted to run the plant in Osceola so he came here and worked for about a year before the family came.

Mom worked in restaurants in Cainsville and in Eagleville for awhile. She had dropped out of school to get married when she was 16; and then, when I was in eighth grade, Mom went back to school to get her diploma. That was no fun! I couldn't get away with anything!

My grandfather was a pastor in the Cainsville Christian Church; I was nine years old when he died, but one of the preachers who followed him had a son: who was 16 and we got to be best friends. I picked up some of my bad habits from him, but I grew up in the Christian Church.

Cainsville was a little tiny town of about 400 people and one of my best memories of living there was that our home was at the bottom of a high hill. In the winter the firemen brought their truck and sprayed the hill to make it really icy. After we kids had slid down that hill about four times and drug our sleds to the top again, we were worn out and would have to go inside to have hot chocolate. A couple of cups of that and we were back out sliding.

I was 14 and in the tenth grade when we moved to Osceola in 1976. My favorite subjects were math and science, but I loved to read. I read anything I could get my hands on westerns, fiction, non-.fiction, science fiction, anything at all. I graduated from high school in 1979.

Until I was about 17, I was just a mouthy kid. My dad and I had a few altercations about that before I enlisted in the Marine Corps. I was in the artillery division and received my basic training in San Diego, after which I spent a year in 29 Palms, California, in the Mojave desert. I loved the desert and lived in Arizona for about three years after I left the service. I am kind of a private person, and in that area could take off and be by myself.

I was in the corps six years altogether. One year I spent in Okinawa, then after I was trained in the Marine security Guard school in Quantico, Virginia, I was stationed for the year of 1981 in Jiddea, Saudi Arabia-another hot, dry desert. Six of us were assigned to guard the embassy where-the ambassador lived. It was on a compound of about 70 acres, with tennis courts and a swimming pool. We guards had our own house and even though we were not allowed to drive, we had drivers who would take us anywhere we wanted to go.

Jiddea was two or three times the size of Des Moines, with maybe a million people. Lives for females were very restricted but circumstances for me were great. We could go anywhere we wanted to go or do anything we, wanted to do. I ran about ten miles a day. The "business district" was interesting. It was like a giant, open-air strip mall and people would set stuff in the streets. You could buy anything-gold, carpets-anything you wanted, really cheap. Cassettes were about $1 each. I must have had about 400 of those. ·

Being in a Muslim country, we had to get accustomed to everybody taking six times a day for prayer. However, Sunday was a normal work day. Wednesdays and Thursdays were their weekends. Every Thursday afternoon there was a public display of criminals receiving their punishment. We watched hands being cut off for stealing. There would be whippings for suspicion of drinking because alcohol was absolutely forbidden. People were beheaded for killing someone.

There was nothing humane about the prison system in Saudi Arabia. A prisoner with no friends or family probably wouldn't live long. We used to have food drives to take things to Americans so they could survive. The same situation was true in Japan. I actually side with them to a degree. I don’t favor reduced penalties because drugs or alcohol are involved. 'These people knew what they were doing when the took them. I also favor the death penalty – I’d put it on pay-per-view TV.

While we were in the area, we went fishing and scuba diving in the Red Sea; we took off and visited Cairo, Egypt, and another three days we went up to Cyprus for scuba diving.

Basically, I was all over the world during that time. My parents' phone bills during those years were pretty astronomical. We were in the Philippines and Japan. I loved the laid-back lifestyle of the Orient. We were on the island of Okinawa in 1980 during the Carter administration when the Iranians took over the embassy and held hostages for over a year. Our ships were sitting off shore waiting to go in when Reagan was elected. He had announced that if he became president, that was not going to continue and the hostages were released then.

After we finished in Saudi Arabia, I went to Vienna, Austria, for 1 year. I had mixed feelings about Vienna. It was a lot bigger embassy. Where we had only six Marines guarding the embassy in Saudi Arabia, in Vienna we had 22 or 23. I prefer the more solitary situation. I don’t like crowds. At the same time, I appreciated the history of it-the Schonbrunn palace, the Spanish riding horses, and Salisbury, where "Sound of Music" was made. Three or four of us Marines played on a rugby team and competed in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. This gave us a chance to see the concentration camps and other parts of those countries.

It was in Vienna that I met Paula, who was a nanny for a countess. She came to some of the parties at our house; we began dating and were married. My six years of enlistment was finished at that time and I left the service. Paula and I lived in Wales, her home country, for about six months. There is an impression of everything being primitive and green in Wales. The country roads, such as the one Paula’s parents lived on, were just wide enough for one car. If one car met another there was no option but for one of the drivers to back up. And the language was something else! Unless you were born into it, you can't begin to understand. I couldn't even pronounce the names of the towns.

We spent a lot of time sight-seeing, as had been my nature everywhere I had lived. I saw the "White Cliffs of Dover" stone formation at the end of the island. We saw Stonehenge, about which there are many theories-possibly used to forecast seasons, possibly to trace the phases of the moon and stars. It is obvious that whoever designed it knew what they were doing, and, in fact, knew more than we do in order to put up such a permanent structure. It is like the pyramids in Egypt. Even if we knew why they were built, we can't figure out how. Without our modern cranes or other technology, what was involved in moving the stones?

We were in Scotland. We visited pubs a lot. They are like nothing we have in this country. They are places where they serve excellent food, and people gather to talk at least as much as to drink.

I am extremely grateful for those years in the service. I feel they made me what I am. For an 18-year old kid, it was fun, but looking back on them I can see that the experience gave me my principles. 'The Marine Corps instills a sense of pride for what you do.

There came a time when I wanted to come home, and Paula was perfectly willing to come. We moved back to Osceola and I worked at the Jimmy Dean plant for about seven months. At that time one of Paula's good friends, who had married one of my friends, wanted us to move to Phoenix. Their family ran a solar company there, and they offered me a job. That entailed my being gone seven to ten days at a time and being home perhaps three or four days. It didn’t work. We had never been totally compatible. We had always fought, but that made it worse. Paula was very young and missed her family a lot. Also, she was a "screamer." She responded to any incident that displeased her by screaming at me, and I neither knew nor really cared to figure out how to respond to that. Paula left to go home for a three-week vacation in 1986 or 1987 and never came back.

Ronda picks up the story telling that she and Randy got to know one another rather well as he delivered and she received work from Dekko at Bethphage:

But there was an important detail I didn't know. I knew about Paula and that she was not living here. I assumed they were divorced. I was the one who made the first move. Randy was too shy to ask me out. We went to supper at a restaurant that was located where Solutions is now, then to Alley Pub for a drink. We continued dating for probably six weeks before his mother told a friend of mine that she disapproved of my dating a married man. I didn't know he was! Randy, being a procrastinator, had never filed for divorce. They were just separated. He neglected to tell me that little detail when we started dating. That precipitated a frank discussion about honesty in our relationship.

Randy's wife had been gone for three years, and as soon as she found out he was dating, it took her less than 72 hours to get here. She stayed with Randy's parents for about a month, trying to break us up. He finally convinced her that he didn't want to be with her any longer and she left, at which time he finally got around to filing for divorce. We knew by then that we wanted to be married, but we had to wait until the divorce was final. We were married March 9, 1990.

In spite of our rocky beginning, once my in-laws, Larry and Glenda Wishon, and I got to know each other, we became good friends. In fact, I don't think of them as in-laws but as another set of parents that I love very much, and they love me. We are very close. I think of them as workaholics, like Randy. Glenda is the opposite of me when it comes to housekeeping. She vacuums and dusts every morning before she goes to work. Her lawn must be mowed twice a week in case a blade of grass might be sticking up! If I have a choice between vacuuming and reading a book, for me that is no choice. In self-defense, I want to say that my house isn't dirty. I call it "lived in."

I was still going to school at SWCC and working as part-time bookkeeper at Phillip's 66. I also worked at Hy-Vee. After I earned my associate's degree in elementary education at SWCC, I started at Simpson to get my four-year degree. I commuted, worked at Hy-Vee about 30 hours a week, and went to school full time. I graduated summa cum laude with a 3.95 grade point. I had one A- in my four years that kept me from the four-point.

I didn't get a job that fall, so I started substituting. Then in October of 1992, I got a call from a lady I had met once while subbing. She worked part time for the Science Center of Iowa and wanted to know if I was interested in a full-time teaching job. I jumped at the chance. I traveled about 1200 miles a week, driving all over the state, teaching science to pre-schoolers through seniors. I loved the job but hated the driving and being away from Randy all week.

The next fall (August '93) I got a job at Interstate 35 teaching fourth grade. I did that for four years before the district reorganized and put all the middle school students in New Virginia and the elementary students in St. Charles. At that point I became a middle school teacher for a sixth grade home room. When I was with fourth grade, I taught everything, then for a couple of years I taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade science and math. In middle school I taught science and math. The last three years I've taught all fifth and sixth grade science.

I decided I didn't know enough about middle school students so I went back to school at Viterbo, West Des Moines campus, and got my middle school endorsement. I learned about the pre-adolescent brain and why the youngsters behave as they do. You either love middle school kids or you hate them, because at that age they are walking-talking hormone machines. Girls cry, boys hit, moods swing. One minute they are best friends, the next they hate each other. Their brains are growing faster than any other time in their lives except in infancy. Their bodies are going through changes that confuse them. I’m one who loves them, but it helped to have these classes in order to better understand. I took night and summer classes, a class here, a class there.

When we decided we were ready for a baby, I got pregnant and we told everybody! On Thanksgiving day, 1994, when I was eight or nine weeks along, I had a miscarriage. I was absolutely devastated! I cried and cried and cried. I remember like it was yesterday. I had so many good friends who helped. Neville Clayton was our minister, and he and Marlene had lost an infant baby. He was a God-send to me. I learned through that experience not to say to people, "I know what you are going through unless you really do know what they are going through.

Six weeks later I was pregnant again and we had Drew. We can’t presume to know why things happen, but if I hadn't lost that baby I wouldn't have had Drew because I couldn't have had both. He was born October 3, 1995 - a huge baby - nine pounds, 4 ½ ounces! And he was difficult! He cried and cried and cried. The doctors couldn't figure out why. Nobody could figure out why. Eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I went back to work after five weeks so for several months I was teaching through the day and sleeping only one or two hours a night. I was nursing him and he ate every two hours or more often.

When Drew was four months old, I took him to a pediatrician in Des Moines who checked him over and pronounced, like all the others before him, that there was nothing wrong physically. However, he played with him awhile and announced that he'd found the answer. When he said, "He's bored" I thought I’d found the biggest quack alive. We had been trying constantly to interest him in rattles or something, but the doctor went on to say that his brain had developed ahead of his coordination and sure enough, the day came when he discovered he could pick up a rattle. He put it in his mouth and his screaming days were over.

Then there is Grant, born July 7, 1998. The whole time I was pregnant the doctors kept telling me that this one is smaller than Drew and I kept telling them they were wrong. When he was born he was nine pounds, 4 ¼ ounces. The doctors were right; he was smaller but only by ¼ ounce. The doctors were amazed at how big he was compared to how big they thought he was going to be. The first thing Dr. Hoegh said was, "I was wrong. He is as big as his brother." But that is where the similarities between the two boys end. Grant was a laid-back baby, who didn't get in a hurry to do much of anything. He finally decided to start walking at 14 months. Where Drew is very logical, Grant is more inclined to go with his feelings. Grant is like his Dad, Drew like his mother. Randy confirms that Grant is like him, which he describes as hard-headed, stubborn, and opinionated. That creates some interesting tensions in the house. However, it isn't the differences that create the tensions but the likenesses. Randy and I do tag-team parenting. When one has had all they can take, the other steps in.

When Grant was several months old, I went to the doctor because I was so tired I didn't think I could go on. He first attributed it to my having a three-year-old and a new baby but I explained that I'd been tired for 10 years and was tired of being tired. The doctor ran all kinds of tests, couldn't find a reason, and sent me to an internist who also was unable to find anything physically wrong. They came to the conclusion that I have chemical depression. This doesn't mean that you have anything in your life that is causing depression, and I didn't feel depressed in the way people think of depression, which is being "down in the dumps." I was just tired.

Chemical depression means that there is a chemical imbalance in the brain, and after they put me on anti-depressant medication, my life is much better! They finally described what I have as chronic fatigue and I still have it but not as bad as before I took the medication. People are surprised when they hear me say I have that problem because I try to hide it. I am always busy, always on the go. My stubborn temperament is a plus, because I am so stubborn that I won't let it win.

But right now, regardless of what Drew says, I am on summer vacation and will be going back to teach fifth and sixth grade science in New Virginia one more year while they are constructing a new building in Truro. I have my priorities in order: First and foremost I am a mom and wife, and I also teach. In that regard I don't feel that I have a job, I have a career. I don't do it for the money or the summer vacation; I do it because I love it. And I hope that I am making a difference in the lives of the kids that I teach. When people ask me what I teach, I don't say I teach science. I say, "I teach children." I am a strict teacher and I have high expectations of the students. I feel that if you ask them for half of what you expect, you will get a quarter, and they almost always rise to whatever expectations you set for them.

This summer Randy will be finishing his degree and our family will be swimming, walking, reading. Drew has his own library card and we do lots of reading. I saw a pillow one time with the words, "A home without books is like a house without windows." I thought that was so cool. You can live without books, but where is the adventure without them? I love books! I read everything and can't stand when I come upon typos that have not been caught and corrected. I am a perfectionist except in my housework. I liked a sign I saw one time, "I cleaned my house yesterday. I'm sorry you missed it." That applies to me.