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The Last Kraus: One family, 10 HHS grads over 22 years

Meredith Kraus, right, shown at sister Judith's wedding, graduates from Hendersonville High School on June 9.

By Bill Moss, Published: June 9, 2017

Part 7 An end … and new beginnings

If you ask the Kraus children to name their mom’s favorite and their dad’s favorite you would get a surprising level of agreement.
“We mainly say it in jest that they had favorites but I think all of us together would say that word on the street is that Mom favors Justin and Meredith and Dad favors me,” Ellen said. “Which, I’m like, OK, Dad was the hardest on me, so I don’t understand why I would be his favorite. But they all say it. They’re like, ‘He totally favors you. He likes your kids better than everybody else’s kids.’ Well, first of all, my kids are like super-duper loving and outgoing. They just gravitate towards him. It’s not that he loves them more, it’s they love him more. And the other kids are a lot more shy.”
Among Ellen’s siblings, Samuel got a lot of votes. Samuel said that’s because he and Ken both play trombone.
“Even to this day I’m so thankful for that because I got to spend quality time with my dad that no one else got to spend,” he said. “My family used to call me the Ken whisperer. We would do gigs together. We would chat while we did gigs. We both love trombone stuff.”

The “favorite” debate is a family parlor game but a lot of it is based on the randomness of birth order.

“Now some of them may get the impression that Meredith is my favorite,” Kathleen said. “That is not true. It’s a matter of where we are right now. Meredith is living with me. She’s my companion. She’s the only person I talk to all week long at home and we do a lot of things together and I would have loved to have had that opportunity with each one of them but it didn’t pan out that way and we have to take it the way it came.”

Meredith rebuts her siblings’ opinion of her supposed perks.

“Everybody thinks I’m a spoiled brat and I get everything in the world,” she said.
“I’m not the favorite one. I don’t think I’m the favorite and I don’t think I’m spoiled either. I was the only one in my family to get a job when I was 16. I pay for everything except for food and housing.”
While the older siblings saw the household grow every year, Meredith has seen the occupancy drop year after year until she became the only one. Only Justin and Meredith ever got to be an “only child.”
“I’m just like a normal kid pretty much,” she said.

* * * * *

They say you’re not supposed to take on more than one big life transition at a time.
Kathleen is doing all of them at once.
For the past year and a half, Ken has been working in Warrenton, Ga., where he is a quality control manager at a plant that makes riding mower seats. The couple bought a two-story house on Main Street of Warrenton, a 200-year-old town with a population of 2,000 and a fading economy. It’s 40 miles from Augusta, where most people go to shop and work.
Kathleen will be leaving her job at the Department of Social Services when she moves to Georgia in the fall.In August Kathleen will see her baby off to college. A few weeks after that, will pack up her belongings and leave the Buncombe Street house where she has raised all the children. (No. 7 Judith is moving in with husband Donald Hendrix and their new baby.)
Kathleen will leave behind friends, neighbors, parishioners at First Baptist and coworkers at the Department of Social Services, where she was recently promoted to supervisor of reception. She will be leaving her hometown, where five of her children and eight of her grandchildren live.
“I don’t know what kind of job I’m going to have or if I’m going to have a job. It’s very emotional,” she said. It was the only time in many hours of interviews that she shed tears.
“I’ve lived this way for a year. And my main prayer has been I can’t see the future and but most people have a good sense of where they’re going and what’s happening in their next year of life. I don’t know any of the people that live there …
“All of it at one time is an incredibly unsettling thing. And on top of that he’s gone. It’s like I’ve been thrown into widowhood without any idea of what’s coming up next. I keep thinking there’s got to be some amazing thing on the other side of that fence that I can’t see because knowing God as I know Him He doesn’t leave us in places of barrenness just to leave us there. If you go through a barren spot then there’s going to be something on the other side.”

For now, she’s got one more graduation to enjoy.

“I can’t help but think I’m going to be just extremely happy,” she said. “It’s an accomplishment not only on Meredith’s part but it’s an accomplishment on our part that we have run this race with public schooling, putting them through. … I feel like I’ve graduated in a sense. I can now go on and not have the sense of responsibility that I have when they’re in high school.”

When she and Ken have dropped kids off at college, she’s felt that “defining moment where I say good-bye to them,” she said. “But it’s not the last time I say good-bye. They’re just passing over that threshold of growing up and moving on and I’m letting go. I get to do that 10 times. It gets easier the more you do it, just like childbirth, but it’s still painful.”