I never thought I'd be this 'down' i my entire fucking life. If it were not for my mother, my son and I would be living on the streets. Truly. My 'spawn,' as I affectionately refer to him, has only known poverty. We live on about $500 a month and that has to cover food and all bills. That breaks down to $369 in food stamps and about $170 in child support. The streets are just outside though. Waiting.
You see my husband used to be a big time drug dealer. He is 61 now. But in his misspent youth he dealt cocaine. He has a hole in his nose where the septum has worn away from YEARS and kilos of use. It drips blood in the mornings. I could put a ring in it. But I'm the gross one because I've put on a few pounds after having three kids. I have never expressed this to anyone. I'm so down I don't know which way is up.
My parents bought a house for 'us,' when my husband was with the family. He has his own home. But 'we' can't live there as a 'family' because that was where the home invasion robbery happened. Joshua hasn't been back to that house since the night the robbery happened. Luckily I had the other house from my parents. My husband hates my parents. They put down $120,000 as a down payment...half the value of the house. My husband put down $35k towards the down payment. Now he wants his money back. Or at least my mom should loan him some money. That bitch, he said. I don't know why he hates my parents. But then he struggles to understand why HE HAS no friends or family. They can't stand him. This has been a life long problem for him. Hmmm.
But I'm the bitch that ruined his life. During 20 years together he has had five or six jobs. He got himself fired 'on purpose' with a dirty drug test because he didn't like the boss. Yeah. I know how to pick them. He turned down a Postal job to sell knives door to door. He was 'laid off' from a job in a boat yard...he's a stellar carpenter...but he said he heard thru the grapevine that the boss said he didn't fit in. He quit his last job as an insurance salesman because he was .... sad and depressed. His shrink told him to quit.
I too was sad and depressed but got up and went to work every day. Hmmm.
I was the family earner, throwing myself into the burgeoning nursing industry. Kept us in high style WITH benefits. I paid extra money out of my paycheck to up our medical insurance to cover his #Hep C treatment. But I've fucked up his life.
My parents just bought me a laptop and a new car. They pay my rent, most of my bills for Josh and I. My husband pays $170.00 per month. That is it. It barely pays two bills. What's left over is used for luxuries like soap and toilet paper. But I'm the bitch.
I have stayed at home with my son since the day the robbery occurred. I was fired a few weeks after the robbery because my gem of a boss decided I needed to spend more time with my family. It was her way of saying I was spending too much time on the phone talking to shrinks, doctors, security firms, Josh, my ex. Maybe she was right. It still was a dirty deal, but that is life, right? And Nick did not understand that he had to take a more active role as a parent if I was to work and Josh needed to be homeschooled and taken to his activities. That was all too much for Nick.
Think my ex would pick up the torch while I acclimated myself to being a stay-at-home mom, get the hang of homeschooling & learning medical billing so I could work from home? By that time, my ex was not working. This was all during the time immediately after the robbery. All of us were diagnosed with #PTSD. We were each given 20 shrink visits a piece. What a learning curve that was. Got lucky, though, and found one who was raised in Compton, California. He knew gang violence, guns, robberies... he was perfect. My husband hated him. 'He's a quack.' Oh, I see, he can actually communicate with our better than you, because he is a professional, but that makes him bad and you hate the man.
He wanted to change Josh's shrink. I fought like a hell cat and won. Only problem was I had to kick down my husband's bedroom door and tell him to get out of the house. @a_okafor007 would appreciate that detail!
Well, my ex did sort of pick up the torch. He 'made me' make him a website. Which he was convinced was going to magically make boat loads of money. AND, he moved back in the house. In the mean time he took over the education of our son which basically consisted of, "You idiot." "What's wrong with you, the other kids 'get it!'" "Are you stupid or something? We just went over this!" "Fuck. All your friends get this shit."
I had to listen to that while I wrote copy about a particular friend of my ex's. His name was Greg. And my husband thought this guy was so cool because he and his #gf DIED after smearing each others body with cocaine and over-dosed. I just snapped. I knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better. For him, not Joshua.
My brilliant solution, because you know I'm perfection personified and never make mistakes, was to start smoking clove cigarettes and drink a lot of vodka. Vodka is so versatile. It goes with everything and you can cook with it, too. Brilliant crap, that vodka. As you can imagine the POlice were at our home frequently. But I was the caller usually.
The vodka and cloves, though delightful, had to go.
You see he had two guns in the house. I had to stay up at night. One night we had a very violent argument. In my mind, this thing was just the right excuse to call the cops and have them take the guns. He hated me for that. I prefer to think I was acting responsibly.
When his website went up, my adoring son came and said to me that dad said I had to loose a lot of weight so I could go to those fancy art parties. You want to talk about Medusa. He barricaded himself in his bedroom (he snores), but I still managed to kick the door in. Without the vodka. With a kick my son taught me! Sho Shu!
He was kicked of therapy by our shrink for being difficult & non compliant with therapy. Well, all that did was throw more gas on a huge fire. He was even more against Dr. Lewis. All he could talk about was how much he hated that doctor and how famous he was going to become as an artist. It's been five years. No one has bought anything because he over priced everything. Not that I cared. By this time our son was old enough to be embarrassed by his fathers 'occupation.' His dad wasn't like the other dads. His dad slept on the couch all day or in his bedroom watching TV.
That was the end. He had taken another loan out on HIS house, $24k, rather than look for a good carpenter's job. It was just too hard.
That night I thought of all the times at night when he did not get up and nurse our precious infant son; the times when he was too busy growing his dope than to find a 'legal' job or bond with his son; all the school lunches that never got made; everything that he missed in this child's life...for nothing. Josh wanted him to go. I always defer to my son. You're only a kid once. I am ashamed that I was part of a lifestyle that left my son with less of a childhood than his father and I enjoyed as kids.
I was working on Joshua and myself. So when he called me to talk, I told him to get a shrink. I wasn't 'smart' enough to fix him. I was busy trying to 'fix' our son's life. And he asked to come back...
He would call me all the time to argue or to beg. But when I'm done with you, that's the end. You might as well be made of stone. I have said I've always been the Medusa. I meant it literally. He tried to get back at me by stop paying all the bills at the Lodi house, the one my parents bought for us. He was trying to force 'us' out so we would feel as bad as him. Because, little narcissist that he was, no one could suffer like my ex.
Never a thought to what he was doing to his son.
One night my brother in law, his brother called and told me that my ex had never wanted a kid or to get married. When confronted with what I always knew, my ex called his brother a liar. Which he may have been. How was I to know. For the record, to date my parents have contributed almost a quarter million dollars to 'raise' my son and keep off the streets and off the public dole.
My parents shell out over $1k a month to keep Josh and I afloat. But Nick, well, he still hates my parents, my mother, specifically. He's mad because she won't loan him any money. His family has contributed almost nothing by comparison. You see after my ex's mother died from pancreatic cancer, truly a saintly woman, the boys went bonkers in different ways. Tony, her spouse of fifty years waited a scant two weeks after we planted her in the ground, to call me and ask ME FOR PORNO. Why? Those two years of chemo were hard on my sex life. I wanted to vomit.
Did I mention that my husband hid 20 kilos of pot in the family wood shed. That was a splendid argument.
But I 'left' my ex after only 9 months of marriage. The growing, the selling meth and using, were things he kept doing after we left him when my son was 2 years old. But Nick kept following us around. Asking for second chances like they pass out 2 dollar bills. Not a lot of effort was put forth by him. Or he'd get it right & then fuck it, Josh, up again.
The news is not ALL bad. Now that Nick has quit his LAST job to draw pictures of animals and children I feel so much more secure. Because ... darn it, Josh and I may be barely scraping by, but NICK IS HAPPY. Nick is fulfilled.
Our son. Still struggles with abandonment issues, depression, his #PTSD, nightmares. He has fallen behind in school because all he can think of now is finishing the divorce. He is the driver of that issue. He feels he can't move forward and feel secure and happy if I am still married to my husband/ex/Nick. Josh is so tired of being broke. But I can't go back to work until after the divorce, because Nick, darling that he is, will seek alimony from MEdusa! Him and what army. Of course, I want to be free again. On paper.
There. Those are the contents of my mind. I don't care if anyone reads this. I doubt it will help anyone. I don't know if it even helped me. I just know that the next three weeks can't go by fast enough for me. The final hearing. It's already turning into the longest three weeks of my life.
I hope getting this out of my head will at least make me feel better. Maybe I can become my old self again on Twitter. It has been my only source of social connection for the last 2 1/2 years. Thanks to some very loyal followers.
Efahisto, my babies. Kalimerimerimerimesi! Oopa! To your health xOx #TheMedusa
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