Well, my shitty story doesn’t quite involve me…but, in a way, it does. Anyway, my mother married my father before I was born. They were married for about 25 years. At first, she admitted to “sleeping with someone else” but that she was young and foolish so my dad forgave her. This was just a little before I was born (probably in the time that my mother gave birth to my eldest sister) and she became pregnant with me. Then, later, when I was very very young, apparently she brought home another man while my dad was at work. Shit, I was so young that I don’t remember it but apparently, I was starting to grow somewhat attached to this man. Anyway, that fell through and for the next 16 or so years, nothing else happened like that (as far as we know). Over the next 16 years, there were a lot of fights about finances and stuff like that (we weren’t the richest people on the block but we never had to resort to public assistance programs…almost did once, but we struggled through)… and finally, we bought our first computer. It had AOL on it.
Back then, AOL had premium services that cost you by the hour or whatever and debited money from your bank account. The next month, AOL took the dues out of the joint bank account. $800 worth. When you’re going paycheck to paycheck, this was quite an unexpected bite. We didn’t know what caused it except that she was using premium AOL services (I wasn’t on the computer at the time and my dad is a complete luddite…still is to this day). No one else in the family used the computer either, so it was all her. This caused a big fight, of course, but we survived.
Next month, it was $900 coming out. Hoo boy! She guaranteed it would never happen again.
Then she started getting gifts in the mail and plane tickets. Yeah, you can see what was happening here, but we were completely clueless at the time. She was “going to see some friends” that she met online.
So, 1995. We wake up one morning and my mother’s not in the house. None of her stuff is in the house. All that’s left is a note left on the pillow that she had moved out in the middle of the night. My dad was crushed. I mean, almost literally. He fell into a very deep depression that he’s still in to this day. I can’t count the number of times he claimed that it was “just a phase” and that “she’ll be back” if he’s just nicer to her and not argue or fight. He’d send her flowers and chocolates, but nothing doing.
She wouldn’t respond to e-mails. She wouldn’t answer the telephone (when we had her number which wasn’t often) and we didn’t really know where she was. The next thing we knew, divorce papers came in the mail. She tried to get child support for my younger sister (whom moved in with her to finish school in a place that had classes she wanted), that was still a minor for about another year, but my dad responded that he would need child support for my younger brother who was still a minor for another 3 years. She quickly dropped the request for child support and he dropped his.
I think from 1995 to 2012, I’ve seen my mother a grand total of…eight times? But it’s not me (I am still unspeakably furious at what she did but I’ve been able to not let it get me down–does that make me an asshole?)…it’s my dad. He’s tried therapists but they can only do so much. He’s tried medication but either he didn’t care enough to continue to take it or when he did, it screwed up his sex drive which is, in his words, “the only thing I have left”. He hasn’t been with another woman since he got together with her in 1972 because he can’t bear the thought of being with someone else.
Yeah, my dad is still suffering from the breakup to this day, 17 years later. He has days when he seems completely happy-go-lucky, and other days when he’s on a rampage. Sometimes, he can go from happy-go-lucky to rampage in under a minute. Bipolar disorder doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Yeah, I don’t usually mention this stuff online because, frankly, I don’t think too many people care and the subject doesn’t come up. But, it came up here and I had to get it off my chest.
Thanks for reading.
