Psycho, Part 1

Disclaimers:

-          If you’re one of those “once a biological parent, always a parent” activists, then please do not read any farther because we will completely disagree.

-          If you decide to continue reading, please keep in mind that these are my opinions and I have formed them from experience from both sides. There are certain things that I feel very strongly about and this is one of them, so no amount of arguing over it or trying to convince me that I’m wrong is going to change my mind.

-          These things happened over a period of several years and it’s difficult to keep it all on a specific timeframe without the use of our calendars at home that has all this crap marked on them. I know there will be things that I’ll leave out – not from choice, just from not remembering while writing. So I apologize in advance if it sounds like I’m rambling or if the timing doesn’t quite match up.

 

 

 

I got blindsided by a paper a few weeks ago. It was a permission slip/ letter from one of Timothy’s teacher talking about how they’re learning how to write letters in class and the student was to fill in the blank on who they wanted to write the letter to and it gave an option of to allow or not allow the student to mail the letter when they were finished writing it and then gave spaces to write addresses. Underneath the address space was a place to check mark and next to it said something to the effect of please send the letter home. I checked the “no permission” box and put it back in his backpack.

Before you start ranting and raving about why this is wrong, you should probably know details. And in giving you those details, you need to know history.

                                      

When Brian and I started dating in November 2008, he had shared parenting with his ex wife where he was the residential parent and she was the one with “visitation”. She was supposed to have the boys every Tuesday night, Thursday night, and then Friday and Saturday nights would alternate from week to week. Key word: supposed. Realistically, she only took the kids once a month… twice a month if the boys were lucky. Even then, any time she would have them, she would call or text Brian and tell him that he needed to come get the kids early, regardless of if he had plans already or not. There were countless times when we had to drop what we were doing so he could get the kids. It was extremely hard to make plans to do anything because she would talk about taking the kids on one of her days… even up until right before we would leave to take the kids to her house and then she would cancel. And then Brian, not her, was left to deal with crying and upset kids. She would always try to get him to bring them to her on days that weren’t ones that were hers. He would do it sometimes, but wouldn’t if we had already planned something for that night.

 

At one point, she called Brian and asked him for some money. She had gotten a van in their divorce and Brian offered to buy it back from her. He came to work one day and asked me if I wanted to “repo” a van with him that night. So I went with him to go get it and drove the car with the kids back to the house while he drove the van. He had gotten it from her with the intention of reselling it, so he started cleaning it out either the next day or that following weekend. Brian found a small pipe in the center console that had burned pot in it. He called her to ask her about it and she told him that it wasn’t hers so it must have been mine. So according to her, I put it there to set her up. (Just for the record, I have never done any type of illegal drugs. I’ve had many, many friends that did, but I never saw the point in it.)

This went on for quite a while… until Brian’s unemployment benefits from being laid off  when Springfield Ford closed down was up which was about a year and a half after Brian and I decided to become serious. Once he told her that he was going to be going back to work and that I would be the one to start taking the kids to the daycare in the mornings and picking them up, then she decided that she wanted to take them like she was supposed to. This went on for a few months.

 

Clothes were a major issue for me. The kids would always go over there in nice clothes that they would wear to school, but somehow once they got to her house they would be ripped or had “gotten dirty” so she would change them into something that was old, stained, smelling of cigarette smoke, and didn’t fit. It was hard because I wanted them to look nice when they went to school but had no idea what condition the clothes would be in the next day when they got home. On the weekends, it wasn’t too bad because they could go over there in play clothes and we wouldn’t have to worry about if they were going to get torn up or not. There were many times where Timothy would come home in Thomas’s clothes so they were too small for him and Thomas would come home in Timothy’s clothes so he would be swimming in them. And she would never send their clothes back home. She would keep all the nice clothes at her house and on the rare occasion that she would send clothes back, they would be clothes that weren’t ours. Eventually, we just started sending the kids back to her house in her clothes in the hopes that we would get the nice ones that we had bought back. We got a couple things back, but not all of it. And when it was cold, they would come back without any coat or sweatshirt to keep them warm.

Her support of the kids was another issue that I had. Granted, since they had a shared parenting order, she wasn’t ordered to pay child support. But she never bought clothes for them or helped out with school fees or sports fees. There were a couple of Christmases (the first one that I was with Brian for and ones before that I believe) that Brian bought presents for the kids and gave them to her to give to them so it would look like she had gotten them for the kids. She would never come and pick up the kids or bring them home so Brian had to do all of the transportation. She would even call Brian and ask him to stop at the grocery to get things for her on the way over to drop the kids off because she “didn’t have enough food in the house for them to eat” even though she had her own car to get back and forth to the store and had a boyfriend she was living with that could have gone to the store instead of her calling her ex husband. And of course Brian would do it because he wanted the kids to be able to see their mother but didn’t want them to go hungry in the process.

Another issue was how she took care of them in general. They were trick-or-treating with her one time and was taking them around in the van she had at the time which she had FULL of junk… so full that the kids had a hard time getting in and out of the vehicle. Thomas ended up falling and hitting the corner of his eye on an old, rusty tool box which put a deep gash there. She never called Brian to tell him and then stayed in the car when she dropped the kids off. So when the kids got in the house, we noticed a band aid on his face. Brian called her and she told him that she had a friend who is a nurse look at it and the friend told her to put a band aid on it instead of taking him to the doctor. He has a scar there now. Anytime the kids needed to go to the doctor while they were with her, she wouldn’t take them. Instead, she would either call Brian to have him get the kids or she wouldn’t say anything and we would figure it out once they got home. And from what I gather from their doctor, they used to have ear infections all the time from being around cigarette smoke. But she never stopped smoking, so the kids would come home from her house smelling like smoke and we’d have to watch them more carefully to make sure we took them to the doctor at the first sign of anything.

A big safety concern was on the rare occasion that she would come to get the kids and she wouldn’t have car seats/ booster seats. There was a time when she came to get them while Brian was at work and she brought the cops with her. (I had caught her going through our garage once after she dropped the kids off and told her I was going to kick her ass if she ever got out of her vehicle on our property again, so she told the cops that she was “afraid for her life”.)  But when she came to get them, she didn’t have seats and I refused to let them go with her. She tried to tell the cop that since I wouldn’t let them go with her, that I was technically kidnapping them from her. The cop laughed and told that that if the residential parent left them in my care and I thought that the situation wasn’t a safe one, then I didn’t have to let them go. That was the last time she tried to come pick up the kids from our house.

Eventually, she quit taking the kids again and was back down to the once to twice a month and then dwindled to even less than that. She would show up to the occasional baseball game or soccer game but always wanted to start trouble.

There was one baseball game where Brian had left Thomas with me while he was coaching Timothy’s team. I was sitting with Thomas on my lap with some of Brian’s family members on the bleachers – on the top – when out of nowhere, she ran up behind the bleachers, reached around me, grabbed Thomas off of my lap, and ran off with him. She didn’t say a word, so of course I ran after her. She stopped and I told her that she couldn’t just grab him and take off like that because Brian had left him in my care. If she had said something, it would have been a completely different situation. So I held my hands out for Thomas to come back to me… and he tried to. He had his arms out so I could get him, but once I got my hands under his armpits, she whipped out her cell phone, dialed 911, and told the cop that I was trying to rip her son’s arms out of his sockets. In the meantime, one of Brian’s family members was yelling to him to get his son. He got over there while she was on the phone with 911 and took Thomas back to the dugout with him so she couldn’t take off with him again. Eventually the cops did show up and came over to talk to me. I explained to them what went on and they told me that she had no right to act that way and I did what I needed to do. They also apologized to me because they felt sorry that I had to deal with her. A report was filed, but no charges were filed.

Another time, she had been at Timothy’s last baseball game of the season and he had gotten a trophy. The kids were going to her house afterwards for a couple of hours and then we were to pick them up and take them to their grandmother’s house. Timothy asked if he could take his trophy to her house so he could show the people there. He was obviously proud of it, so Brian agreed – even though I had strongly disagreed to it. When we picked the kids up and they got in the car, Timothy didn’t have his trophy. We told him to run in and go get it so he could show his grandma. He went to the door and she answered. He talked to her for a minute and came back to the car – again without the trophy – and said that she wouldn’t let him bring it home. That pissed me off. I got out of the car (the ONLY time I have ever gotten out of the car at any place she has lived) and went to the door. Only this time she wasn’t the one that answered… her boyfriend did. He was screaming and had a gun in the waist of his pants without a shirt on so the gun was visible. He told me repeatedly that I did not have permission to be on his property and that I was trespassing. I tried to tell him that Timothy wanted his stuff, but he refused to back down. We both ended up calling 911. He told them that I was there threatening them – which I did not do – and I told them that he wouldn’t let Timothy have his things. We went down to a local school and waited for the cop to get there and she told us that since the trophy was in his house, there was nothing that we could do about it and that Timothy couldn’t even walk in and take it out if he wanted to. 

There was also a debacle with the school. She had seen me driving towards the school one day during my normal work hours so she called Brian to ask why I wasn’t at work. He was busy and preoccupied, so he blurted out that I was headed to the school to help plan Timothy’s first grade class Halloween party. That set her off. She called the school and went off on them for letting me be a part of the planning process because I wasn’t their mother and she didn’t want me anywhere near the school. The school ended up telling me that because she requested it, I couldn’t be at the school without Brian. (So I wasn’t able to help with the other parties the rest of that entire school year, with the exception of the end of the year party. Timothy’s teacher told me that since she had thrown such a fit and then never decided to participate in anything, that there was no reason to deny me being able to help out.)  She showed up to the school’s parade where all the kids walk around the back of the building in their costumes wearing a tank top, a mini skirt, fishnet stockings, and black boots that came up to her knee and had a tall heel. Other parents were asking me if that was the boys’ mother and why in the world she would show up to a school dressed like a hooker. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.................. To be continued...