♪ All by Myself...

    1998. Randall was nine going on forty-three, Craig was seven, and Brett-Brett was three. I left the three of them in the van, listening to Radio Disney,  while I numbly wandered through Stater Brothers, our local supermarket chain. I kept wondering what kind of horrible person I was to a) leave my young children in the van and b) have people consistently and chronically leave me with misery instead of providing me with security. 
    Their dad had left for the night on a turn-around trip to Vegas with his good friend Kevin. A turn-around is a bus ride, several hours of time in Lost Wages, and then a bus ride home. To my weary, HeadStart teaching-mom to three boys-going to college at night-foggy understanding, it had something to do with some charity, which I remember thinking was odd, but whatever. I wasn't one of those wives who nagged all the time, just sometimes. LOL.    
   In hindsight, that should have been my M.O. 
   It had been over a year that their dad was out on medical disability and had gotten a settlement for an at work injury. He'd recovered, gone back to school and been certified to work on copiers, ATM machines, and other electronic equipment. He'd had a long year and the job market was slow, even though he went out everyday to the Inland Empire to apply for positions in his new field. 
   The good Christian wife that I had been brainwashed to be trusted him, expected him to provide for me and the kids, and had also learned to take Excedrin immediately after being smacked so as to keep the swelling down. I wasn't ever easy to live with, always on the edge of fear, so getting smacked and choked had become routine to me.
    Yep. (I always knew I belonged to an earlier era, the one in which you just didn't talk about such things. ) 
    That may have contributed to the non-nagging stance that I had adopted, as well as the relief at him being away for even part of a weekend.    
    Indubitably. 
    I had put the kids in the van shortly after getting a phone call. From Kevin. Asking for the father of my children.  
    "He's...with..you..."
    Nope. He was on a bus to Las Vegas with total strangers, leaving me at home again for the zillionth weekend with three little boys.      
    We liked those weekends. On Friday nights we would get blankets and pillows and "camp out" on the living room rug, watching Miracles and Other Wonders on cable TV. Brett usually conked out first, and around ten Rand and Craig would give in to the weight of their eyelids closing against their will to stay up all night. The sight of those three beautiful boys sleeping amidst a jumble of blankets and pillows -- still so precious to me. 
   The thought of my sons broke through the numbness that had overtaken me at Kevin's phone call. Grabbing a few Friday night snacks, I hurried back to the van and got in just as Nilsson started wailing, " All By Myself" on Radio Disney, since it had been recycled into a recent mummy movie. Craig, unsuspecting as to his mother's inner turmoil, said, " That's you Mommy, all by yourself." I lost it. Poor Craig. I had to quickly pull myself together and tell him I was crying like the mummy in the movie when he couldn't find his way home. 
    While they rolled around on the blankets that night, I skimmed through bank statements and ATM withdrawals, and I realized what a total dupe I had been to think that he had been dutifully job hunting. Unless, of course, he had to pay the casinos thousands of dollars to apply to work on their machines. 
     That might have been it. Hmmmph. 
      I straggled along for a few months after that, but when he went through MY teacher retirement fund, also on a false premise, I figured the God that I knew and loved didn't approve of His daughter being beaten or having her bank account emptied at casinos.
    I got divorced. On both sides of our family, folks shunned me and denounced me for 'giving up on my marriage'  from their purported higher moral ground. "She's being awful to poor Jimmy." Whatever. I guess beating me and ruining me financially wasn't enough to give me what they thought I deserved.
   Fourteen years later my sons still get shoved aside by that man, and his wife, and all the blame is projected onto me and the boys. I've never been so important to him. He sure doesn't matter to me.  
   No, they aren't little boys anymore. I don't have to live with it...and yet, more than a decade of disappointment is hard to brush off for them. 
   People say, "stop bringing up the past and let it go". 
   The problem is, the problem never went away. 
   What if it keeps happening? 
   What if your 17-year-old calls his dad and gets cut off, not getting a return call for a week, and then sees on Facebook that he was in Las Vegas, when he is supposedly so weak that he can't get a job?    
   What if his brother is in the ICU but has to call his dad three days later, to tell him how he's doing? 
   What if a college kid hasn't gotten a single card, box, or other sign of care for three years??
  There's no explanation for that. 
  That's not the past. That is the wretched present. 
  My own father had some ghastly personality traits of his own, but at least he had a long career teaching at the university level, and alcoholism to blame for most of his wretchedness. Most of it. 
  Partly he was a creep.
  I'm sure there is some goodness, somewhere in the man who fathered my children, but there is a long pause if you ask my adult sons to tell you about it. 
   Perhaps someday he will remember his baptism and live well. 
   I remember it. I was so grateful that my then-husband had come to accept God in his heart and I was proud of him, that day. 
    I certainly have not been the perfect mother. I was not the perfect wife. Not even close. I broke the rules, too. The big difference is I blame myself for my mistakes, not him. He doesn't have any power over me any longer. 
    I stayed at my post as long as I could. Among all the failures of my own life, which number in the thousands, I count against them some pretty good men that used to listen to Radio Disney. He stopped being their dad when they outgrew him, in junior high. 
    He just blew his chance at being their friend, for a long long time. 
    That makes me sad. For them.