(no subject)

[badstar]

Nothing particularly spectacular happened in sixth grade as far as my grandparents were concerned…every other weekend visitation, and I still didn’t want to live with my mother. Still didn’t believe that she loved me. Still wanted to move back to my grandparents. What did happen though was that my mother and Keith started fighting a lot, often over petty things. He would stomp and storm around the house and slam doors and yell a lot, and started to be mean to my sister and brothers- but never bothered me.

Things continued in this way for that year. It was in seventh grade that a lot of things got extremely shook up. All this time we were visiting my grandparents on a modified visitation order- the first weekend of the month with holidays split the same as before. Sometimes my mother would let us go for other weekends too.

Things were always tight moneywise, but that next year was extremely stressful Keith’s father died just before Christmas and there wasn’t money to buy presents until after Christmas. – this was another “bad parent” button for my grandparents to press. Mom and Keith’s fighting became more and more frequent and several things happened all within the course of three our four months- Keith’s father dying and Christmas I already mentioned.

One event that I can’t place an exact time or cause for is probably one of the biggest things that ever happened to me. All I remember is that it was the first weekend of a winter month- probably February, I was at my grandparents’ house for the weekend and somehow someway something happened that I suddenly realized how my grandparents had been lying all this time, how they had manipulated everyone. I wish I could remember how this all came about. But I don’t. I just remember going home to my mother’s house on Saturday night- I refused to stay over that night and insisted on going home- and sleeping in my mother’s bed under a heap of blankets- the heating in the house was broken and they couldn’t get someone out til Sunday morning- with my mother sitting next to me and telling her about every little thing that I could remember them doing that I had just realized was all a lie.

It was about a year til I really spoke to them again. I actually continued to go to their house for visitation because they kept threatening to take my mother to court again and she didn’t have the money to pay for a lawyer. I’d go, but I would either stay up in my room reading, or watching movies in another room, or try to go to friends’ houses (I still had friends in their neighborhood)

There was that, and then right around the end of February, mom and Keith had a major blowup. I don’t remember what caused it, just that she was afraid that he was going to get violent and telling us to go to a neighbor’s house and call the police. I’m guessing that he hit her or something at some point, because he was arrested and she ended up getting a restraining order on him. They broke up, and he moved out.

Within a few weeks, my mom ended up meeting someone else- completely by accident- he was a friend of a friend who was given our phone number trying to track down a mutual acquaintance. Somehow they got to talking…and ended up spending hours on the phone every night for the next week. They met the week after that, were engaged within three weeks- This was late March/early April, and they were married in August. This individual would be my stepfather, Mike.