(no subject)

[badstar]

My father continued to be absent and mostly incommunicado. Sometimes we spoke to him once or twice a year, sometimes slightly more often. Once in a while he was in town, and we might get to see him for a shirt time if we could catch him at our grandparents’ house. I always asked him why he didn’t bother to call, write, send a post card saying “Hi, I’m alive”, whatever…he always said he didn’t have the money. When I said that a post card cost fifty cents and a stamp cost thirty, and was he really that poor that he didn’t have less than a dollar to send one, he would give me an exasperated sigh, apologize and promise to call or write more. He never did, I eventually stopped asking. All this time he also had been accumulating child support arrearages. His paycheck would get garnished, he would change jobs and it would take months to get it attached again and once it did, he would change jobs yet again. He was working outside of the state, so it was easy for him to do that. There was a lot of resentment over this. Our father didn’t want to be around, and didn’t want to help pay for our care.

Mike, on one hand, adored my mother…but didn’t seem to know how to handle kids. He moved in once they got engaged and started taking over my mom’s rules pretty quickly. I don’t know why she allowed him. Suddenly, he was the one dictating bedtimes. He started measuring out our bowls of cereal with measuring cups. He started dictating what chores were assigned to whom and when- he had once been in a drug rehab program and used the same system that they used in the halfway house that he stayed in for assigning chores, and then grading how well they were done. This dictated what we got for allowance each week. I hated this. I was extremely resentful of the idea of bring treated like someone in drug rehab living in a halfway house when I’d done nothing to deserve it. We had to have our chores done before he came home from work. If they weren’t done to his satisfaction, we were often punished- I was once sent to my room for the entire night for missing a gum wrapper underneath the TV…though he wasn’t always quite so unreasonable, it happened.

At the end of ninth grade, they bought a house in what we were told was the same school district, but turned out to be the first house over the line in the next school district…we moved and changed schools.

Visitation with my grandparents continued. By this point, I was on better speaking terms wit them again They could never figure out what the problem was…I tried to tell them a few times, tried to confront them but was always met with “We’ve never ever lied to you, we would never do anything to hurt you.” Once I realized that they were so wrapped up in their own lies and believed what they said, I didn’t try anymore. There was no point. I wanted to hate them for it, but there was also no point in that, it just wasn’t worth my energy. The next big blowup with them happened in the last few days of tenth grade I was leaving school a few days early to go to Switzerland. I was leaving on a Monday, and the weekend before was the first weekend of June when I was supposed to go to their house- because of this trip, I had arranged in advance to skip that weekend, having also been invited to a year-end gathering on Friday evening at a teacher’s house and a friend’s birthday party on Sunday on top of getting ready to go. They agreed, and said that they were planning to give me some money for the trip, so I should be sure to come along with my mother when she came to pick up my sister and brother on Sunday night. I did…and when I got there, my grandfather handed me fifty dollars and started yelling at me about lying about my plans and how he was planning to give me so much more money before my brother told them I was out partying all weekend. I shoved the money back at him, told him that my brother was lying and that I had told them exactly what I’d be doing that weekend and I didn’t go anywhere or do anything that I didn’t tell them I had planned to do. Only then did he pull three hundred dollars out of his wallet and hand it to me…I pushed it away and said I didn’t want it. He tried to put it in the backpack I was carrying, but I got back in the car so he handed it to my sister and made her give it to me. I sometimes still feel like I did the wrong thing in eventually taking the money, but I did.