The sins of the Mother

I turned around in my seat to face the young girl sitting behind me. Gabi, I can’t wait until we get to the beach. We’re going to have so much fun. Aren’t you excited?

She just stared straight ahead, with her mouth hung slightly ajar, and for some reason not acknowledging that I’m talking to her. Even though she’s looking straight at me.

I love catching waves on the boogey board. I continued on, Have you ever done that before?

Still no response. I was actually quite impressed by her acting skills. She did a great job appearing as if she was a lower functioning individual. I glanced at her chin checking for drool before turning back around.

A second later James, her Father called out to her, if you’re too tired to go, we can turn around and go home. I have a lot of work that still needs to get done.

I never said I was tired. She snapped.

Weren’t you just sleeping?

No. What makes you say that?

Well, You must have been daydreaming then. Sarah was just talking to you and you didn’t hear anything she said.

The silence in the car only lasted a second before James put some music on the radio. If it were my children who were being disrespectful, he would’ve gave them 1000 sentences to write, or even spanked them, but he didn’t discipline his own daughter for doing it. He didnt ask for an explanation for why she didn’t offer me a reply, and chose to give me the silent treatment instead. He didn’t correct her behavior and tell her that it was rude and disrespectful. He didn’t demand that she apologize for her behavior. And he didn’t punish her for it. He just let it go, as if it wasn’t a big deal.

He often said that you have to pick your battles and let the small things go. Yet, if it was him that she was being disrespectful towards, she would have been disciplined.

He was inconsistent when it came to correcting her for being disrespectful towards me. That was because she was always doing behaving negatively towards me. Sometimes it was apparent, while other times it seemed unintentional.

Why did she have a problem with me? Well, it’s a long story, but I will try to make it short. It all starts with her Mother, Beth.

A long time ago Gabi’s parents, were married and living together. Her Father, James, would leave early in the morning for work, and when he came home the house would be a mess. Beth wasn’t a very good house keeper.

So, after a long day at work, James had to come home and do all the housecleaning. By this time, Beth feels that it’s his turn to watch their son, as she had been watching him all day long. And,someone needed to make dinner, so he did both of those things too.

By the time their son was asleep, James was exhausted, and annoyed with Beth. He felt that she should have done more than she had done, since he worked so hard to provide for her. Instead of going to sleep, James would take off for a couple of hours to get high and while he was out he would make some extra money by selling drugs. It took his mind off of his anger. By the time he got home, he had already forgotten all about the house being a mess just a few hours before. But, Beth didn’t. The whole time she was sitting there getting angrier and angrier. He was gone all day at work, and then after dinner, he takes off again and is gone all night. And when he does come home again, he comes home high.

She doesn’t get to take off whenever she wanted to, she had to stay home and watch their son. And he said there was no reason for her to go out at night, but he did. Because he was making money while being out.

Well, one day Beth decided that she was going to get high too. She searched for his hiding spot, and when she found it, she pulled out a big chunk of meth and took a big bite out of it.

Beth should not have done that. Beth was pregnant and immediately after taking that bite, she had to be rushed to the hospital.

The meth made her go into labor a couple of months earlier than she had planned and it made her baby poop inside of the womb, which almost killed her. Both Beth and Gabi almost died that day.

Gabi was high on meth when she was born. The hospital called social services and informed them of the situation, and soon after a worker was there ready to take custody of baby Gabi away from her Mother.

It so happened that the worker who came to the hospital is the same woman who James went to live with for a few months when he was 13. She gave him a warning instead and told him that she would have taken the baby if it had been anyone else. But if she gets called out to check on the baby again, she will have to take custody of her.

James and Beth both quit drugs and tried to do the right thing for their family. But James still felt like he had all the responsibility and was still coming home exhausted while Beth had done nothing all day long.

Work slowed down and James was home more often. James was under alot of stress. He demanded that Beth get a job because he needed help with the house payments otherwise they were going to lose it. But Beth refused to help him out. This caused them to always be fighting with each other, and every time she started a fight, she would do it in front of their children. She thought it was safer that way, but he thought that every time the fight escalated in front of the children, it put them in danger. He wanted an escape from all the stress, and that led him back to doing drugs again.

Eventually he gave up on the house and he gave up on the marriage. One day he decided that he wasn’t going to come back home. He was just going to take whatever he had on him, and leave everything else behind. He couldn’t take his children, he was on drugs. Even if he got sober, who would watch them while he worked? He couldn’t take them from their Mother just to have a stranger watch them while he worked. That wasn’t fair to his children. So he did the only thing that he could do. He left the state so that he wouldn’t come back home, so he wouldn’t keep fighting in front of the kids, so he wouldn’t put them in danger of being taken away because of his drug use.

James didn’t just go to a different state, he flew all the way across the country. And that’s when he met me. We hung out for a month, and then parted ways.

Ever since James found out that he was going to be a Father, he was driven to make sure that his baby had everything that he needed in life. And then he was driven to take care of two children.

Now he was across the country without his children. He was lost without them. They were the reason why he got up and went to work every day. They were the reason that he came home all those years. Without them, he felt like he no longer had a reason.

And the feeling just got stronger and stronger as the months passed by. On the third month he walked into a laundromat’s bathroom, filled a syringe with a lethal amount of drugs and proceeded to end his life.

But the needle would not go into his body. He tried over and over again, but nothing worked. Frustrated, he decided to step outside for a moment and get some fresh air before trying it again.

James vision went black for a second and when it returned to normal all he could see was me standing on the sidewalk across the street from him, looking right at him, with a beam of sunlight shining directly on me. We ran towards each other and he picked me up and swung me around in the air. From that moment on, we were inseparable.

Gabi didn’t know why her Father left, or when he would be back. All she knew was that something was keeping him away from them.

A year had passed before James was able to travel back across the country in hopes that he would be able to see his children again.

Beth agreed to meet James at the mall and she had his birth sister with her. After a short visit at the mall, they followed him over to his adopted parent’s house and visited a little longer. They were all laughing and getting along it seemed. He asked if he could see the children again in two weeks.

They had already gone through the divorce process, and the courts gave their orders on how much child support he was responsible for and when he would have visits with his children. They gave him every other weekend. This was the first, and the second visit was scheduled to take place in two weeks.

The court assigned the visits, so she was obligated to bring the children to visit him as stated in the court order. He didnt need her permission, he was just being polite by asking.

She said of course she will and before giving him a hug goodbye she told him that he can’t be going in and out of their children’s lives. Either he’s in it and wants to see them all the time, or he stays out of it. He told her that he won’t be going in and out and he meant it.

That’s what Gabi saw. She saw her parents smiling and laughing together. Her Father was back in her life and she heard him say that he planned on staying in it. And her Mother saying that she wanted him in it too. She saw them hugging each other. She thought everything was going to go back to the way that it was.

James called Beth everyday to see if he could talk to his children. Most of the time she didn’t answer it, either because her phone was dead or because she was out of range.

When she did answer it she would ask him when he was going to send the child support check, then she would tell him that the children couldn’t talk to him because she was busy.

On the day of his visit, she called to tell him that she was still waiting for the child support check and that she wouldn’t be bringing the children over because she was busy. Then she reminded him that he needed to remain in their lives and not to be in and out of it.

He still called his children everyday, hoping to get a visit over the phone at the very least. But she kept repeating the same excuses from the weeks before.

James earned some money as fast as he could, and when he paid his child support, she said she couldn’t bring them over to visit him because she was busy grocery shopping.

The following visit he wasn’t able to find any work to pay it, so she didn’t bring them over for that visit either. Still, she reminded him that he didn’t need to be in and out of their lives.

He paid the child support as soon as he could, but it was only enough for the week that he was late and not enough for the current week. So she didn’t bring them over that weekend either.

James struggled to find enough work, eventually falling several months behind on his payments. His Mother took out a mortgage on her house and paid off his child support and then paid the next two months worth to give him time to see his children and find work.

But still she wouldn’t bring the children over for a visit. He went to the courthouse and filed the paperwork to ask the judge to go over his visitation schedule because he was not getting his visits.

On the day of court, he finds out that Beth responded to the court paperwork with an accusation that he had watched inappropriate shows in front of one of his children, and that was something that needed to be discussed first.

Supposedly his children were outside swimming, unsupervised, when an adult went to check up on them, their son got caught doing something sexually inappropriate.

He was immediately brought into the house, then Beth started to ask him questions about what his Father did that caused him to behave inappropriately.

He was told that it wasn’t his fault and he would not be in trouble if he told them what happened. The son was angry with his Father. Showing back up into his life, with promises of seeing him again, just to disappear once more. Who knew if he would come back, and if he did, how could his son trust that he would stay and not just disappear like before? This was his get out of trouble coupon and he jumped on it. He said that five years ago he saw a swimsuit ad where women were wearing nothing but their underwear and bra when he slept over at his Grandmas house with his Dad.

The judge knew it was a bogus case but he still had to do something regarding it. So James couldn’t see his children until he did a year of parenting and counseling.