If Only I Was a Seer

It was 2016 and I was being promoted at work. I can't disclose business names or anything, but we will call the place 'W'. At W I was to become a bakery manager and I was excited to work in bakery. Quickly upon starting the training for my new job, I was informed that I was to be a Bakery and a Deli manager. Two departments for the same amount of pay. This did not sit well with me as I despised everything to do with the Deli department.

That being said, I accepted because it was 16.00 an hour and that was decent money for a single lady to be making. What I didn't plan on was everything going south almost immediately.

My training weeks were terrible. W had a really bad habit of not training its associates well at all. They sent me to a store to learn the bakery half and to another to learn the Deli. Well, while I was learning the Deli, I sent pictures of some of their unsafe and unclean food handling practices to corporate. This labeled me a 'spy' for our head office, which I wasn't, but I get it, they got in trouble for what I did.

I finally got placed in what was to be my home store and things got worse. Not only did I have inadequate training by inadequate teachers, but my store manager was a complete, and I do mean complete, asshole. He would cuss at me in the back room, shout at me, yell at me on the main floor. Everything he could do to hurt me mentally and berate me to more than likely make me quit. Like I said, I was being labelled a corporate spy, perhaps that is what it was? I never did quite figure out what the fuck his problem was.

Now, moving on, I became rather close with my Deli lead. We will call him 'B'. B and I quickly formed a romantic relationship which admittedly soured rather fast. Within the first week he would do little things that would bother me. He would leave his clothing at my place. He would put me in a position I didn't want to be in; such as he knows I don't smoke weed and while I didn't have a problem with other people doing it, I didn't want to be around it at all, but he brought me to his friends house where they were all smoking it around me.

It's not in me to be outright rude. I didn't say anything to them, but I did mention how that wasn't fair of him as I'd told him of my preferences beforehand. These were minor things, but I was not feeling it as I had in the beginning, plus, at work, he kept trying to undermine me.

Speaking of the undermining, at one point I was venting in a text message which got delivered to the wrong person. It simply said I wanted to "Take my lead down a notch". If you had dealt with the shit I was dealing with, you'd want to take his ass down a notch, too. That being said, it got back to Store Manager, who we will call 'C'.

When I was called into C's office, it was a surprise to see our HR rep waiting there with a stern scowl on her slightly aged face. Come to find out, there were trying to fire me for this intercepted text. I sent one message stating such a negative thing, but nothing ever came about the way my manager shouted at me and belittled me and he didn't care about if anyone, including customers, saw. When I mentioned this, C immediately denied he had done anything of the sort.

Well, it was finally time to tell them something I'd learned only within that week before this write-up. I was pregnant with B's child. Whoops.

I nearly quit that day. For some reason, I managed to hang in there. Somehow, C had a little more sympathy for me after he found out I was pregnant.

Now, I had a little scare. I was spotting. I was told by my doctor to not lift more than 10 pounds, which meant I couldn't work the supply trucks when they came in, even for my own departments.

C's second in command, we will call this bitch 'G', told me I had two choices. It was either step down or quit. I didn't know any better at the time, but I should have and could have sued their asses off for this. That's discrimination for a disability as pregnancy is labelled as a disability. Hell, that's plain discrimination just because I was pregnant. They desperately wanted me out of that store for some reason.

As I said, I didn't know any better, so I stepped down. I went from making 16.00 an hour to 12.45. As a part time cashier. No benefits (which would end up fucking me over when maternity leave came up), nothing.

In this time, B and I broke up for good. The main reason was I was already planning on breaking up with him but he was beginning to show stranger signs of being too controlling. Case and point, I invited my family over for a get together after telling him I needed some space from him. He sent me a message and asked me why I was "inviting anyone and everyone" over to my house. I wasn't about to put up with that shit.

Now, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't ever have told B I was pregnant. The shit I went through after and am still going through, should be something no one has to deal with.

Unfortunately, I did tell him. I also tried to communicate with him still, being as he is my son's father.

B came up when I was about four months pregnant. He was away finishing his degree at this time and we went and saw a movie together. We were trying to work things out, sort of. Well, after the movie, I was feeling real tender in the stomach and was worried I would be having gastric distress very soon. So, I told him I'd like to sleep alone. Like I said, I was a little afraid of him still to begin with. When I told him that, I specifically remember him slamming the door as we stopped for him to get cigarettes at a gas station. He denies this, to this day. Funny how they always deny the things they do that scare you. Now, he gets back in, and don't forget I'm four months pregnant with his child, he says to me, "Are you SURE you're not seeing anyone else?" I was floored.

What kind of woman did he peg me for? Seriously?

We got into a fight over that, of course. Now, after that incident, I didn't want anything to do with him. We got into NUMEROUS fights. Mostly, I didn't want him involved at all and here he was demanding 50/50 custody etc, meanwhile he wasn't even there to help with my pregnancy and I was scared of him. Why would I want him around, knowing that? We even got into a fight about what to name our son. I wanted to name him Marcus, but B said that was a Latin based name. B is Jewish and said that, because of some shit the Romans did to the Jews over 2000 years ago, that was an inappropriate name. I asked many, many Jewish people about this. They all said he was exaggerating the seriousness of it.

Now, at one point we were half friendly with each other and even considering working things out as I felt I really didn't have any other choice. However, when I was eight months pregnant, I was able to go back to my original store and possibly reclaim my old position back that I had before I was promoted to Deli/Bakery management. Two things happened in this time. One, B asked if I was going back to that store to cheat on him. Almost verbatim, honestly. At eight months pregnant. Asked me that. Yeah, because just fucking a manager there, who I used to have a thing with who doesn't and hasn't worked there in forever, is a thing? Why the fuck he painted me this way? Oh, you'll see later... you know what they say about a guilty conscience.

Well, while I thought I was also getting my old job back at 14.69 an hour, I was sorely mistaken. It wasn't until I got settled in that I was told that due to my final written warning given to me by C, I wouldn't be getting my old job back until it fell off my record. I remained with that god damned place until it did and you know what they told me? "Oh, well, we think they actually want to give someone else a chance instead." I was again surprised and yet I really shouldn't have been.

So here I was, a part time cashier and I was out on maternity leave which I had to rely solely on B for. Now, B and I started to work things out. By the time our son, who I will call F, was 6 months old, we started to get back together. B always had an excuse as to why he couldn't be with us. There were times F would scream and scream because he had reflux really bad as a baby and B would up and leave and go home and say he had to help his mom. Sometimes he couldn't come out because he had a flat tire. Sometimes he just had an excuse for literally anything and everything and he was never really around. I figured he was just working a lot. However, I found out in June the next year, that wasn't the case.

B moved in with F and I and we tried our best to work on things. However, B liked to go out and do shit with his friends a lot and there would be times he simply wouldn't be around. This bothered me a lot. Well, when he moved in, he and I talked about actually getting married. Come to find out though, after I went through his phone due to his suspicious actions, and you can all harp on me all you want, he'd had an entire relationship going on behind my back for an ENTIRE YEAR. Now, if you ask why I stayed with him, it was more for my son than anything. Plus, he always always has threatened 50/50 custody and I have complied because there is no way I'm letting him have that much time with my son when he barely pays attention to him to begin with.

Shit got ugly. I absolutely hated him for cheating. It wasn't even just that he cheated, he literally made an account with 'whatsapp', pretending to be me to tell this other girl that I knew about her. He actually impersonated me in order to pull off the affair. Meanwhile, he also told this girl that I was a horrible person, I was fat and ugly among other things. Also, the icing on the cake, was he almost had a baby with this girl, but in her words he talked her into an abortion. Here's this man threatening me with 50/50 custody but aborted the other child he made, yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either other than he's a fucking psycopath.

I was not a nice person after that. I was constantly yelling at him. Constantly mean to him. Rude to him. I couldn't get over what he did. All the times I'd stayed up with a screaming baby and he'd left were to go home and fuck the other girl. All of the times he told me he had a flat tire or had an excuse he couldn't come out- he was out fucking her. She literally lived with him for a while. She told me she would cook and clean for him and he would make up excuses for her too.

It's funny, because when I first confronted him, he swore up and down they only ever smoked weed in his car and they kissed and that they held hands. That was the lie he was trying to pass off. He didn't expect me to get ahold of her and find the REAL truth out for myself.

Now, some time slowly passed and I still hated what happened but I was desperate to make anything work because I didn't want to go to court. And he swore and swore he would never do it again.

We got a bigger place together. Up until now, me him and F were staying in my travel trailer. So, not only did we finally get a place, but his fucking mother moved in with us. At first, I thought it was only to be for like three months. I was okay with it. I gathered the money through my grandparents to secure the place. I did everything. I found the place, put down the money for it, secured it. His mother moved in and... shit got one thousand times worse.

It's sad. It really is because things were actually looking up for B and I. At first. We were more loving, I was beginning to forgive him. I was tryin to look towards the future and I had the ideal family I wanted. I was a homemaker at this point because I lost my job. I quit W and moved on to a store we will call P, I was forced to quit that job because my baby sitter quit on me, and my baby sitter at the time, who we will call J, was my assistant manager. She told me she refused to babysit for me anymore because I didn't inform her I was taking one of her usual days she watched F off. However, at W, the manager and assistant manager always spoke about that type of thing, so I figured my manager would have told her. He did not. And she punished me for it.

Now, back to the story. I was now jobless, but B was making enough (the bullshit of it was he was now a deli manager, promoted by C... go fucking figure) to support us. His mom started off okay. Her and I were getting along. At first. I started noticing she was full of shit.

What I mean to say is, well no, that's exactly what I mean to say. She would fabricate the most fantastic bullshit stories. One was about an artist who painted a picture for B and presented it to her at his birth... the painting in question? A famous print done by a famous artist and was absolutely not painted for her son. The copy she had was just that-a copy. Now, she also told stories about how B's father once played 'hitler music', whatever that was, and was told by the whole neighborhood he was under some kind of ordinance violation. She told me about some huge bird she saw on the interstate, swearing it flew at a semi-truck's window and that it must have had a 20 ft wingspan, among other things. She also told a story, and I want you all to pay really, really close attention to this one, she told a story about how her mother-in-law called CPS on her and how the cps worker dismissed the case almost immediately.

You know, I probably could have handled the stories a little bit. But, she did a bunch of other crazy shit that I couldn't handle. One, there's the situation of my missing cat. I had a cat named Octavius. He was NOT supposed to go outside. She let him out. On purpose. Because she didn't like cats. She did the same to my cat Fleur, but with her, I was able to get her back inside. Octavius never came home and unfortunately, the night she let him out, I heard a cat screaming as though being torn apart. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if she killed that cat.

Other things happened too. My son, who was only 2 at the time was sitting on her bed. She handed him fucking SUDAFED to hand to her. Who the FUCK allows a toddler to handle any medication at all!? Needless to say, I didn't want F around her at all. She also stated she thought F had autism because at 2, he was throwing fits. God. Forbid. What 2 year old throws fits? I came to find out later, she was insisting to B that F was not his son. So essentially, on top of it all, she was also calling me a whore. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because I didn't circumcise my son and they're Jewish? I really couldn't figure out why she had a problem with me. Well, things with B and I started to fall apart quickly. His mother was the fucking catalyst that ruined it all.

Her being there put strain on he and I. They would often sequester into her rooms to chat without me around on purpose. She also stopped up the sceptic tank with fucking paper towels and refused to admit it was her even though she straight up told me it was her. Well, things came to a boiling point with B and I. I went to visit my sister and we had gotten a puppy, he said he'd watch over the puppy but threw a fit when it came to cleaning up after it. He refused to pick up the puppy mess. I ended up coming home to at least six piles of shit and even more puddles of piss to clean up. He wouldn't touch it. He also didn't do any of his laundry. All of this going on was horrible. I often told B some things I shouldn't have. That I wished he would die in a crash etc. I am not going to pretend to be innocent when it comes to my behavior towards him. But everything at this point had boiled and spilled over.

His mother also acted like she was too old and weak to do her own dishes or chores. She would never pick up after herself and blatantly told me it was my job as the lady of the house to pick up after literally everyone. She also told me I was drab and should spruce myself up for B and try a little harder to be something he'd be proud to come home to. This bitch.

Now, the only thing I ever threatened her was either she moves the fuck out or I would. It ended up that on November 1st, even though it meant going back to the camper, F and I moved out. We left that situation. And it was for the better. Now, on Nov 5th, CPS shows up at my door saying that I was being accused of living in squalor conditions (remember how I was away for a week at my sisters and he didn't clean up after the dog?) and that I had threatened elder abuse. (Also, remember how I told you she made up that story about her mother in law calling cps on her? Yeah. Creepy, huh? Well, sucks for her, but CPS was on MY side about that shit. When I explained it all to them and what was REALLY going on, they dropped the case.

B and I have been on and off again. It really sucks that everything fell apart, but when you're not right together, you're not right together. I don't worry so much about the whole 50/50 thing because I contacted a lawyer. B is so uninvolved in F's life (other than paying child support, because at least he does that) that I would have a very good chance at winning full custody with a once a month visitation from him, which is basically what he does already.

There have been other traumas I've been through, trying to navigate through relations and trying to find someone else to be with who would be good to me and F. There have also been other things that have gone on, hurtful things that B said that still ring in my ears, like that I'm content to live in poverty, that I deserved to be cheated on because I'm a bad person. That I'm the reason he didn't become a doctor like his father. But that's for another episode. If I had known all I would have to deal with, you can bet that I would have not told B about the baby. Tune in next time for me to tell you about my dating life after B and the horrors that followed with that.