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I took a second job, as a special needs bus driver so I would have a vehicle without expenses and became a home demonstrator for a direct sales company. My youngest son was at an age where he was old enough to care for the children and although it was a heavy burden for a young boy that had only a few years before lost his sister and both grandparents, he helped to hold us all together. He was my Godsend, and in time, our lives settled into peaceful ones, at least for a while. We had a few vandalizing events around Christmas the first year. Someone took a baseball bat to the windows of my school vehicle and through a larger boulder through the picture window where the Christmas tree stood. I never tried to prove these things were his doing, but I had a sense about them. I tried so hard to stay in a positive state of mind amidst the turmoil. It was hard and I began treatment for depression, despite being able to carry out all the necessary things in my life, it triggered an old disability of clinical depression. There was great fear lingering in me all the time but I had to keep going for the children. I never spoke a bad word about their father or made them privy to the fear I had about the vandalism, but in time, they formed their own opinion about how they felt about him. If one always does what is right, the truth will always come out. The truth was not mine to tell, but my children found it anyway. When they did, I was there to talk them through it until my youngest son turned 13.
My ex-husband was also a narcissist; something we would discover later on, but if my children did not call him every day and tell him how grateful they were for everything that he gave them, he would spin into a tirade.(A God complex) Many phone conversations and lies later, he called and told my youngest son, the only one that still loved him, never to call him again. He broke my son that day, and although I have forgiven him, I have no use for the man in my life and neither do my children. What kind of parent says something like that to their child? He went on later to say to me that “my” children were “white trash, and had never been raised properly.” My children, really? I responded with, “Never call me again, you have no idea what it means to parent a child and the influence you “inflict” on my children is destroying them.” A few months later, I learned, not by him, but from the return address on the child support payment, he resented every month he made it, that he and his wife moved to Georgia. Well, I say good luck to Georgia. He had burned all his bridges in this area and needed to re-locate, re-invent, and run from all the mistakes he had made here. (cont’d)
